Terms of Service

Freeman Flow is operated by Freeman Flow Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 16508031), registered office Flat A, 194 Windmill Lane, Greenford, UB6 9DW, United Kingdom. Our VAT number is GB 495 456 151. You can contact us at hello@freemanflow.com.

Using the site means accepting these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use it.

We are an introduction service. Clients post building work; contractors pay to see the full details and get in touch. That is the whole of what we do.

We are not a party to any agreement you reach with the other side. We do not carry out the work, supervise it, price it, guarantee it, or hold your money for it. Any contract for the work itself is between the client and the contractor.

We do not check, approve or accredit anyone. We do not verify qualifications, insurance, trade memberships, creditworthiness, identity, or the address on a job. A contractor appearing here is not a recommendation from us, and neither is a client. Satisfying yourself about the other side — references, insurance, qualifications, written quotes — is your responsibility, and we would strongly encourage it.

One thing we do check is the telephone number. Before a job goes on the board, the client enters a code we send to the number on it, and changing the number means doing that again (section 4). That confirms the number reaches them. It is not a check on who they are, whether they will answer, or whether they will go ahead with the work.

You must be 18 or over and, if you are acting for a business, be entitled to act for it. An account is either a client account or a contractor account, chosen at signup — one account cannot be both.

Keep your login details to yourself; anything done through your account is treated as done by you. Give us accurate details and keep them up to date, particularly your email address, since that is how we tell you things.

Post only work you actually want done, at a property you own or are entitled to act for. Describe it honestly.

Give contact details that reach you. The telephone number and address on a job must be correct, current, and a number you will answer. Contractors pay to receive them, and a number that reaches nobody is the one part of a job we cannot put right afterwards. Where details turn out not to reach you we may take the job down, and doing it more than once may cost you your account.

Before your first job goes on the board we send a code to that number — a text message, or a call reading it out if it is a landline — and you enter it to confirm the number reaches you. A phone number can be confirmed on only one client account.

If you change your number later, we send a code to the new one and the change only takes effect once you enter it. Until then the number already on your account is the one that stays there, and the one contractors are given. This applies while a job is live as well: a job on the board always carries a number that has been confirmed.

You can have one job up at a time, and post up to three in any 24 hours. To post another, withdraw the one you have or wait for it to finish. Contractors pay to read these, so every job on the board should be one somebody is actually waiting to have done.

One job can name up to 5 kinds of work, so a kitchen and a roof at the same property go up together rather than as two separate jobs.

The title, the description, the budget and the address cannot be changed once a job is posted. That is deliberate: contractors pay to read them, and a description that could change afterwards would be worth nothing. If you got one of them wrong, withdraw the job and post again.

Two things about a posted job can still be changed. You can switch between letting contractors unlock instantly and approving each one first. You can also add, correct or remove the planning reference. A new or corrected reference is sent to be checked again, and a job without one shows as unverified, so the badge on a job can change after a contractor has paid to see it.

Do not put phone numbers, email addresses or other contact details into the parts of a job that are visible before a contractor pays. We remove them where we spot them.

A job stays open for 90 days, or until 3 contractors have connected to it, whichever comes first. It cannot be extended and it cannot be put back up once it has finished; if you still need the work done after that, post it again. You can withdraw it at any time. Withdrawing is how you close a job whether you have hired somebody or given up on it. If nobody has connected to it, withdrawing removes it entirely; if someone has, the job closes but the contractors who paid keep what they paid for, and they are told it came down.

The photographs, the drawings and the words you write stay yours. We do not claim to own them, and we do not use them anywhere else — not in advertising, not to promote the site, not for anything but running the introduction you posted them for.

What we do need is your permission to do that much: to store what you upload and to show it to the people it is meant to reach. For a job, that is the contractors who pay to connect with it. For a contractor's portfolio, it is the clients they are connected to. That permission lasts exactly as long as we hold the content and ends when it goes.

A job's photographs and drawings go when the job is deleted: 90 days after the last contractor connected to it, or 90 days after it was posted if nobody did — or later, where a report about the job has held it (section 6). A job nobody has connected to goes straight away, with its photographs and drawings, if you withdraw it or delete your account. Deleting your account does not bring the date forward for a job a contractor has already paid to see: they keep its photographs and drawings until then, as section 11 explains. A photograph on your profile goes when you remove it, or when you delete your account.

