The vocabulary, defined plainly

Most of the vocabulary in this trade is borrowed from payments, freelancing and economics, and most of it is used slightly wrong. The definitions below are the working ones - what the word means when an earner uses it, rather than what it means in a textbook.

Each entry points at the post that treats it properly, because a definition is not the same as knowing what to do about it.

Money words

Take-home. What reaches your bank account, after commission, processing, currency conversion and anything else in the chain. It is the only number worth comparing between platforms, and it can differ by several percent between two platforms advertising identical commissions - compare platforms on take-home, not commission.

Effective rate. Take-home divided by every hour the work consumed, including admin, enquiries that went nowhere and time spent being reachable. Always lower than the number people quote themselves, and it moves monthly without your price changing - why your effective hourly rate keeps changing.

Hold. The period between a buyer paying and the money becoming yours to withdraw. It is a risk-management device, not a punishment, and it is why a strong month can arrive as a thin one.

Float. Money that exists in your platform balance but cannot be spent, usually because it is below the withdrawal minimum. A high threshold holds a permanent slice of your earnings hostage rather than a temporary one - withdrawal thresholds and trapped float.

Chargeback. A buyer reversing a payment through their card issuer rather than through the platform. Slower than a refund and more expensive: Stripe's documentation of how disputes work says card networks typically allow disputes within 120 days of payment, and that outside Mexico the fee for receiving one is non-refundable even when you win.

Refund versus chargeback. A refund is something you grant; a chargeback is something done to you. One refunded fee costs less than a contested dispute, a bad review and the arguing - the full account of both is in getting paid: holds, chargebacks and walking away.

Deduction stack. The four things standing between the buyer's payment and your account: commission, processing, conversion and threshold. Only the first is normally advertised - how platform fees change your effective rate.

Pricing words

Rate card. Your published tiers and what each includes. Its function is not to display prices; it is to make every individual pricing conversation settled in advance.

Band. The visible spread of prices for comparable work in your category. Three profiles is not a band, and the three you looked at were the ones ranked highest.

Anchor. The top tier, whose job is to make the middle tier read as sensible. It earns its place on the card whether or not anybody ever buys it.

Floor. The lowest price at which a job is still worth taking after flat charges. Flat charges do not scale down, so the smallest item on a card is the one most likely to be underwater.

Rush fee. A premium for same-day or fixed-deadline turnaround. What it charges for is not speed but the loss of your ability to schedule your own day.

Grandfathering. Keeping existing buyers at their old price after a rise, deliberately and with a stated end date. The alternative is a repeat buyer discovering the rise from a listing, which is a worse conversation than one you opened.

Discount versus lower tier. Two different operations that look identical to the buyer. The same work at a lower price retires your card; a smaller job at a lower tier leaves it intact. The whole of pricing, in the order the decisions arrive, is in the pricing pillar.

Job words

Scope. What the job includes, stated before it starts. In a per-job trade it is a pricing instrument rather than paperwork, because every unagreed extra is a discount you did not decide to give.

Scope creep. The slow expansion of a job through small additional requests, each individually reasonable. It arrives as "while you are at it, could you also", and the correct answer is a price rather than a refusal - the scope sentence that prevents most disputes.

Thin brief. An enquiry too short to work from. Ask one clarifying question, not three, because an interrogation loses the booking and no question at all loses the review.

Turnaround. The stated time from acceptance to delivery. One of very few things a buyer can evaluate objectively, which is why it converts and why it appears in reviews.

Second pass. A follow-up on work already delivered. Looks small to the buyer, costs you the entire setup again.

Unbilled surround. Everything around the deliverable: reading, replying, confirming, admin. Roughly a third of a working session before anything is produced - the arithmetic of a part-time week.

Market words

Adverse selection. The tendency for the cheapest option to attract the buyers who cost the most to serve. Not bad luck and not a coincidence: a low price selects for people optimising on price, who are the same people most likely to ask for extras and dispute the result.

Cold start. The period before you have any evidence, when nothing you can say substitutes for a completed job. The hardest part of the trade, and structurally rather than qualitatively hard.

Crowding. More suppliers entering a category. It does not lower every price - it lowers the price of whatever is easiest to supply, which is why scarce formats hold value while common ones do not.

Ranking. Where a marketplace places you in its default sort. It rewards measurable behaviour - recent completions, response speed, delivery against stated turnaround - rather than anything you wrote.

Dormancy. A profile still live but inactive. Reviews survive it, ranking does not, and the recovery curve is steeper than the original climb - coming back after a long break.

Words that belong to other sites

Three clusters of vocabulary get used in briefs and are not defined here because they are not this site's subject.

Measurement terms - the conventions, units and tolerances a precise brief uses - are documented on the site that owns them. Scoring terms, including what a model's confidence figure does and does not mean, sit with the technical account of automated assessment. And the buyer-side vocabulary for commissioning - how a request is framed, what a client thinks they are asking for - reads very differently from this side, which is why the commissioning account is worth twenty minutes even though it is written for the other party.

Platform-specific terms are the fourth cluster, and they change whenever a product does: what a given marketplace calls its tiers, accounts and payout methods is its own to define, and Rate Cock's judges page is the current source for this one.