Mainstay vs Contra

Contra is a platform where independent professionals build a public presence: a profile, a portfolio, work they can show, and a discovery surface built around all of it. Mainstay is a register a buyer reads. The two overlap on the browsing, and they are built for different people.

What Contra is good at

It is a good product for the professional. A profile someone maintains because it is their public face is a profile that gets attention paid to it. Portfolios are richer, presentation is better, and the person has a reason to keep it current that has nothing to do with any platform’s reminder.

Discovery that behaves like a network. Work, followers, referrals and visible portfolios feed each other. That is a real advantage for finding people whose output you can judge on sight — designers, illustrators, video, anything visual.

It is one place for the whole relationship. A platform with its own project surface keeps the introduction, the presentation and the working relationship in one account. Mainstay has no project surface at all: after the introduction there is nothing here to come back to except the record.

What Mainstay is

Written for the buyer rather than for the professional, which shows up in three places.

Every record is the same shape. Rate, hours free, skills, work samples, own description, clause results, attendance history. Uniformity is what makes a shortlist comparable — you are reading the same fields in the same order for everybody.

The bar is published, and per-record. The standard is seven numbered clauses, versioned, dated and published in full under CC BY 4.0. Every record was read against it before publication and prints which clauses it cleared and when. Identity is checked against a government-issued document before publication, and the method sits on the record beside the clause results: an automatic check by Stripe, whose images we never receive, or a person here reading the document.

The register removes its own stale entries. Every Mainstayer answers a check every week; miss one and the record drops out of every list a client sees, automatically. Each record prints its twelve-week attendance history (how we verify). It is worth asking of every profile platform: what happens to an entry when the person stops looking for work? Go and check the answer rather than taking ours.

Contact details are the product. $49 a month buys 100 contact reveals (pricing): email address, phone number and portfolio link, yours for good once spent. Money never passes through this site — no commission, no markup, no escrow, no mediation — and freelancers pay nothing, so placement is not for sale.

What Contra charges, and why it is not the difference

Contra’s pricing page says: “Contra is always commission-free for all creatives.” (contra.com/pricing, read 2026-08-14.) It holds: Contra takes no percentage of what a creative earns.

It charges a flat platform fee on each client payment instead, and the payer carries it — $15 on a payment under $500 and $29 at $500 and over, dropping to nothing where the creative holds Pro, which costs $199 a year or $29 a month (same page, same date). Card processing is separate and Contra says so in its own words: “Processing fees are calculated by our payment processing. This is not charged by Contra.” Those run at 2.9% plus 30¢ per successful domestic card charge. So a client paying a creative $600 pays Contra $29 on top of the card processing, unless that creative has paid for Pro — which is a substitution of a flat fee for a percentage, not an absence of cost, and Contra’s page does not claim otherwise.

That is this site’s own argument, made by somebody else. Mainstay takes no commission either, and charging for access rather than for the work is not a thing either of us invented. So the place to compare these two is not the money. It is what the entries are checked against and what happens to one that goes stale.

Three questions to ask any profile platform, including this one

1. What was checked before this entry went up, and where is that written down? Ours is at the standard: seven numbered clauses, with a version and a date on them.

2. What happens to an entry when the person stops looking for work? Here, a missed weekly check takes it off every list automatically.

3. Who wrote the words on the page? Every description on this register is the Mainstayer’s own writing. We never generate one and we never rewrite one, and a near-copy of another record is held rather than published.

Ask all three of us and of anybody else. A platform that cannot answer the second one is a list of people who were available once.

What this site does not have

No messaging, no proposals, no bidding, no milestones, no ratings and no reviews. No feed, no followers, and no way for anyone to approach you — you do the approaching. The only page behind a login is a read-only list of the contacts you have unlocked and how many are left. If a platform’s social surface is part of why you would use it, that is a reason to use the platform and not this.

The question that separates them

A profile platform optimises for the professional’s presence, which is why the profiles are good. A register optimises for the buyer’s shortlist, which is why the records are uniform and why an entry that stops answering disappears by itself.

Both are legitimate. Which you want depends on whether you are browsing to be impressed or browsing to compare.

When Mainstay is the wrong choice

You are hiring on visual portfolio quality alone. A platform built for presentation will show you better work, better presented, and the browse is more pleasant. Our records carry samples, not showcases.

You want the platform to carry the working relationship. There is no project surface, no messaging, no invoicing and no payments here. After the reveal, this site is a page you can re-read, and nothing else.

You want to be discovered by freelancers rather than the reverse. There is no way to post work here and no way for anyone to approach you. You do the approaching.

You want the money held until the work is delivered. Nothing is held here, ever, and no part of this site can be made to act as an intermediary.