How The Handyman Austin works
The Handyman Austin is a paid introduction service for the Austin area: we help a customer and a handyman find each other and then agree on a job directly. We are not the contractor and we are not a party to the job. Here is exactly how the process is designed to run.
1. Free sign-up and free search
Handymen register free with their trade, skills, and service areas. Customers search free by trade and area — Austin, Cedar Park, Pflugerville, Round Rock and more. No card is needed to join or to browse.
2. The paid introduction
A customer posts a job for free, with their contact details hidden. Handymen browse open jobs for free and see the title, trade, area, budget, and description. A handyman's phone and email are never shown in the public directory either. When a handyman chooses to unlock a job, he pays a single introduction fee of $4.99 per introduction (paid by the handyman) for that job, and only then are the customer's contact details revealed to him. The customer is never charged. The fee is captured at the moment of the introduction, not later; the price is shown before payment; and card data is handled entirely by Stripe — it never touches our servers.
To keep it exact, there are two separate claims about two different sides: (1) customers pay nothing — a customer is never charged for anything; and (2) handymen pay $4.99 per connection at the reveal — a handyman pays one $4.99 introduction fee only when he unlocks a customer's contact for one job, at the moment of the reveal. We state them separately and do not blur them together.
3. Following up — "did you actually hire him?"
After an introduction we follow up to find out whether the work happened. Only the customer can confirm that a handyman completed the job — a handyman cannot mark his own work done. If the customer answers No, the handyman has a short window (about five days) to reply from their account, and the case goes to a person to review. We never auto-charge or auto-refund on silence.
The binding rules for quiet customers, disputes, and the fee — including the exact no-show process, the request window, the 30-day cap, and the delivery-failure refund — are set out in the Terms of Service, section 6, and not on this page.
4. Star ratings — only after a confirmed job
Ratings exist to help the next customer, so we keep them honest:
- Only a customer with a confirmed connection to that handyman can leave a star rating.
- One review per confirmed job. There are no anonymous reviews and no reviews from people who never connected.
- Reviews publish after a neutral cooling-off window of about 48 hours, applied to every review.
- We never write, edit, or rewrite a review, and we never suppress a review because it is negative. We remove a review only if the transaction behind it did not happen, or if it breaks the law or our terms.
The aggregate star rating shown on a profile is a simple, unweighted average of that handyman's published reviews, rounded to one decimal place, computed by us. The full rules are in the Ratings & Reviews Policy.
5. We do not check anyone
No background checks. The Handyman Austin does not verify, screen, or check anyone. We do not check licenses, insurance, permits, criminal background, identity, or the truth of a listing. A handyman attests that they hold the licenses and insurance the law requires, but an attestation is not verification. Customers must independently verify a handyman's license, insurance, and suitability before hiring — especially for electrical, plumbing, and HVAC work, which Texas licenses. Do not rely on a profile or a star rating as evidence of any qualification.
Honesty note: the directory is new and there are no handymen, reviews, or connections listed yet. Nothing on the site is invented, and every profile and review you see is a real one submitted through the flow above.
6. Why we charge at the introduction
Charging for the introduction, rather than a monthly fee or a cut of the job, keeps sign-up and search free and keeps the marketplace honest — there is no incentive to post fake listings, and no need to chase a handyman for money he might not report.