Pricing Jobs, Fees, and Timing
Independent Consultants’ listings include directional cost per hour, day, or project. Actual costs will be determined based on the job’s scope and negotiations between the Business and the Expertise.
To help keep costs down for both Clients and Consultants, Elderberry.work splits the transaction fee between them, which includes the payment processing fee to our global payments leader, Stripe, for its advanced data privacy and protection practices and relationships with all major banks.
Client platform fees for use of Elderberry.work are found in How It Works. Consultants’ platform fees for use of Elderberry.work are found in For Talent.
The agreed upon Consultant’s fee is charged to the Client’s credit card when the job is commissioned (contact us if you prefer milestone payments or an e-transfer), and held in escrow by Stripe. It is deposited into the Consultant’s bank account when the work is completed to the agreement of both Consultant and the Business.
Note that Elderberry.work never sees anyone’s financial/banking information – that is input into Stripe’s payments processing system.
Steps to Completing a Transaction
1. Browse by category (or keyword search) or use our AI-guided matching bot to find consultants of interest.
2. Review candidates’ expertise listing, a quick overview, and click on their photo in the listing to then see their personal profile for more information about them, as in the 2nd screenshot below.
3. Short list your top candidates, by clicking on the “heart” in the corner of their photo to save them as favourites.
4. In their listing, click on the “Contact [name]” button, to message someone. Note that you have to be signed up and signed in to do this.
5. Message to send them more details about your job requirements, as a document attachment, such as a pdf in the screen shot example.
6. Discuss, negotiate, finalize job scope & terms. For all live discussions between you and the consultant, we cannot currently do cell phone or video calls. Please use your choice of phone or internet meeting/call application, such as Zoom, Google Meets, or Microsoft Teams.
When your discussions are complete and you have a final version of your agreed work requirements document, send it to the consultant. The consultant will then use their dashboard to send you a price proposal, for you to accept or decline.
Note that the finalized transaction agreement must always be led by the consultant submitting the final proposal to the Business – it cannot be finalized by the Business sending a proposal to the consultant.
7. Your dashboard lets you agree to a job, initiate it, confirm completion of the work, and pay for it. The 2nd image below shows how your dashboard will keep track of all your jobs and payments.
