Your money is safe before the first file arrives
Hiring a stranger on the internet is a leap. Gigxie is built so that leap costs you nothing: payment is held in escrow from the second you order, released only when you say the work is done, and backed by a dispute team that reads the whole order before it rules.
What that means in practice
Escrow, in four steps
An order is a sequence of states, and money moves at exactly two of them. Here is the whole machine, with nothing left out.
The money is real before the work starts
Placing an order charges the buyer and writes a single escrow-hold entry the same second. Sellers never begin on a promise, and buyers never hand cash to a stranger.
Neither party can move it
Once the seller starts, the buyer cannot cancel unilaterally and the seller cannot withdraw the funds. The only routes out are delivery, mutual agreement, or a dispute ruling.
You get 72 hours, and a visible clock
Accept, request a revision, or open a dispute. The deadline is shown on the order as a countdown to the exact instant our servers use, so it never arrives as a surprise.
Released in full, in one movement
Acceptance releases the entire escrowed price to the seller. Our payment module asserts that the released figure equals the held figure, so a commission cannot ship without failing the test suite. The card processor's fee — 2.9% + $0.30 by default — is then deducted from the payout as its own separate line, so it can never hide inside a smaller release. Gigxie keeps none of it.
Ledger entry types, and no others
Hold, release, refund, payout, buyer service fee, card processing fee. Every movement of money is one immutable row in integer cents, and each fee is its own row rather than a silent adjustment to another. Nothing in the product can edit or delete one — a correction is a new compensating row.
Commission, at any point
There is no commission field to set. Our own admin console rejects any attempt to configure one with an error, so 0% is a property of the system rather than a toggle an operator could flip. The one deduction a seller does see is the card processor's fee, which we pass through at cost and never count as revenue.
A dispute can settle exactly once
The refunded and released halves must sum to the order price before a single entry is written, and a second attempt to settle the same dispute is rejected outright. Nobody gets paid twice.
Who is actually on the other end
We would rather tell you exactly what we check than claim every seller is "vetted" and leave you to guess what that word means.
Email confirmation on every account
No account can order, publish or message until its address is confirmed. Disposable-domain addresses are refused at sign-up.
Identity checks before large payouts
Sellers withdrawing more than €2,000 in a calendar month complete a government-ID check with our payment provider. We store the pass or fail, never the document.
Every new listing is screened
Automated checks compare each gig against our prohibited-services list, known scam templates, and portfolio images already published elsewhere on the platform. Anything flagged goes to a human before it can take an order.
Ratings that cannot be bought
A review requires a completed order from the account that paid for it, one per order. Review trading, self-ordering and inducements are detected by pattern analysis across accounts, and they reset a seller's level.
Continuous behaviour monitoring
Sudden pricing changes, bursts of new accounts from one network, off-platform payment language in threads, and unusual refund patterns all raise a flag for review.
Seller levels are earned, not awarded
Levels are recomputed from completed orders, on-time delivery rate, rating and response time. They can go down as easily as up, and no one at Gigxie can hand one out.
Email confirmed and a published gig. Fewer than 15 completed orders. Perfectly capable people start here — read their samples rather than their badge.
15+ completed orders, 60 days on the platform, 4.5+ rating, 90% on-time delivery, no active policy strikes.
75+ completed orders, 120 days, 4.7+ rating, 95% on-time delivery, response time under 6 hours, zero disputes lost in 90 days.
250+ completed orders, 12 months, 4.85+ rating sustained over 90 days, 98% on-time, and a manual review by our Trust & Safety team. Reviewed again every quarter.
Services we will never host
These are banned regardless of whether they are legal where the seller lives. Listing one removes the gig; the serious ones end the account on the first offence.
Academic dishonesty
Essays, dissertations, take-home exams or assessments written to be submitted as a student's own work.
Fake engagement
Purchased followers, likes, votes, installs, streams or reviews — on any platform, including this one.
Adult and sexual content
Explicit material, escort or companionship services, and anything sexualising a minor, which is reported to law enforcement.
Drugs, weapons and controlled goods
Sale, sourcing, instructions for manufacture, or any service that helps someone obtain them.
Hacking and account intrusion
Credential theft, DDoS, malware, spyware, and "account recovery" for accounts the buyer does not own.
Counterfeits and piracy
Cracked software, leaked licence keys, resold stock assets, and replicas of branded goods.
Forged documents and impersonation
Fake identification, forged certificates or invoices, and impersonating a real person, a brand, or Gigxie staff.
Guaranteed professional outcomes
Promised medical results, legal or immigration outcomes, or investment returns — and any licensed advice from someone unlicensed.
Money movement and schemes
Cash-out services, gambling operations, lotteries, pyramid and matrix schemes, and orders structured to move funds rather than buy work.
Disinformation and astroturfing
Coordinated inauthentic campaigns, sock-puppet networks, and political manipulation dressed as marketing.
The complete, binding list lives in Terms of Service, section 12, alongside the prohibited conduct rules covering off-platform payment, review manipulation, harassment and spam. If a gig looks like it belongs on this page, report it — you do not have to be sure.
