About Helpward
Helpward is the Human Infrastructure Network — an on-demand marketplace connecting people with verified, background-checked humans for real-world tasks across the U.S. and Canada.
What we believe
The on-demand economy was supposed to free up time and lower the friction of getting things done. Mostly, it built bigger versions of the same patterns: opaque pricing, hidden quality, algorithmic dispatch that treats the worker as a cost to be minimised. Helpward exists because there's a different version available: a marketplace where every helper is a real, verified person; pricing is published before the booking; payment is held until the customer says the task is done; and 80% of every dollar the customer pays goes to the helper.
We're not trying to be cheaper than the alternatives — we're trying to be worththe booking. That means investing in identity verification, criminal background checks, $1M-per-incident platform insurance, real-time GPS tracking, encrypted in-app chat, and a 24/7 safety team that responds within four hours. None of these are premium upsells. They're the baseline on every booking, paid for out of the flat service fee.
How Helpward actually works
- You describe what you need — a designated driver, a wait-in-line errand, a furniture assembly, a check-in on an elderly relative. Anything legal and safe that a human nearby can do.
- Our matching engine notifies nearby qualified helpers in real time. The first to accept becomes yours.
- You see their identity, rating, and live ETA before they arrive. In-app chat and live GPS run end-to-end.
- You confirm the task is complete. Only then is payment captured. A 24-hour dispute window keeps that capture pausable if something needs review.
Every helper passes Stripe Identity verification and a Checkr (US) or Triton (Canada) background check before they can take a single task. Approval is reviewed by a human, not an algorithm. Read the background-check process.
We launch one city at a time and don't move to the next until helper supply hits the density that keeps response times under 20 minutes. Currently live in 10 metros — see them on the homepage.
Helpers keep 80% of base + distance fees and 100% of tips. Helpward's 20% funds insurance, background checks, support, and platform engineering. No subscriptions, no setup fees.
Helpers set their own hours via the schedule, see every task before accepting, and can decline anything that doesn't fit. The platform works only if helpers want to be on it.
The team
Helpward is built by a small team obsessed with reliability and operational craft. We're based in Vancouver, BC with helpers and customers across the U.S. and Canada. We're actively hiring across operations, trust & safety, engineering, design, and community management — open roles live at /careers.
Where we operate
Helpward is live in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal (Canada) and Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, New York, and Miami (United States). We support USD and CAD natively with per-province / per-state tax handling and helper payouts via Stripe Connect. New cities are added as the verified-helper supply meets quality thresholds.
How we make money
A flat $4.50 service fee plus 20% of the helper's base + distance earnings on each completed booking. We chose a flat fee over a percentage so a $20 errand isn't disproportionately penalised versus a $200 booking — the fixed costs of running the marketplace (insurance, verification, support, engineering) don't scale with task size, and our pricing shouldn't either. The full economics live in the pricing guide.
What we publish
Helpward operates with operational transparency from launch. Three things we publish or commit to publishing:
- A quarterly transparency report with marketplace stats (helper approval rate, response times, incident rate, refund rate) pulled directly from the production database — no PR curation.
- A complete safety microsite documenting every mechanism: what we screen, what the insurance policy covers, how disputes work, what gets refunded.
- Quarterly law-enforcement requests starting Q3 2026 — counts of LE information requests received, complied-with, and rejected, by jurisdiction.
Get in touch
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