--- title: "How ROJI Works — The Platform Mechanics | roji.ai" description: "How the commerce layer works: structured service listings, typed inputs and deliverables, an honest SLA clock, pay-at-order payments, refund rails, the business console, and the agent-facing MCP surface." doc_version: 5cdbfde67ce5 last_updated: 2026-09-10 --- # How ROJI Works — The Platform Mechanics | roji.ai How ROJI works One order, end to end: a business publishes a listing, an agent finds it and orders with structured inputs, the payment goes straight through, the work comes back typed and checked — and the platform manages state, communication, and refunds in between. 1. A listing, not a job post The unit of supply is a service listing: a service the business already sells, written down so software can buy it. A listing carries a plain-language description, a structured input schema (what the buyer must supply — an address, a jurisdiction, the documents, the constraints), a deliverable schema (what comes back and in what shape), a price, a turnaround, a refund window, and the jurisdictions it covers. Vertical templates mean a business doesn't design any of this from scratch; it fills in the variables, or pastes its website and corrects the draft catalog we generate from it. Listings are versioned, so an order always references the listing exactly as it stood when it was placed. 2. Discovery that respects licenses There is no matching engine, no claim race, and no bidding — the buyer picks the listing. What the platform does instead is control what can be listed. A business can only publish work its verification actually supports: licensure and jurisdiction are hard eligibility rules on the listing, not preferences applied later, so a Travis County filing only exists in the catalog of a business verified for Texas. Search filters on vertical, jurisdiction, price, turnaround, and business reputation. If nobody covers what you need, search returns nothing — which is a better answer than an order that silently hangs. 3. The order, and the money An order is a listing plus parameterized inputs plus a payment. The agent gets an itemized fee preview — list price, platform fee, processing — and nothing is charged until it accepts that preview. Then the payment clears in one shot: a Stripe destination charge routing to the business's connected account, with ROJI's fee collected as the application fee, or the same amount over x402 for agents on the agent-native rail. ROJI never holds the funds. There is no escrow account, no capture at acceptance, no release step — which means no stuck money, no expiring authorizations, and no verdict standing between a business and its own revenue. 4. Structured communication, both directions Talk during an order runs through typed channels — no chat log a machine has to guess at: Questions Either side asks; the asker attaches the answer type (yes/no, multiple choice, number, file). A business's clarifying question reaches the agent as something it can answer programmatically — often in seconds. Unanswered questions pause the SLA clock. Document requests Missing an authorization letter or the original invoice? The business requests it; the agent uploads it — or the request escalates to the human behind the agent, who can fulfill it from a secure link in their email without logging into anything. Checkpoints Approval gates a listing declares ahead of an irreversible real-world act — 'approve the filing packet before I submit it to the clerk.' The buying side approves or asks for a change before the point of no return. Status updates Lightweight progress signals — 'arrived on site,' 'draft 70% done' — delivered over webhooks, so agents can plan around human time instead of being surprised by it. 5. Deliverables a machine can consume Businesses deliver four ways: documents and media against a manifest ("12–20 geotagged roof photos, minimum 3000px"), structured data validating against the schema the listing declared, answer sets for judgment and verification work, and attestations — signed statements that a real-world act happened, backed by required evidence like stamped receipts and geotagged captures. Automated checks run at upload, before anything can be marked delivered: schema conformance, complete manifests, geotags, file integrity, malware scan. They're free and unwaivable, so structurally invalid work never reaches the buyer. The agent gets data it can use immediately, not a ZIP file to untangle. 6. The SLA clock, kept honest Every listing publishes a turnaround, and the platform measures it — but only across time the business could actually use. The clock pauses whenever the business is waiting on the buyer: an unanswered question, an unfulfilled document request, a checkpoint sitting in the agent's queue. It runs again the moment the buyer answers. This is the one rule that makes machine-to-human commerce fair, because it makes "the business was slow" and "the agent was slow" two different, measurable things. Both feed reputation, and both are visible before the other side commits. 7. Refund rails instead of verdicts Because ROJI controls the refund rail rather than a pot of held money, protection is enforceable without custody. Cancel before acceptance, or have the business decline: automatic full refund. Miss the published SLA: automatic full refund, no request needed. After delivery, the listing's refund window opens — 7 days by default, 3 to 30 at the business's discretion — and a buyer can file a request with a reason; the business approves or contests within 72 hours or it auto-approves, and a contested request goes to platform mediation decided from the complete order record. Chargeback liability sits with the business as merchant of record, which is honest: they're the seller. 8. Two surfaces, one record Businesses work in a console: publish and version the catalog, take the order queue (accept, reject, deliver), handle refund requests, watch payouts. Agents work over MCP: search the catalog, read a listing and its fee preview, order, answer questions, pull the deliverable, request a refund, leave a review. Both sides read and write the same order record — the listing as it stood, every input, every message, every state change, every cent. That record is what mediation decides from, what a review hangs off, and what your agent can load into context instead of reconstructing from tool calls. Full technical reference on the order lifecycle page; verticals and typical prices in the service directory. See it live Get started ## Sitemap - [Every public page, as markdown](/sitemap.md) - [llms.txt](/llms.txt) · [AGENTS.md](/AGENTS.md) · [auth.md](/auth.md)