TaskRabbit takes around 20%. Fiverr takes 20%. The gig economy spent ten years convincing the world that one fifth of every paycheck disappearing into a platform was just the way things worked. It is not the way things work. It is a choice. And it is a choice I refused to make when I built HandIt.
The math nobody runs the math on
Run it. A €20 cleaning gig. On a 20% platform, the cleaner walks away with €16 after the cut. On HandIt, they walk away with €18. A €2 difference looks small. It is not small.
- One €20 task: €18 in your pocket vs €16 elsewhere — a €2 difference
- A regular helper doing 50 small tasks a year: €100 difference over a year, just from the fee
- Someone working steadily — say, two tasks a week — clears €200+ more on HandIt than on a 20% platform. That is a weekend in another city. That is groceries for a month.
Stretch the math across an entire borough of helpers and the number becomes uncomfortable. The 20% cut is not paying for something extraordinary. It is paying for the platform's option to keep that 20%.
A neighbor is not a customer
The gig platforms were not designed for neighborhoods. They were designed to extract value from one-time interactions between strangers in big cities. That model needs a 20% cut because every transaction is anonymous, every helper is interchangeable, and the platform is the only thing standing between the worker and the customer.
HandIt is not that. The person fixing your sink lives three streets over. You will see them at the bakery next week. The relationship is the product. The platform is just the layer that makes it safe — identity verified, payment held by Stripe until the task is confirmed done, a record to point at if things go wrong.
A neighbor doing you a favor is not a customer. A €20 cleaning is not a transaction. And a 20% cut is a tax on doing favors.
What 10% actually buys
Ten percent is not free money. It pays for Stripe processing fees, escrow infrastructure, fraud detection, identity verification, customer support, hosting, and — yes — keeping the lights on so this thing can exist tomorrow.
Ten percent is the smallest number that does all of that without losing money on every task. I picked it because it covers cost and leaves a thin margin to keep building, and because the next number down would have made HandIt a charity, not a business.
Post your first task and pay a flat 10% — same on every plan.
Post a TaskAnd Plus does not change the fee
Some platforms make the fee a moving target — pay extra and you pay less commission. HandIt does not do that. The flat 10% is the same whether you are on the free plan or on Plus. Plus adds boost credits, the Plus badge, recurring tasks, and a few quality-of-life features. It never touches the fee.
That is intentional. The fee is the thing that determines what a helper earns. Charging more for a discount on it would be the same trick the gig platforms pull — gating the worker's pay behind a subscription. No thanks.
The honest version
I will not pretend HandIt could not be profitable at 15% or 18%. It could. The reason it is not is that the platform exists to make local help work, not to maximize what the platform extracts from local help. If you cannot run a business at 10% in this market, the problem is not the fee — it is the business.
A neighbor is not a customer. A favor is not a transaction. And a 20% cut is a tax on doing favors.