Only upload what is yours to upload. Putting a photograph or a drawing here is you confirming that it is yours, or that whoever owns it is content for it to be used this way — an architect's drawing usually belongs to the architect, and that is worth knowing before it goes out to 3 builders. Do not upload anything showing somebody else's property or household without their say-so.

The site itself — its design, its words and its software — is ours, and nothing here gives you a right to copy or republish it.

Contractors buy credits. One credit connects you to one job: you see the full description, the address, and the client's name, telephone number and email address, and you can message them.

What a credit buys is the connection, not a permanent copy. The job, the description, the photographs and drawings, and the whole conversation are deleted 90 days after the last contractor connected to that job. We warn you 7 days before, but keep anything you need for your own records. We do not delete a job while somebody has reported it and we have not finished looking into it, because a complaint cannot be judged once the evidence has been deleted. Once it is settled the ordinary date applies again or, if that date has already passed, 7 days after it was settled, with the same warning beforehand. If the client deletes their account, their name, phone number, email address and the job's address are removed straight away. Section 11 explains what stays, and our Privacy Policy explains why.

At most 3 contractors can connect to any one job. Slots are taken in the order they are claimed.

There are two ways in, and the job says which applies. Where the client accepts anyone, your credit is spent immediately and that spend is final — you have received exactly what you paid for, which is the information. Where the client wants to approve people first, your credit is held: if they accept, it is spent; if they decline, or do not answer within 24 hours, it is returned to your balance automatically. The same happens if the job comes down before they answer — withdrawn, expired, taken down by us, or the client deleted their account. The one exception is a payment that is reversed, which is covered below.

Once you are connected, the job coming down does not take it away. If the client withdraws the job, lets it expire, or posts a different one instead, every contractor who has already connected keeps the full details and can carry on messaging them until the job is deleted. Coming off the board only stops new contractors reaching that client. What you paid for was the connection, and a client cannot take it back by removing the listing.

Credits expire 12 months after they are first added to your balance, and we email you 14 days before any expire. A credit returned to you from a request keeps that original date and does not start a new 12 months. Prices are shown excluding VAT, which is added at checkout, and a VAT invoice is issued for every purchase.

Credits are sold to contractors for use in their trade or business. In buying them you are contracting as a business and not as a consumer, and the cancellation rights that apply to consumer purchases at a distance do not apply.

A credit buys the client's details as the client gave them. It buys those details and the ability to message that client here. It does not buy an answered call, a reply, or the work. We cannot see telephone calls and do not decide disputes on accounts of them. We can see messages sent through Freeman Flow, so a conversation begun here is the record we are able to read. Where a client's details turn out not to reach them at all, tell us: we may return the credit as a goodwill gesture, and returning one on that occasion does not oblige us to return another.

The details are for the job you paid to reach. Use the client's name, address, telephone number and email address to quote for that job, and to carry it out if they choose you, including passing on what the people doing the work need. Do not use them to advertise anything else, add them to a mailing list, or give them to anybody else. Once we hand them over they are in your care, and data protection law makes you answerable for what you do with them. Using them for anything else breaks these terms and may cost you your account.

Keeping your own record of a job you quoted for, such as an estimate or an invoice, is ordinary and expected. Section 11 says what happens to everything else when a client deletes their account.

Credits are not money and cannot be cashed out. Outside the automatic returns described above, purchases are not refundable — in particular, we do not refund a credit because a client did not answer the telephone, stopped replying, chose someone else, or turned out not to be worth quoting for. If your legal rights as a consumer give you more than this, those rights are not affected by anything here.

If a payment is reversed, the credits it bought come back to us. Where you charge a payment back to your card issuer, or we refund one, we take that many credits off your balance. If your balance has fallen short, we make up the difference from credits held on requests still waiting for a client's answer: those requests are withdrawn, and the credits held on them are not returned to you. That can include credits from another purchase, because a balance does not remember which payment each credit came from. A discount code the payment earned is switched off as well. Where only part of a payment is reversed, we work it out by hand.

Credits you have already spent on a connection are not taken back: they bought a connection to a client who may still be waiting on a call, and taking that away would punish the client for a dispute they are no part of. Reversing a payment for credits you have used is a breach of these terms, and we may suspend or close the account behind it.

