Terms of service
Heelwise is a place for pet owners and pet sitters to find each other, agree work, and pay for it.
We are not the sitter. The care itself is between you and the person or business you book, and the sections below say which parts we are responsible for and which we are not.
What we do
We list sitters, take bookings, hold the money until a booking is accepted, and pass the sitter’s full rate on to them afterwards. Our service fee is paid by the client, on top of the sitter’s rate.
We check what we say we check. A listing shows exactly which checks have been completed on that sitter, and a sitter with none shows none — we never imply a check that has not happened.
If you sit through Heelwise
You work for yourself. You are an independent business offering your services to pet owners through Heelwise, not our employee or agent: you set your own prices, choose the days and areas you work, and decide which requests to accept.
You are responsible for doing the work with reasonable care and skill, for keeping any licenses or insurance your work requires, and for your own taxes on what you earn.
Your clients are yours. You can keep working with anybody you sit for, whether you met them here or not, and take work directly or through other services, including ones that compete with us. You don't need our permission for any of it. The one rule about money is for bookings made here, and is set out under "Bookings made here are paid here" below.
The sitter waitlist
Joining the waitlist before we open in your area does not guarantee you any work, bookings or income, or that we will open by any particular date. The date we give is our honest expectation, not a promise.
Founding sitters — those who join before we open — are shown first in the default ordering of search results in their area for 90 days after they are let in. Owners who choose to sort results another way see them in that order instead.
We may decline or remove anybody from the waitlist, for example if we cannot verify who they are or they do not pass the background check.
Fees
Joining, having a listing and being on the waitlist are free. There is no monthly fee.
Sitters do not pay a fee on bookings. You receive 100% of the rate you set. Clients pay a service fee of 15% of that rate on top of it, and that fee is ours.
Background checks
Before you take your first booking a background check is carried out by a consumer reporting agency. We will give you the disclosures the law requires and ask for your written consent at that point; nothing is checked before you agree.
The check costs $35. It is recovered from your earnings, never more than 50% of what you earn on any one booking, until it is paid. If the check could lead us to remove you, you will be told first, given a copy of the report and a summary of your rights, and given time to dispute anything inaccurate before we decide.
Booking and paying
Requesting a booking is not a booking. Nothing is charged until the sitter accepts, and if they decline or never answer, nothing is charged at all.
When a sitter accepts, we take the full amount from your card: the sitter’s rate plus our 15% service fee. The sitter receives their full rate, and we keep the service fee.
A sitter cannot be listed at all until they have completed payout setup, so a booking cannot be accepted by somebody who has no way to be paid.
Bookings made here are paid here
A booking requested or made through Heelwise is paid for through Heelwise. Don't ask for, offer or accept cash, a payment app or a separate invoice for it instead, and don't cancel it here to redo the same booking privately and get round the service fee.
This covers only bookings that go through Heelwise. Work you arrange with each other outside Heelwise, before or after, is between you, and nothing here stops it.
A booking paid for outside Heelwise is also outside what we do for bookings: there is no payment record, no way to propose cancelling it with a refund, and nothing for us to go on if something goes wrong. We can close an account that is paid, or pays, outside Heelwise for a booking made here.
Cancelling
You can cancel a booking at any time before it is finished. If you have already been charged, we do not refund automatically — you and the sitter sort that out between you, and we will help if you ask.
If a sitter withdraws from a booking they had already accepted, we refund you in full, including our fee, without you having to ask.
You can also cancel a single visit out of a recurring booking without affecting the rest.
You or the sitter can propose cancelling a visit, or the rest of a booking, with a refund. The proposal says how much would be refunded, up to what you paid for that part of the booking. Nothing is cancelled or refunded unless the other side accepts. If they decline, or nobody answers within 72 hours or before the visit starts, the booking stays as it is.
A sitter cancelling a visit, or being unable to get in, does not by itself mean a refund.
What we expect
Give sitters accurate information about your animals, especially anything about medication, temperament or a bite history. Sitters get hurt when they are not told what you knew.
Sitters: do the work you agreed to, on time, and say so immediately if you cannot. Do not share entry details with anybody, ever, including colleagues.
Reviews are for describing what happened. We do not remove a review for being unflattering.
References from a sitter's past clients are shown apart from reviews of bookings made here, and are not counted in a sitter's rating. The sitter chooses who to ask, and cannot edit, hide or remove what they write. We remove one only for abuse, spam or somebody's personal details.
If you write a reference, it stays yours. You give Heelwise permission to show it on the sitter's listing, and you can ask us to take it down at any time. Don't write one for somebody you haven't used, and say so if you are related to them or know them some other way.
Sitters: ask only clients you have really looked after pets for, and don't offer anything for a reference. Reviews you have on other sites stay there; do not copy them here.
What you write, and what we write
What you put on Heelwise stays yours: your profile, photographs, reviews, references, visit reports and messages. By putting it here you give Heelwise permission to store it, show it on Heelwise, and show it where Heelwise appears elsewhere, such as in a search result or the preview when somebody shares a link. The permission is not exclusive, so you can use your own words and photographs anywhere you like.
The permission lasts while it is on Heelwise. When it comes down, or you close your account, we stop showing it, and keep only what our privacy policy says we keep.
Only put up what is yours to share: your own photographs or ones you have permission to use, and nobody else's personal details.
The rest of Heelwise, its words, guides, design, name and logo, is ours. Don't copy it, and don't copy listings, reviews or references from here to another site or service; share a link to the page instead. Writing about your own experience anywhere else is always fine.
Using the site fairly
Browse, search and book as much as you like. Accessibility tools, and software acting for you in your own browser at the pace a person would, are fine too. Without our written permission, these are not:
- Using robots, spiders, scrapers or any other automated means to visit, copy or monitor Heelwise. Search engines may crawl the pages our robots.txt file allows.
- Collecting listings, profiles, prices, photographs, reviews or references in bulk, or building a list, database or other service out of them.
- Collecting the names, email addresses, phone numbers or addresses of people on Heelwise, other than the people you book or are booked by.
- Getting round anything we use to limit or protect access, such as sign-in, rate limits, blocks or checks that you are a person, or dressing up automated traffic as a person.
- Overloading the site, interfering with how it works, or probing it for weaknesses. If you find a security problem, tell us.
No recruiting or selling to members
Don't use Heelwise to recruit sitters or clients for another service, a job or a business, or to advertise one. That includes our messages, listings and reviews, and anything you learn about people here.
Don't send members anything they didn't ask for: adverts, sales pitches, chain messages, or requests that have nothing to do with a booking.
This is about people who come here to recruit or sell. Sitters and clients who book each other can swap contact details and keep in touch, and a sitter can tell their own clients about their own business.
When something goes wrong
Tell us. We will help sort it out between you and the other party, and we hold the records — the visit reports, the photographs, the audit trail of who opened which door and when — that usually settle what actually happened.
The sitter is responsible for the care they provide. Whether they carry insurance is shown on their listing.
Ending your account
You can close your account from settings at any time. We can suspend an account that puts animals or people at risk, and we will say why.
We can also close an account that scrapes the site, harvests contact details, recruits or spams members, or is paid outside Heelwise for a booking made here, and we will say why.