WorkMateAI
Safe payments and fair disputes for every home-service job.
Dispute resolution, payments, and compliance for Australia's on-demand trades.
- Client
- WorkMateAI
- Industry
- Home Services Marketplace
- Region
- Australia
- Engagement
- Marketplace · commissions + platform fees · Trust, safety & payments platform
WorkMateAI connects customers with verified tradies for home repairs and improvements. As it grew, payments, contracts, and disputes created real legal risk. We built a structured trust-and-safety system: clear legal agreements, held-and-released payments, provider verification, and a phased dispute process. The platform is now legally protected and easier to run.
The problem we set out to solve.
The platform had no control over payments or chargebacks.
There was no legal contract framework between the parties.
Dispute handling was manual and undefined.
Tradie verification was weak — licenses, insurance, and identity went unchecked.
Messaging language could imply the platform was liable.
Payments happened off-platform, with no document generation and limited admin tooling.
What success needed to look like
- Payments stay inside the platform, with disputes and chargebacks handled instead of absorbed as risk.
- Every job is backed by a clear legal agreement, not informal messaging that could imply liability.
- Tradies are verified — license, insurance, identity — before they can accept a job.
- Disputes follow a defined process the platform can defend, not ad hoc handling.
How we delivered it.
01
Diagnose
Reviewed where payments, messaging, and dispute handling exposed the platform to legal and financial risk as it scaled, from unverified tradies to liability language in customer messaging.
02
Design
Designed a three-layer legal agreement model — platform terms, provider agreement, per-job contract — and a phased dispute framework moving from manual toward rule-based and AI-assisted resolution.
03
Build
Built hold-and-release payments on Stripe Connect with dispute freezes and chargeback evidence generation, e-signature contracts via DocuSign/HelloSign, and verification checks against ABN, trade licenses, and insurance, with documents stored securely on AWS S3.
04
Launch
Rolled out the admin case dashboard with automated timers and notifications alongside the new payment and verification flows, replacing the previous off-platform, undefined process.
05
Run
Kept the dispute framework in its manual-to-rule-based phase, with the architecture built to bring in an AI-assisted resolution agent as case volume grows.
What we built.
We designed a structured, compliant dispute and payments ecosystem that sets clear legal boundaries. A three-layer agreement model covers platform terms at signup, a provider agreement at onboarding, and a job contract per accepted quote, all with version history. Payments run through Stripe Connect on a hold-and-release model, freeze on dispute, and generate chargeback evidence. Providers are verified before they accept work. The dispute process runs in phases — manual first, then rule-based — with AI-assisted resolution on the roadmap.
Tech stack
Integrations
- Stripe Connect (hold-and-release payments + identity)
- DocuSign / HelloSign (e-signature)
- AWS S3 (secure document storage)
Security
- Encrypted storage for legal files
- Role-based admin access
- Audit logging for all dispute actions
- Clear data-retention policies
A marketplace's legal exposure shows up in what happens when something goes wrong — building the dispute and payment framework before scaling further is what makes growth defensible.
