Tidy

What: Tidy sets up housekeeping jobs, paying between $16 and $27 per hour, but also fines housekeepers if they need to cancel or reschedule a job.

Expected pay: $16 to $27 an hour

Husl$core: $$

Commissions & Fees: NA

Where: select major cities in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, Texas, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Requirements: Be over the age of 18; have a smart-phone with location-tracking; skills, and where necessary, licenses to clean as promised;

Review:

Tidy likes to brag about the fact that it pays better hourly rates than most housekeeping jobs. However, the site also levies heavy penalties on housekeepers when they arrive late, need to cancel or reschedule a job. That would be less offensive if the site didn’t automatically schedule you for jobs you couldn’t take, and then fine you for cancelling jobs you never wanted.

The site doesn’t officially charge a commission on housekeeper’s earnings. It makes its money by marking up the service. So, for a one-hour cleaning that pays housekeepers $27, Tidy charges $45, pocketing the other $18. For a 2.5-hour cleaning, the housekeeper earns $54; Tidy charges $90, taking $36. For the 4-hour clean, the housekeeper gets $80, while Tidy charges $135. 

Although that’s an implied 40% commission rate, that’s not what appears to bother housekeepers. They complain mainly about the litany of penalties levied on them when they’re struck in traffic or have to change a schedule. These fees are spelled out in Tidy’s terms of use for housekeepers. Specifically:

• if you are more than five minutes late, you pay $5
• leave early, you pay $30
• call out with less than 24-hours notice, you pay $30
• no-show, you pay $30
• change the schedule with less than 7-days notice, you pay $10.

In our opinion, the terms of this deal give a disproportionate wealth of benefits to Tidy and very few to its housekeepers. We’d suggest you look for cleaning jobs with Managed by Q and JiffyOnDemand — or simply advertise your availability through a neighborhood website like Nextdoor. 

What their users say: (from Indeed)

I understand it’s no good to cancel but they charge OUTRAGEOUS prices if you need to. And you only get 3 waivers every 90 days. I do 4-5 cleanings a day sometimes. If I have a full day booked and wake up deathly ill, my car is broken, my kids are sick…I’m going to pay anywhere from $80-$160 for calling out of 4 cleanings. 

They stack the jobs too close to one another. And it’s hard to cancel a job without them charging you for it. If the client lets you leave early. Tidy will dock your pay for it.

I look at my cleanings for today and they booked me 46mi from my location. I’m positive I signed up for a region that was no more than 30mi wide in either direction. What are they doing sending me 46mi in rush hr traffic? I try to “call out” they say they will charge me $20. — for a one-hour job.  I NEVER would have chosen to go 46mi for an hour just to make $24. Thats not a profit. It’s a waste of almost 4hrs of my time. I emailed them and have yet to get a reply so we’ll wait and see if they will remove the job. 

If the client has you leave early, they charge you. When your app (that is glitchy) freezes and kicks you out, they charge you as if you never showed up! You can have a full schedule booked, but have one cancellation or one mishap on your app and they will take away your booked appointments and charge you!

Make sure you schedule a lunch because you will not be given any breaks. They say you get paid $20 an hour which is not true unless you only do 1 hour cleanings. The 2 1/2 hour cleanings you get paid only $17/hour, which is the most common cleaning, and the 4 hours is paid at $16/hour! Discount your cleaning materials and your gas, you’re looking at maybe $13/hour? And that’s obviously not including taxes, which would bring it down to approximately $11/hour or so?