Transparency report
Quarterly stats on how Helpward is actually operating: helper approval rates, response times, incident rates, refund rates. Updated every three months.
Helper supply & approval
Helpers go through identity verification, background check, bank-account linking, and a human approval review before they can take a single task.
Approval rate = (approved applications + currently-in-review) / total applications. Background-check disqualifications and incomplete onboarding both count as rejections.
Booking outcomes
We define a “successful” booking as one marked Completed by both parties with no dispute filed in the 24-hour window. The metric we're most accountable for is the percentage of bookings that hit that bar.
Disputes & refunds
Disputes split into categories tracked separately so we can see what's actually going wrong, not just a flat “3% of bookings had issues” figure.
| Category | Filed | % refunded | Avg resolution |
|---|---|---|---|
| No-show | — | —% | — |
| Quality | — | —% | — |
| Damage | — | —% | — |
| Billing | — | —% | — |
| Safety | — | —% | — |
% refunded = customers who received a partial or full refund / total disputes filed in the category. Avg resolution = hours from dispute submission to written decision.
Safety incidents
Helpward tracks every safety report on its own ledger separate from the dispute system. Categories published here mirror what Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb report in their respective transparency reports.
Response times
Helpward's public commitment is a 4-hour acknowledgement on safety reports and a 24-hour acknowledgement on everything else. We measure ourselves against that bar.
Methodology
All figures are pulled directly from Helpward's production database at the close of business on the last day of the quarter. We do not pre-screen the numbers or excuse outliers — what's in this report is what the platform actually did. Definitions for every metric are pinned in the help centre under /help. Numbers are reported as raw counts and percentages; we do not weight or seasonally adjust.
What's coming next
- Law-enforcement requests. Counts of LE requests received, complied-with, and rejected by jurisdiction and request type.
- Helper demographic transparency. Aggregate stats on helper geography and tenure — never individually identifiable.
- Annual third-party attestation. Once we cross 50,000 quarterly bookings, an independent firm will verify the figures.
Spot something missing? Email hello@helpward.com — we'd rather hear suggestions for what to publish next than discover after the fact that we omitted something material.
Frequently asked
- Why publish this? +
- Marketplaces only earn trust when both sides can verify how the platform actually operates. Helpward chose to publish quarterly stats from launch so customers, helpers, and regulators can hold us to our own claims. The figures here come directly from our production database — no hand-curation, no PR spin.
- Are these numbers audited? +
- No, not yet. The aggregates come from production-database snapshots and the methodology is described below each table. Once Helpward crosses 50,000 quarterly bookings we'll commission an annual third-party SOC-2-style attestation of the figures.
- Will law-enforcement requests show up here too? +
- Yes, starting next quarter. Helpward will publish counts of law-enforcement information requests received, complied-with, and rejected — separated by jurisdiction and request type — using the same template as Cloudflare's transparency report.
- What if a number looks bad? +
- We publish it anyway. Refund rates that go up tell us something is breaking; incident rates that creep up are a signal to invest in vetting. Hiding bad numbers would defeat the purpose. We commit to a written explanation alongside any metric that worsens by more than 25% quarter-over-quarter.