Last updated August 5, 2026
These terms are for the people and businesses who take bookings through HelpU. They sit on top of the terms of service and they exist to answer, in plain words, the two questions a provider is entitled to have answered before deciding to work here: how your position in the list is decided, and what happens if you pay us for placement. They follow Regulation (EU) 2019/1150, the platform to business regulation.
These documents are currently available in English only. Greek and the other languages HelpU supports will follow once the translations have been reviewed; until then the English text is the one that applies.
Who these terms are for
You are covered by these terms if you list services on HelpU, whether you are self employed or a company. They add to the terms of service rather than replace them. Where both speak to the same thing, the more specific rule here is the one that applies to providers.
The current version is in the app under Legal at all times, before you sign up as well as after, and you can read it without an account.
How your position in the list is decided
When a customer opens a category or runs a search, the providers they see are ordered by one thing: your average customer rating, highest first. That rating is the mean of the star ratings customers left after a completed job, rounded to one decimal place. Nothing else moves you up or down.
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On relative importance, which the regulation asks us to explain: there is nothing to weigh. Rating is not the main parameter among several, it is the only parameter. There is no hidden score, no engagement weighting, no freshness bonus, and no personalisation based on what that particular customer booked before.
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A provider with no ratings yet sorts as a zero, which puts them at the bottom. That is the honest weakness of a one parameter ranking and we would rather write it down than let you discover it.
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The customer can change the order, and when they do it is visible on their screen. Filtering by price re orders the list cheapest first for as long as that filter is on. Filtering by top rated or by language hides providers who do not match. Those are their choices, not ours.
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Search matches on your display name, your area, the category, and the names of your services, on the words themselves. We do not rewrite or expand a query and we do not sell keywords. Results come back in the same rating order.
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These are shown to customers and do NOT affect where you appear: the number of jobs you have completed, your years active, the HelpU Checked badge and the languages you speak, all on your card; and your typical response time, on your profile page rather than on the card. They are information for the customer to read once the order has already been decided.
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The Top Pros row on the home screen is a separate surface with its own editorial selection, made by HelpU. It is not for sale, and being in it or out of it does not change your position in any category or search list.
Featured placement is advertising, and it is paid
HelpU sells exactly one form of paid placement and this is it. Featured is a monthly subscription. What it buys is an advertisement, not a better rank, and the difference is the whole point of this section.
What the money buys:
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A card in a block that sits above the ordinary list on category screens and on search, separated from it by a visible line.
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The word Sponsored on every card in that block. It is on each card rather than once above them, so a customer who scrolls into the second one still sees it.
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At most two slots in any view. The cap is applied by the server, so an app build that forgot it cannot widen the block.
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A rotation. When more providers pay than there are slots, the order is reshuffled once an hour, deterministically, so that everyone who pays is seen instead of the same two every time. The block is deliberately not ordered by rating: an advertisement must not borrow the authority of the organic list.
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Your own numbers underneath it, being profile views, bookings and repeat customers, so you can decide for yourself whether it was worth the money.
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Placement only among providers the customer is already looking at. If their filters or their search have excluded you, you are not advertised into a list you do not belong in.
What Featured costs
EUR 19.90 per month for a solo provider, and EUR 49.90 per month for a company. The amount is shown on the Featured screen before you confirm, and Stripe charges it every month until you cancel.
You can cancel in the app. Cancelling keeps your placement running to the end of the period you have already paid for and then stops it. There is no refund of a month in progress, and no charge after it. If a payment fails, the placement stops and the app tells you so, rather than quietly dropping you out of the block and continuing to look active.
A price change is a change to these terms and gets the notice period at the end of this document. It never applies to a month you have already paid for.
What Featured does not buy
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It does not change your position in the ordinary list. Not a boost, not a tiebreak, not a nudge. The ordering takes no account of who is paying, and the featured slots come from a separate query that the ordering never sees.
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It does not take you out of the ordinary list either. You still appear there, in the position your rating earned. Removing you would be altering the ranking just as surely as promoting you would.
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It does not touch your rating, your badges, your response time, whether you turn up in search results, or whether a customer filter matches you.
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It does not buy a customer. A slot is an impression. The booking is still yours to earn.
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It comes with no promise of views, bookings or revenue. We publish no forecast, and if nobody was browsing your category this month then you paid for slots nobody saw. We are not going to dress that up.
