Why businesses keep 100% (and the buyer pays the fee)
Every platform has to answer one question before any other: who pays it?
Our answer: the buyer. ROJI's platform fee — 15% of the list price, tiered down with volume — is charged to the buying agent's account, on top of the price the business published. The business receives its full list price. If a service is listed at $250, the business is paid $250, and the buyer's account is charged $250 plus the fee.
This is not a promotional rate, and it isn't generosity. It's the only structure that makes sense for this platform, and we'd rather explain the reasoning than have you wonder about the catch.
Platforms that tax scarce supply never reach liquidity
A platform is worth using when the other side shows up. In our market, the constrained side is supply: verified businesses — notaries commissioned in the right county, review desks with the right background, people willing to drive to a site and photograph a roof properly. Demand is software; it scales by deployment. Supply is businesses run by people; it scales by trust.
Taxing the scarce side is how young platforms strangle themselves. Every percentage point taken from a seller is a reason for the best ones — the ones with alternatives — not to show up, and a recruiting wedge handed to the next competitor. The platforms that take 20% from freelancers can do it because they spent a decade building demand the freelancer can't get elsewhere. We're not pretending to be at that stage. At this stage, the deal has to be plainly good.
There's a second, structural reason. A business that keeps 100% of its list price can publish the same price here that it charges everywhere else. No re-pricing to absorb a take rate, no awkward conversation about why the ROJI price is higher, no margin math before deciding to list. That is what makes publishing a catalog an easy decision instead of a negotiation.
The buyer doesn't feel the fee — and that's not spin
Consider what the buying side is actually replacing. Before ROJI, when an agent hit work requiring a human, someone at the company became the fulfillment department: find a business, brief them by email, chase them, check the work, pay them through a separate system, feed the result back. That coordination overhead costs real staff time per incident — usually more than the work itself.
Against that baseline, "$250 for the filing, plus $37.50 for it to be found, ordered, tracked, checked, refund-protected, and paid without anyone at the company touching it" is not a decision anyone agonizes over. The demand side is price-sensitive about latency and reliability, not about a fee that replaces an afternoon of someone's time. So the fee sits where it's barely felt — and doesn't sit on the business doing the work, where it would be felt keenly.
There's a third reason the buyer pays: the buyer is software, and software needs deterministic math. Fees on ROJI are published, itemized, and machine-readable — an agent sees the all-in cost before it orders, to the cent. A fee quietly deducted from the seller's side would corrupt the one number both parties care most about: what the business actually earns.
What this means for your first order
Say you're a commissioned notary, you've listed a filing service at $250, and an agent orders it.
- $250 reaches your Stripe account at the order. Not promised, not escrowed, not released later — paid. The buyer was charged your price plus the fee when the order was placed, and ROJI only ever touched its own fee.
- $250 is your number. No commission, no service fee, no fine print between the price you published and the amount you're paid.
- The obligations are the other half of the deal. You published a turnaround and a refund window, and both are enforceable: miss the turnaround and the order refunds automatically and in full; answer a refund request within 72 hours or it approves itself. Being paid up front is only fair if the buyer's protection is real.
Compare that to the platforms most independent professionals know: win the work with unpaid proposal-writing, take a 10–20% haircut, invoice, wait, chase.
Will it stay this way?
Honestly: charging the buying side is our launch posture, and we've published the reasoning precisely so you can hold us to a standard when things evolve. If we ever charge supply anything, our stated plan is an optional subscription for extras like instant payouts and placement analytics — not a take rate carved out of list prices. A seller commission is the last resort, not the roadmap, because it taxes our best businesses the most and hands competitors the obvious pitch against us.
The quarterly earnings transparency report we've committed to — total paid out, median effective hourly by vertical, payout latency, refund rates — is the enforcement mechanism. If the deal stops being good, it will show up in numbers we've promised to publish.