What happens after you hit send
Reports are read by people, in order, on a rota that covers seven days a week. Here is the actual path yours takes.
Triage within hours
A specialist reads your report and grades it. Anything involving payment fraud, threats or content harming a minor jumps the queue immediately and is actioned the same day. Everything else enters the normal queue with a median first response of 4 hours 40 minutes on business days.
Investigation, with the whole record
We can read the specific order, its delivery, the message thread and the ledger entries behind it. Where a report concerns an account rather than an order, we look at its history across the platform. The other party is asked for their account of it unless doing so would put someone at risk.
An outcome, and a reason
We tell you what we decided and why, in plain language. Outcomes range from removing a listing to refunding an order, restricting a feature, resetting a level, or ending an account permanently. Either party can appeal once to a reviewer who was not involved in the first decision.
Gigxie is not an emergency service. Report it here afterwards so we can act on the account, and email urgent@gigxie.com to have it escalated within the hour.
Report a problem
Tell us what you saw and where. You do not need to be certain — a wrong report costs nobody anything, and an unreported scam costs someone their money.
Report logged
A specialist will pick this up shortly.
GX-000000Quote that reference if you write to us about it. No email has been delivered — Gigxie has no mail provider connected, so any confirmation sits queued in an outbox.
Habits that prevent almost everything
Nearly every case our team sees would have been avoided by one of these. They take about a minute each.
Never pay outside Gigxie
A seller asking for a bank transfer, PayPal friends-and-family, gift cards or crypto is asking you to give up escrow, disputes and any record of the deal. There is no legitimate reason for it. Report the message and order normally.
Write the brief before you order
Deliverables, file formats, dimensions, tone, and what "done" looks like. Most disputes we see are two people who each thought the scope was obvious and meant different things by it.
Keep the conversation in the thread
Agreements made over email or a chat app do not exist as far as a dispute is concerned. If you agree to something on a call, write a one-line summary in the thread afterwards.
Read the three-star reviews
Five-star reviews tell you the seller can do the job; three-star reviews tell you what happens when something goes wrong. That second thing is what you are actually buying.
Use the 72 hours
Open the files, check they work, and check the licensing on any stock assets or fonts. The window exists so you can look properly before the money moves, and it closes on its own.
Be sceptical of impossible pricing
A full brand identity for $15 delivered in four hours is either stolen, generated without disclosure, or a hook for upsells. Compare against the going rate in the category before you order.
Do not start before the order exists
A buyer who wants work "as a quick test" before ordering is asking you to work without escrow. Ask them to place the order; if the intent is genuine, that costs them nothing.
Deliver through the order, always
Files sent by email or a file-sharing link are invisible to a dispute. The delivery timestamp on the order is the evidence that you met the deadline, and it only exists if you used the workspace.
Say no to out-of-scope requests
A revision fixes the thing you agreed to make. A new concept, a new direction or extra deliverables is a new order. Declining politely and offering a quote is normal professional behaviour, and our rules back you on it.
Disclose your licences at delivery
List the stock photos, fonts and plugins the work depends on, and what the buyer's licence covers. Delivering something that only works under a licence the buyer does not hold is a refundable defect.
Watch for the classic phishing message
"Click this link to view my brief", an attachment from an account with no order history, or an email that looks like Gigxie but asks for your password. We will never ask for your password, and we never message you outside the site to request one.
Never trade a rating for a refund
Offering money back in exchange for a better review is review manipulation, and it costs you your level even when the buyer suggested it. Reply publicly to the review instead — a calm, specific reply reads better than the complaint.
The numbers we would rather you saw
Moderation figures for the twelve months to 31 May 2026. We publish them whether they flatter us or not, and update them each quarter.
We also received 34 requests for user data from law enforcement, complied in full with 9, partially with 6, and refused 19 as overbroad or improperly served. Nine users were notified; the remainder were subject to non-disclosure orders. Details and methodology are in our full transparency report.
Where each promise is written down
Everything on this page maps to a clause you can hold us to. These are the three worth bookmarking.
Orders, escrow and cancellations
The order state machine, what escrow is and is not, how a dispute settlement splits the money, and the hard cutoff on cancellation.
- Terms §7 — Orders, payment and escrow
- Terms §8 — Delivery and the 72-hour window
- Terms §9 — Cancellations and refunds
Disputes, conduct and enforcement
When you can open a dispute, how escalation to our team works, what we can and cannot rule, and the full list of prohibited services and conduct.
- Terms §10 — Disputes and arbitration
- Terms §11 — Reviews and ratings
- Terms §12 — Prohibited services and conduct
Your data, and who can see it
What we hold about payments and the escrow ledger, when a moderator can open a message thread, the one cookie we set, and how we secure all of it.
- Privacy §5 — Sharing and processors
- Privacy §6 — Payments and escrow data
- Privacy §11 — How we secure your data
Safe to hire. Safe to get hired.
Escrow on every order, reviews that cannot be bought, and a team that reads the whole record before it rules. Then the part that makes Gigxie different: we take 0% commission from the seller.