If any of this ever stops being true, these terms change first and you get the notice period below. A ranking that quietly started taking money into account would make everything a customer believes about the list false, which is worth more to this product than the advertising is.
We do not compete with you
HelpU does not operate its own providers, holds no stake in any provider on the platform, and gives no provider more favourable treatment than another. The single exception is the paid Featured block described above, which is labelled everywhere it appears and which any approved provider can buy on the same terms. If that ever changes, this section changes with it and you get notice.
Verification, and the badge it earns
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Everyone is checked. You cannot be approved to take bookings until the documents we ask for have been reviewed and passed, and that applies to every provider on the platform rather than to a premium tier.
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Which documents you need depends on the work. Identity for everyone, and then a police clearance certificate, a child protection certificate, a trade or professional registration, or proof of insurance, according to what you do and who you do it around.
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A reviewer at HelpU decides. You cannot approve your own documents and neither can any other provider; the database refuses the write regardless of what an app sends it.
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A rejection comes with a reason you can read, and you can upload again.
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The HelpU Checked badge means that review was done and passed. It is not sold, it is not part of Featured, and paying us cannot produce it.
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The badge is a statement about documents we saw, not a warranty of your work. Your licences, insurance, taxes and legal compliance remain yours, and we do not monitor them on a continuing basis.
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How the files are stored, who can see them and what happens to them if you leave is set out in the privacy policy.
What you can see, and what you may do with it
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You can see your own bookings, earnings, reviews, services, availability and packages, and your own Featured numbers if you pay for it. You can ask us for a copy of your data at any time and it is free.
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Customer contact details, the full street address, the access notes and the note left on the booking itself are released to you for a live job and for 24 hours after it ends. A request you have not accepted carries the first name, the area and the city, and nothing else. That is a limit the database enforces, not a courtesy we ask you to observe.
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Using those details for anything other than that job breaks these terms and data protection law. That covers marketing, contacting the customer off platform, and passing them to anyone else.
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You cannot see another provider's data, and we do not hand yours to another provider.
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HelpU does not sell your data and does not give it to third parties for their own purposes. The processors named in the privacy policy are the entire list.
You are not tied to us
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You set your own prices and choose which services to list and when you are available.
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There is no exclusivity. You can work through other platforms and directly at the same time, and you can charge a different price elsewhere.
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You can take your listing offline or close your account whenever you like. Bookings you already accepted still have to be done, or cancelled properly.
If we restrict, suspend or remove your listing
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If we restrict or suspend your listing we will tell you why in writing, with the facts or the reports the decision rests on, before it takes effect or at the latest when it does.
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If we end your account entirely we will give you at least 30 days' notice, with reasons. That does not apply where the law requires us to act sooner, where you have broken these terms repeatedly, or where waiting would put someone at risk.
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You can reply, and if we got it wrong we will reverse it. Write to the address at the end of this document.
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Money already earned for work already done is yours either way, and a suspension does not cancel it.
Complaints and disputes
Write to saleemmatar6@gmail.com. Say what happened and which booking or decision it concerns, and you will get an answer with a reason in it rather than a form letter.
HelpU is run by one person and is well below the size at which the platform to business regulation requires a formal internal complaint handling system and a published list of mediators. We are not going to claim machinery we do not have. What we have is one address, read by the person who makes the decisions, and a commitment that you get a real reason for any of them.
None of this affects your right to go to court, or any remedy Cypriot or EU law gives you.
Changes to these provider terms
We give you at least 15 days' notice before a change to these terms takes effect, and longer where the change needs you to make technical or commercial adjustments. Notice goes to you in the app and by email, and the date at the top of this document changes with it.
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You can end your agreement with us before the change takes effect, from inside the app, and you do not have to give a reason.
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The notice period does not apply where a change is required by a legal obligation, or where it is needed to deal with an unforeseen and immediate danger to the platform, to customers or to providers. Those are the only two exceptions and we will say which one we are relying on.
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You can waive the notice period, but only by telling us clearly that you are doing so. Carrying on using the app is not a waiver, and neither is listing a new service during the notice period.
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Nothing is applied retroactively. A booking, a package purchase or a subscription period that already exists stays governed by the terms in force when it started.
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Older versions are kept and are available on request, so you can check what the rule was on a given day.
Contact
saleemmatar6@gmail.com