Where a job carries a planning reference, we look it up on the public planning register and check that the reference belongs to an application at that property — not merely that the reference exists somewhere. Where it matches, the badge repeats the decision the register itself records, which is why a job can read approved, pending, refused or not required. Anything we cannot match reads unverified, which means we could not confirm it — not that anyone has done anything wrong.

The badge repeats the register; it is not our own view. We do not assess the application, and we do not check that the permission covers the work being advertised, that it is still in time, or that any condition on it has been met. Planning data reaches us from a third-party source that may be incomplete or out of date, and a decision can change after we last looked. A client can also add, correct or remove the reference after posting, and any of these can change the badge: a new or corrected reference is checked again, and a job without one shows as unverified. Treat the badge as a prompt to check the register yourself, never as a substitute for doing so.

Do not post anything false, unlawful, abusive or discriminatory. Do not impersonate anyone. Do not use the platform to advertise services to other members, to scrape it, or to attack it.

You can report a person or a job to us, and you can block someone, which stops contact in both directions.

We can suspend or close an account that breaks these rules. A suspended account can still read everything it already had, but cannot post a job, unlock one, or send messages, including in a conversation already under way. Reporting still works, so somebody suspended can always put their side of it. Unused credits in a suspended or closed account are not refunded where the account was closed for breaking these terms.

A job posted by a suspended client comes off the board for as long as the hold lasts, so nobody can spend a credit to reach somebody who is not able to answer them. It goes back up if we lift the hold. Anyone already waiting on that client's approval has their credit returned when the 24 hours run out.

We can also take a single job down, on its own or alongside action against the account behind it. The client is told the reason. Any contractor still waiting for approval on that job has their credit returned automatically, and where contractors have already paid to see it we may return theirs as well.

We can read every job and every message on the platform, and we do when we need to settle a dispute or investigate a report. This is set out more fully in our Privacy Policy. Use the platform on that basis.

Nothing here limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

Beyond that: because we are an introduction service and not a party to the work, we are not liable for the work itself, for anything the other side does or fails to do, or for any agreement you reach with them. We do not promise the site will be uninterrupted or error-free.

We are not liable for work you did not win, a job that did not happen, income or an opportunity you say you missed, time you spent, money you laid out on the strength of using the site, or harm to your reputation. Those are the losses an introduction service cannot stand behind. It applies however the complaint arises — an account we put on hold, a job that came off the board, an alert that did not reach you, a badge that turned out to be wrong, or the site being down at the moment you wanted it.

Where we are liable to a contractor for something that goes wrong with the service, our liability is limited to the amount that contractor paid us in the twelve months before the problem arose. Posting a job is free, so a client has paid us nothing; where we are liable to a client, our liability is limited to £100.

You can delete your account at any time from your account page. Records of money are kept, without your identity attached — see the Privacy Policy for why. Deleting your account does not refund unused credits.

When a client deletes their account, their personal details go straight away. Their name, phone number and email address are removed, and so is the address on every job they posted. Where a contractor has already connected to one of those jobs, that contractor keeps the description, the photographs and drawings, and a read-only copy of the conversation until the job is deleted, 90 days after the last contractor connected.

Deleting your account cannot take back what you have shared yourself. Anything you chose to put in a job or a conversation, or to give the other person away from the site, stays with them as you shared it. That includes the photographs and drawings you uploaded. We remove the address from the job, but we do not alter your files: a drawing whose title block carries the address, or a photograph that shows the property, still carries it. We remove what we hold about you; what somebody else keeps, or does with information you gave them, is outside our control and not our responsibility.

We may change these terms. If a change matters to you we will say so on the site and update the date at the top, and continuing to use Freeman Flow means the new version applies. Changes never apply backwards to a job or a credit already paid for.

If a court decides that some part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest of them still stand. The part that failed is read as narrowly as it needs to be to work, or left out altogether if it cannot be.

We may pass these terms, and the accounts and records that go with them, to somebody who takes over Freeman Flow or buys the part of the business that runs it. Your credits and your job go with you, and the terms you are on do not change because of the handover itself — a new owner who wanted to change them would have to do it the way section 12 describes. Our Privacy Policy says what happens to your personal information. You cannot hand your own account to somebody else: it is yours.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer living elsewhere in the UK, you keep the protection of your local law and may bring proceedings there.