Terms of service

Mitlea is an online marketplace in the United States that introduces families to independent caregivers. It lets a family find a caregiver, message her, request a booking, and pay for it. It lets a caregiver publish a profile, set her own rate and hours, accept or decline requests, and be paid.

Mitlea is currently open in Blacksburg, Virginia, and only to people in the United States. Where a rule below depends on state law, that is said plainly rather than answered with the law of one state.

That is the whole of what Mitlea does, and the following is what it does not do. Each of these is a limit on what you may expect from us, and they are repeated on our safety page because they matter more than anything else in this document.

• Mitlea does not employ caregivers. Every caregiver on this site is an independent person working for herself.
• Mitlea is not a childcare agency, a nanny placement agency or a licensed childcare provider, and it does not operate a childcare facility.
• Mitlea does not supervise, monitor, direct or train caregivers, and nobody from Mitlea is present during a session.
• Mitlea is not an emergency service. It cannot dispatch help. In an emergency, call 911.
• Mitlea does not guarantee the conduct, suitability, punctuality or honesty of any person who uses the site, whether a caregiver or a family.

The care itself is an arrangement between the family and the caregiver. Mitlea is a party to the introduction, the booking record and the payment — not to the care.

You must be at least 18 years old, resident in the United States, and legally able to enter into a contract. Accounts are for individuals, not organisations.

Children do not have accounts on Mitlea and may not create one. A parent or guardian adds information about their own children to their own account, which is covered in the privacy policy.

You must give us accurate information about yourself, and keep it accurate. A caregiver profile that overstates experience, or a family account in someone else's name, is grounds for removal.

You are responsible for your password and for what happens under your account. Tell us immediately if you think someone else has access to it.

A booking request is a request. It is not a contract and it does not charge you. The caregiver may accept it or decline it, and she may decline without giving a reason. A request that is not answered expires.

When a caregiver accepts, the family pays. Payment is taken through Stripe; card details go to Stripe directly and are never held by Mitlea.

Mitlea holds the payment from the moment it is taken until the session is marked complete. When it is complete, the caregiver's share is transferred to her own connected Stripe account, and Mitlea keeps its service fee.

The price of a booking is fixed when the request is created, calculated from the caregiver's rate as it stood at that moment. A later change to her rate does not reprice an existing booking.

If the two of you agree to change the arrangement — different hours, a different day — do it through Mitlea so that the record, the price and the held payment all match what was actually agreed.

Mitlea charges families a service fee of 12% of the session cost, added on top of the caregiver's hourly rate. The caregiver receives her full rate.

The fee is shown on the quote before a family sends a request, and on the booking afterwards. Mitlea takes no other cut, and it does not charge caregivers to list, to be verified or to be paid.

We may change the fee. If we do, we will say so on the site, and a booking already created keeps the fee that was quoted on it.

One policy applies to every booking, and the same code that applies it issues the refund.

• Cancelled 24 hours or more before the start: the family is refunded in full, including the service fee.
• Cancelled between 24 and 2 hours before the start: the caregiver keeps half of the session cost. The rest, including the service fee, is refunded.
• Cancelled inside the last 2 hours: the caregiver keeps the full session cost. The Mitlea service fee is refunded.
• Cancelled by the caregiver, at any point: the family is refunded in full.

The reason a caregiver keeps part of a late cancellation is that she turned down other work to hold the evening. If something went wrong that the policy does not fit, tell us and a person will look at it.

You are working for yourself. You set your own hourly rate, your own minimum booking, your own hours, the ages you take and the services you offer, and you choose which families you accept. Mitlea does not schedule you, does not set your price and does not require you to accept any booking.

Nothing is withheld from what you are paid. You are responsible for your own taxes on your earnings, and for any licence, registration or insurance the law requires of you. Mitlea cannot give you tax or legal advice.

You are responsible for the care you provide, and for telling a family promptly if you cannot make a session.

To be paid you need a connected Stripe account in your own name. Stripe's own terms apply to that account, and Stripe decides whether it may be paid out.

Verification is voluntary. Where you ask for it, you agree that a person at Mitlea may look at the evidence you show them and record what they saw, and that the resulting badge — and the exact claim it makes — appears on your public profile.

You are responsible for deciding whether a caregiver is right for your children. We give you her profile, her verifications and her reviews; the judgement is yours. Meet her before you book.

Tell your caregiver what she needs to know: allergies, medication, routines, who may collect a child, and how to reach you. Attaching a child to a booking is how that information reaches her.

You are responsible for the safety of your own home during a session, and for telling us if something in it — a pool, a dog, a firearm in the house — a caregiver ought to know about.

Reviews may be written only after a booking you made through Mitlea has been completed. Write what happened. We may remove a review that is abusive, is about something other than the care, or identifies a child.

Arranging or paying for care outside Mitlea after meeting here is not permitted. It is not about the fee: an off-platform booking has no held payment, no agreed record, no route to a refund and no report you can file afterwards.

If a caregiver does not arrive, tell us. We refund you in full — the cancellation rules exist to protect a caregiver who kept her side of the arrangement, not one who did not.

Our messaging always hides phone numbers, email addresses and payment handles from the recipient. Once a booking is confirmed, you are both shown each other's phone number, because two adults arranging a doorstep handover need to be able to call each other.

You may not use Mitlea to harass, threaten or abuse anyone; to misrepresent who you are or what you have done; to discriminate against anyone on a protected characteristic; to collect other people's information; or to break the law.

We may suspend or remove an account, hide a profile or a review, or cancel a booking where we reasonably believe someone is being put at risk, this agreement has been broken, or the law requires it. Where a child's safety is involved we will act first and explain afterwards.

You may close your account at any time. Doing so does not cancel bookings that already exist or reverse payments already made.

A verification badge means a named person at Mitlea saw a specific document on a specific date and recorded that they saw it. The exact claim each badge makes is printed next to it on our safety page, and no page on Mitlea may state it more strongly.

A badge is not a prediction, an endorsement, a guarantee, or a substitute for your own judgement. The absence of a badge means we have not checked that thing, not that someone failed a check.

Mitlea does not retain identity documents or background-check reports. What we keep is the record of the check itself.

This section has not been drafted or reviewed by a lawyer and is the part of this document most likely to change before launch. It is written here in plain language so that our intent is on the record.

Our intent is this: Mitlea provides the introduction, the booking record and the payment. It does not provide childcare, does not employ caregivers and cannot be responsible for what two adults do in a private home. What follows from that in law — including what liability may and may not be limited, and whether Mitlea or a caregiver must carry insurance — is being determined with counsel before launch, and this section will be replaced with the result.

We do not currently make any representation on this site about insurance coverage, because we are not going to claim one we have not confirmed.

We may change these terms. Material changes will be announced on the site before they take effect, and the date this draft was written appears at the top of this page.

Mitlea is operated from Blacksburg, Virginia, in the United States, and is available only to people in the United States. Which state's law governs this agreement, and where disputes are resolved, is one of the open questions with counsel — we are not going to name a governing law before we have been told which one is correct.

Childcare is regulated state by state. Licensing, background-check requirements, mandated reporting and how an independent caregiver is classified all differ depending on where a session takes place, and some of those rules apply to us as well as to her. As Mitlea opens in a new state, those questions are answered for that state before anybody is listed there.

Questions about these terms: hello@mitlea.com.