What a subscription buys

$49 a month, 100 contact reveals (pricing). That is the entire product. This page says what it does and does not get you, before you spend anything.

The objection first

Why pay a subscription when other platforms advertise no fees?

You are paying a subscription instead of a percentage of everything you ever pay them.

A commission is charged on the work, so it is charged again every time the relationship produces anything. A subscription is charged on the introduction, so it stops. If you hire one person for one small job, a percentage of that job is almost certainly cheaper than a month of this. If you find someone you work with for the next two years, it is not, and the gap widens every month you keep working together.

That argument does not depend on knowing anyone’s percentage. It only depends on what the fee is attached to.

The arithmetic, with one marketplace’s published number

Freelancer.com charges an employer “a fee of 3%” on each payment made to a freelancer on an hourly project (Freelancer.com’s fees and charges page, read 2026-08-14). At 3%, $49 is what you pay on about $1,633 of payments. Spend less than that in a month and the percentage is the cheaper of the two; spend more and it is not — and the percentage is charged again on next month’s payments, and on the month after that, for as long as the relationship lasts.

Upwork’s client fee on its free Basic plan is published as a ceiling rather than a rate: “a Client Marketplace Fee of up to 7.99% on all payments you make to freelancers”, with exactly one named case beneath it, “a reduced Client Marketplace Fee of 3%” for qualifying U.S. clients paying from a bank account (Upwork’s Client Marketplace Fee article, read 2026-08-14). At the ceiling, $49 is reached at about $613 of payments in a month. Where you land between the two, Upwork does not publish.

The sharper number is what leaving costs. Upwork’s Terms of Service “require you to keep all work and payments on Upwork for the first two years”, and the fee to take the relationship off the platform inside that window is “13.5% of a freelancer’s estimated annual earnings” — the hourly rate times 2,080 hours. Upwork’s own worked example is a freelancer at $30 an hour, which it computes as $62,400 and bills at $8,424 (Upwork’s Conversion Fee article, read 2026-08-14). A subscription has no equivalent of that number, because there is nothing to convert: cancel this one and the contacts you already revealed stay yours, and nobody here has a claim on what you and the freelancer do next.

What the money buys

Contact details. One reveal is one Mainstayer’s email address, phone number and portfolio link. Spend it once and it is yours for good — opening the same record again next month costs nothing and shows on your ledger as a line with no charge against it.

A record that was checked before it was published. Every record on this register was read against the standard: seven numbered clauses, versioned, dated and published in full under CC BY 4.0. Each record prints which clauses it cleared and when.

An identity that was checked against a document. No record on this register was published until the person behind it had been checked against a government-issued document, and each record carries the account of it: whether that check was the automatic one or was made by a person here. What we keep is the outcome, the country that issued the document, its type, and the name on it. The automatic check is run by Stripe, who see the document; the images never reach us and we cannot ask for them.

A record that is still true this week. Every Mainstayer answers a check every week. Miss a week and the record drops out of every list a client sees. Each record also prints its twelve-week attendance history (how we verify).

What the money does not buy

It does not buy an outcome. A check says a record was read against a written bar and that the person answered a check this week. It does not say they are good at the work.

It does not buy a reply. We can see that someone confirmed they are active. We cannot see whether they answered your email, because there is no messaging on this site and we never see your correspondence.

It does not buy protection. No money passes through Mainstay. There is no escrow, no milestones, no dispute mediation and no refund on work you were unhappy with, because we were never holding anything to refund.

It does not buy a replacement. Nobody here will find you a substitute if the person does not work out.

It does not buy exclusivity. The people on this register are independent professionals. They are reachable elsewhere, and several clients may reveal the same person in the same week.

It does not buy a verified rate. The rate on a record is what the Mainstayer says they charge. We see no money, so we cannot confirm it, and neither can anyone who tells you they can (what a directory cannot verify).

The limits of the allowance, stated plainly

The 100 reveals belong to the month you bought them in. They do not roll over, and running out charges you nothing — contact locks until the period turns. There is a working limit of 12 reveals a day on every account, which is what stops a subscription being drained in an afternoon. There is no top-up pack, no annual prepay, no seat count and no enterprise plan.

Spend the whole allowance and a contact costs 49 cents. Spend one and it costs $49. Both are true and the second one is the one worth thinking about before you subscribe.

What stays free

Everything except contact. Every record, every rate, every clause result and every twelve-week attendance history is readable without an account and without a card. A free reader sees exactly the page a subscriber sees, minus three lines. So browse first. If you read the register and cannot find anyone you want to talk to, do not subscribe.

Cancel any time. The month you paid for runs to its end and then nothing renews, and the contacts you already revealed stay yours.

When Mainstay is the wrong choice

You are hiring once and never again. One introduction for $49 is poor value. Buy a defined deliverable somewhere that sells one, or hire through a marketplace where the fee is proportional to the job.

You need the money held until the work is delivered. This is the single most common reason to choose something else. We hold nothing. If your only protection is unpaid money, do not buy a subscription — buy escrow.

You want to be handed a shortlist. There is no matching service, no account manager and no sourcing team. You do the reading and the choosing.

You want to compare candidates on a rating history. There are no ratings and no reviews here: we have no way to verify a review of work we never saw. If a star rating is how you decide, a marketplace that has them will serve you better.