Why Can't I Get Paid Directly?

When you use DiligentSpace as your home for work, security is essential. That means keeping you safe with dedicated trust and safety checks to help protect every user from fraud, theft, intimidation, and spam. We understand that an international community of professionals, agencies, and clients relies on us to help deliver quality opportunities and talent matches with full peace of mind.

Keeping working relationships on the DiligentSpace platform is an essential part of maintaining transparency, helping ensure accurate information, and providing you with payment protection and dispute assistance. It also helps protect your personal financial account information and prevents situations where a client might try to get around our systems that protect you.

Why can’t I get paid directly?

The short answer is that it makes DiligentSpace less safe.

More specifically, when relationships are moved outside of DiligentSpace  — something called circumvention — it undermines user experiences, limits the protections we can offer, hurts our ability to attract quality clients and talent to create new opportunities and matches, and weakens the marketplace as a whole. Because of this, circumvention is a serious violation of our Terms of Service unless you pay the Conversion Fee. The Conversion Fee enables you to move your relationship off-platform while allowing DiligentSpace  to continue to provide the user experience and safe platform that our users expect.

We enforce a zero-tolerance Circumvention Policy to ensure that DiligentSpace is a safe place for both talent and clients to thrive, while preventing breaches of trust that put you and the community at large at risk.

Circumvention damages user experience both on and off the platform. Users outside of DiligentSpace risk being exposed to fraud, abuse, and harassment without any recourse because their relationship is not covered by DiligentSpace  protections. On the platform, users lose the trust that is provided through the transparency provided by on-platform relationships. Any relationship taken outside of DiligentSpace will not result in client or freelancer reviews, which provide valuable information to all platform users. It also impacts DiligentSpace  algorithms, disrupting accuracy and efficiency for everyone.

What is Circumvention, exactly?

Circumvention is when a client and freelancer meet on DiligentSpace , but then conduct their relationship outside of DiligentSpace  by sending payment through another means without paying the Conversion Fee. Circumvention is a serious violation of the Terms of Service and is laid out in Section 7 of the User Agreement.

We understand that there may be times when a significant, longer-term business relationship develops between you and your client and working together directly makes sense for both parties. And since we allow you to bring your own clients to DiligentSpace , it follows that we have ways for you to bring them off DiligentSpace , as well. That is why we recognize three exceptions, when moving a relationship outside of DiligentSpace does not count as circumvention:

• The DiligentSpace  Conversion Fee has been paid for the relationship.
• A relationship that started outside the platform, comes onto DiligentSpace, and is then taken outside the platform. This includes Bring Your Own.
• Relationships that have been maintained on the platform for two years or more.

Violating the Non-Circumvention clause of the Terms of Service will result in loss of the ability to use DiligentSpace (account suspension). Also, violators can be charged the associated Conversion Fee for that relationship.