Workadabra

A local services marketplace has one hard problem, and it is not the app. When somebody needs an electrician on Tuesday morning, the question is which electricians are actually eligible: near enough, cheap enough, rated well enough, qualified for that work in that country, and still offering it. Get that wrong and you have either sent a plumber to a wiring job or shown a household nobody at all.

Workadabra answers that question in one place. A request carries what it will pay, the rating it expects and where it is. A provider carries what they offer, at what rate, and the paperwork each service demands of them. Matching is the intersection of the two, computed rather than curated.

How a request finds a provider

Six conditions have to hold at once, and a provider who fails any of them simply does not appear. They offer that service. The offering is in effect today, which is not the same as having offered it once. Their hourly rate is at or below what the request is willing to pay. Their average rating for that specific service, rather than their rating overall, meets the request’s minimum. They are inside the maximum distance, which is set per country rather than globally. And they satisfy every requirement that service demands in that country. Because this is one query rather than a ranked list somebody maintains, a provider cannot be quietly promoted, and a household cannot be shown somebody who is merely nearby.

An offering is retired, never edited

A provider’s offering carries the dates it is effective between, and a trigger holds its rate immutable across versions. Changing what you charge does not overwrite what you used to charge: the old offering is stopped, with the date it stopped, and a new one begins. There is exactly one write against an offering, and it sets the end date. This is why the matching query asks whether an offering is in effect today rather than whether it exists, and it is why a rate a household saw last month can still be shown to have been real.

Money is written twice rather than changed

Every amount is an entry in the credit ledger, and amounts are carried as exact strings cast to a numeric column rather than as floating point, because the value decides whether a withdrawal is refused and a binary float cannot hold two decimal places without rounding. When a payment succeeds, an entry is written. When a payment stops being successful, the reversal is not an edit: a second entry is written for the same amount with the sign flipped, and the flags it had set are flipped back. Commission is taken on the household’s charge and not on the provider’s payout, at a rate set per service per country, as either a percentage or a fixed amount.

What stands between a provider and a payout

Three checks, and none of them is a waiting period. The country has to permit that payment rail in that direction, since a rail that can take money in cannot always send it out. The provider must not owe the platform anything, a figure read as an exact string for the same reason the ledger is. And the wallet has to hold what is being withdrawn. Nothing imposes a clearing delay, so a payout waits on those three answers rather than on the calendar.

Who it is for

Households that need a trusted local pro, and skilled workers who want steady, verified demand.

Visit Workadabra: www.workadabra.com