Provider terms

Appointment of Loclis as payment agent

You appoint Loclis as your agent for the limited purpose of receiving payments from customers for your services and passing them to you through Loclis's payment processor. A customer's payment is treated as received by you when Loclis or its processor receives it, and the customer's obligation to you for that amount is then fully satisfied, whether or not Loclis has yet passed it on to you.

You authorise and direct Loclis to say on your listing, quotes, checkout pages and receipts that Loclis accepts payment on your behalf.

Loclis acts for you only in receiving payment. It does not act for you in agreeing scope, doing, scheduling, managing or supervising the work.

You sell the work

Each customer who books your service contracts directly with you. Loclis does not provide, sell, perform, manage, supervise or subcontract your services, and is not a party to your agreement with the customer. Loclis is not a contractor.

You set your prices

You set every price and write every quote. Loclis may show price ranges or suggestions, but it does not set, change or mark up your price.

Your business is your own

You decide which jobs to accept, when and how to do the work, and what tools and crew to use. You may decline any request, list your business elsewhere and deal directly with customers you find yourself. Customers you meet through Loclis are covered in the next section.

Licences, permits, insurance and contracts

You hold every licence, certificate and registration the law requires for each service you list, in the name shown on your listing, and you get every permit a job needs. You are responsible for your own insurance, and for any insurance the law or your licensing board requires of you.

For licensed residential contracting work over $1,000 in Virginia, you give the customer the written contract the Board for Contractors requires (18VAC50-22-260), and it is signed before any work starts or any payment is taken. You sign every change order. Loclis may sign a contract or change order only as agent for your business, with your licence number on it, and only when you authorise it for that document.

You do not let anyone else work under your licence, and you do not send a Loclis job to anyone who is not licensed for it, except where the law allows a subcontractor to do that work without its own licence, as described under General contractor projects.

Customers you meet through Loclis

Jobs that come to you through Loclis are booked and paid through Loclis. When you first meet a customer through a Loclis request, quote or booking, the work you do for that customer in the 12 months after that first contact is booked and paid through Loclis, unless Loclis agrees otherwise in writing. That covers the job you met them on and any other work you do for them in those 12 months. It applies to customers you first meet through Loclis after you accept this version of these terms.

Taking that customer's payment outside Loclis to avoid Loclis's fee is a breach of these terms. If it happens, Loclis may charge you the booking and payment fee it would have earned on that payment, and may suspend your shop on Loclis.

Customers you already had before Loclis put you in touch are not covered. You can tell Loclis about one at contact@loclis.com, best when their request or booking arrives, with something that shows the earlier work, such as an invoice or a receipt. A customer who only saw your directory listing and contacted you without a Loclis request, quote or booking is not covered either.

None of this stops you declining work, or stops a customer choosing another business. It is about how work that came through Loclis is paid for, not who you may work for.

Until a customer has booked you, Loclis checks the messages and quotes you send that customer and hides phone numbers, email addresses, links and social media or payment handles in them until the job is booked.

General contractor projects, described in the next section, are not covered by this section while Loclis does not collect payment for them.

General contractor projects

A business on Loclis can run a project as its general contractor (the GC) and invite other businesses (subs) to bid on parts of it. For that work the GC is the sub's customer, and the GC and the sub contract with each other directly. Loclis is not a party to that contract and is not a contractor on the project.

Loclis does not collect payment for GC projects, and charges neither the GC nor the sub for them. An award in a GC project records the GC's decision; it does not form a contract. Invoices and payments are records the GC enters: Loclis does not issue, collect or check them, and an invoice shows as paid only when the GC reports it paid.

Because Loclis does not collect that payment, the 12-month rule in the section above does not apply to work a GC and a sub do for each other after meeting through a GC project. If Loclis starts collecting payment for GC projects, it will say so in a new version of these terms first.

The GC decides whom to invite and whom to award. Loclis does not rank bids by price or recommend a winner. Its bid comparison, and any AI notes on it, set the bids side by side and point out differences between them.

Loclis shows each sub's licence as its records hold it, and a note on how much work that sub may take on the project, based on the licences on file for both businesses and on Virginia law, including Va. Code § 54.1-1101(A)(15), which lets a subcontractor without a contractor licence do up to $25,000 of work on a project for a prime contractor licensed in the Residential Building, Commercial Building or Home Improvement classification. Loclis may refuse to record an award its records say is over that limit. These notes come from Loclis's records and are not legal advice; the GC and the sub each remain responsible for the licences and permits their own work needs.

Until the GC awards a sub a package, Loclis hides phone numbers, email addresses, links and social media or payment handles in the GC's invitation message and answers, and in the sub's questions and the text of its bid. A document a sub uploads with a bid is passed to the GC as sent. Once the package is awarded, the GC and that sub can share contact details freely. The project's street address and access notes go to a sub only if the GC chooses to share them with the award.

A GC can ask Loclis to invite a business that is not on Loclis yet. Loclis sends that invitation itself, only after the GC approves it, and says that it is a request for a bid, not an awarded job.

The GC can use an AI project assistant to draft the project, its trade packages and its invitations, and AI notes to compare bids; a sub can use AI to fill in its bid from its own quote. What goes to the AI model provider is described in the privacy policy. The assistant only proposes: it cannot send an invitation, make an award, change agreed terms or record a payment, and nothing it proposes happens until the GC applies it.

Fees

You pay Loclis a booking and payment fee on each payment Loclis collects for you, for Loclis's listing, booking, messaging and payment-collection services to you. It is a charge for those services, not a share of your price for the work. It is deducted before the payment reaches your account. The current rate is published at /pricing, and referral credit you earn is applied against it.

Payouts, refunds and disputes

A customer's payment for your service settles into your own payment account with Loclis's processor, less Loclis's fees, and is paid out to your bank on that account's payout schedule. You must finish your payment account setup before customers can pay you.

As your payment agent, Loclis may decide a payment dispute between you and a customer, refund the customer in full or in part, and take the matching part of the payment back from your payment account. The Loclis service fee and your booking and payment fee are reversed in proportion on any refund. If a card chargeback is decided against the payment, your share of it is recovered from your payment account.

Refund of Loclis's fees

When a job goes wrong, Loclis may, at its sole discretion, refund to the customer the fees Loclis charged on that job. That money is Loclis's own, and a refund of it does not reduce what you are paid. It is not insurance, not a warranty of your work, and not a promise to the customer that the job will be done.

What Loclis shows about you

Loclis shows a licence, insurance or other credential as verified only after a person at Loclis has checked it, and shows the date of that check. Licence details read from Virginia DPOR records are shown with that source and the date they were retrieved. Anything you tell Loclis that it has not checked is labelled provider-reported.

Loclis does not show your phone number, email address, website or street address on your public pages or your quotes; it shows them to a customer, and that customer's to you, once the customer has booked you.

Changes and contact

Loclis may update these terms and will note the effective date. Questions go to contact@loclis.com.