Frequently asked questions

Yes — posting jobs, receiving bids, and hiring are completely free for clients, residential or commercial. Contractors pay credits to bid; that is how the platform is funded.

As many qualified, verified contractors as want to — there is no cap, so you get the widest possible choice of competitive quotes. Larger projects ($100,000+) run on formal tender schedules with Bid of Intent windows. Every bidder is insurance/license verified before they can bid.

Before a contractor can bid, they upload proof of liability insurance or a trade license, which our team reviews. Verified contractors carry a badge on every bid. We still recommend confirming credentials directly before signing a contract.

Bids cost 1 to 12 credits depending on the job budget — 1 credit for jobs under $1,000, scaling up to 12 credits for $500,000+ tenders. Unlocking a job’s documents costs 1 credit when the job has attachments, and the Bid of Intent is free. The full fee table is on the Pricing page, and every job shows its exact fee before you commit. Credit packs start at $50 for 10 credits; there is no monthly fee.

The job closes, the other bids are declined, and both parties see each other’s contact details to arrange the work directly. QuoteHive takes no commission on the job value.

Credits don’t expire — any you buy stay in your wallet until you use them. They are non-refundable once spent on a bid, since placing the bid is the service being bought. If a job is removed for violating our rules before its bidding closes, credits spent bidding on it are returned. Bought credits by mistake or hit a billing error? Contact support and we can refund a credit purchase.

No. QuoteHive is an introduction platform — the contract for work is between client and contractor. Use reviews, verification badges, and your own written contract to protect the project.

All 13 Canadian provinces and territories. Job alerts are matched by trade and province.

Clients pick a bidding window when posting (7–30 days for standard jobs; large tenders run on a fixed 10/15/20-day schedule). A live countdown shows on the job; when it ends, bidding closes and every bid is revealed for full transparency.

Contact us and we will remove your account and associated data, subject to records we must keep for tax and legal purposes.

We track the expiry dates of every dated credential (liability insurance, WSIB/workers’ comp, trade licence). We remind the contractor at 60, 30 and 7 days and on the day it expires. If a required credential lapses, the contractor is automatically blocked from placing new bids until they upload a current copy and it is re-approved — so a bidder’s insurance and licences are always current.

Yes — every account has a personal referral link (on your Account page). When someone signs up through your link, verifies their email and makes their first purchase (a credit pack or a marketplace bidding top-up), you earn bidding credits automatically (10 by default), with no limit on how many people you can refer. The first-purchase step is a deliberate anti-farming safeguard, so a click alone never pays out. Credits can be spent on bids and across QuoteHive’s marketplace features. See the “Referral rewards” help article for details.

Selling is free during our beta — listing, browsing, and making or receiving offers cost nothing, and the seller fee on completed sales is waived for now (we’ll announce it well ahead of time). Two small buyer-side wallet fees are already live to keep bidding serious: your first 10 auction bids are free, then each bid is 25¢ from a prepaid marketplace balance; and to message a seller you haven’t bid with or made an offer to, verified accounts can unlock the chat for a one-time 25¢. When the seller fee turns on it will be a small percentage of completed sales by category (2–5%), paid by the seller. Getting an item delivered or installed goes through QuoteHive’s verified contractors, where the normal pay-per-bid credit rules apply to those contractors.

Trending ranks active listings by real engagement — a score built from page views, how many people are watching an item, and auction bids — with the freshest listings breaking ties. It’s a fast way to see what buyers across Canada are looking at right now. You can still filter Trending by mode (buy, auction, quote, wanted) and category.

On any category page, use the quick chips (mode, price, condition, province) to narrow results, or tap “All filters” to open the full filter panel — a side panel on desktop, a bottom sheet on mobile. Set your criteria and tap “View results”; “Clear filters” resets everything.

Every Marketplace listing has a unique Ad ID shown in the breadcrumb and under the title. It’s the quickest way to reference a specific listing — for example when contacting support or reporting a listing, quote the Ad ID and we can find it instantly.

Yes. In a Marketplace conversation, use the attach (paperclip) button to send a photo or file to the other party — the same as messaging on a QuoteHive job. Images preview inline; other files download securely and are only accessible to the two people in the conversation (and our support team).

Messaging is bidding-first: it’s free the moment you engage with a listing — once you place a bid or make an offer, you can message the seller at no charge. If you haven’t engaged but still want to reach the seller directly, verified accounts can open a chat for a small one-time fee (25¢), taken from your marketplace balance; an in-site confirmation shows the exact charge before it’s deducted. Once a thread is open, all further messages are free.

Yes — each category adds its own item-specific filters on top of the general ones. Vehicles & Trailers let you filter by Make, Year, Kilometres, Fuel and Colour; Tools by Brand and Power source; Building Materials by Material; and so on. You’ll find them in the “All filters” drawer on a category page, alongside the general Mode, Price, Condition and Province filters, and they update the result count live.

All three are linked in the site footer: the Terms of Use, the Privacy Policy (how we handle your information under Canada’s PIPEDA), and the Posting Policy, which sets out prohibited and regulated items you may not list. Please read the Posting Policy before posting a job or creating a marketplace listing — content that breaks the rules can be removed.

Yes. An organization owner can invite team members as seats and share a single pool of bidding credits: assign credits down to any member so they can bid, see each seat’s spend, and reclaim unused credits back to the pool at any time. Manage it all from your Organization page (Account → Organization). It’s built for crews and firms where several people bid under one account.

Yes — both buyers and sellers keep a card on file. Buyers need one to check out; sellers need one to list. Saving a card doesn’t charge it (it uses a Stripe SetupIntent to store the card for later). Your card is held securely by Stripe — QuoteHive only ever stores the card’s brand and last four digits, never the full number. Add or manage it under Account → Billing.

Your first 10 auction bids are free. After that, each bid is a flat 25¢ — no percentage and no per-listing fee — taken from a small prepaid marketplace balance you top up any time ($5, $10 or $20). Making an offer on a fixed-price or Wanted listing is always free; the wallet only applies to auction bids.

The seller pays a small sale fee only when an item actually sells — a flat percentage by category (a low 2–5%): Tools & Equipment 5%, Building Materials 4%, Vehicles & Trailers 2%, Home & Garden 5%, Surplus 3%, and Services no sale fee. It’s shown up front and taken from the seller’s proceeds, never added on top. Buyers never pay a sale fee. Selling is free during our launch beta (the fee is waived for now). Listing, browsing and offers are always free.

When a buy-now sale completes, your net proceeds (the sale price minus the sale fee) are credited to your seller balance as Pending right away. After a 24-hour hold — the standard window that covers returns and chargebacks — they clear to Available. You can watch both balances on your seller dashboard. The buyer’s provincial sales tax is collected at checkout and is never part of your proceeds.

Yes — once the item is yours. After you buy it, win the auction, or have your offer accepted, the listing shows “Request delivery or install”, and tapping it posts a real job to QuoteHive’s verified contractors, who bid on the work — right inside the page, no re-typing. (Before you own the item the button is shown but locked.) Bought a vanity? Get it installed. Bought pallets of tile? Get them hauled and laid. Those contractors pay through the normal pay-per-bid credits; there’s no extra platform fee to you as the buyer. Before you buy, every buy or auction listing also shows a non-binding delivery & install estimate — a typical price range within ~50 km — so you can size the cost up front; it’s only an estimate and spawns no job, and the firm quote comes after you own the item.

Yes — native Android apps for clients, for contractors and for the Marketplace, all signing in to the same account and the same data as the website. Post on your laptop and take the bid notification on your phone. The apps are in private beta and we distribute them ourselves rather than through an app store; iPhone versions are in development. Every app sign-in appears alongside your browser sessions under Account → Security, so you can revoke any device from the web. See the apps page.

Yes, for the actions that matter. Clients and contractors must have two-factor authentication or a passkey enabled before they can post a job, unlock a job’s documents or place a bid — browsing needs nothing. Set it up under Account → Security: scan the QR code with any free authenticator app and confirm the six-digit code. You are also given one-time backup codes — store them somewhere safe, as each works once if you lose your phone. Locked out of both your authenticator and your backup codes? Contact support for an identity-checked reset.

A passkey signs you in with your device’s own fingerprint, face or PIN instead of a password. There is nothing to type and nothing a fake login page can steal, because the credential is tied to QuoteHive’s address and simply will not work anywhere else — which makes it the strongest option we offer. Add one under Account → Security → Passkeys. A passkey satisfies the strong-authentication requirement for posting and bidding on its own, and it can sign you in without typing your email first. You can keep a passkey and an authenticator app at the same time, and having both is a good idea so you are never locked out if you lose a device.

Yes. In the apps, biometric sign-in seals your session behind the device’s own sensor — the Android keystore or the iOS keychain — so coming back is one touch instead of a password. It is a local convenience on that one device and does not replace two-factor authentication or a passkey. There is also an optional app-open lock that re-locks the app every time it returns to the foreground, and it always offers “Sign out instead” so a failing sensor can never trap you. Two safeguards are deliberate: re-enrolling a face or fingerprint on the device invalidates the saved sign-in, and signing out clears it — so a shared or stolen phone cannot be unlocked straight back into your account. See the Help Centre article.

From time to time we send a product announcement — a new feature, a policy change, or planned maintenance. It lands in your notification centre (the bell in the header) and, depending on what it is, may also arrive as an email and as a push notification on the apps. Anything important also appears as a banner across the top of the site until the announced window ends. Announcements are one-way from us: nobody can use them to contact you, and real conversations always live in their own threads under Messages.