Half the rules are about things you would never think to check

Read the platform's rules before you list, not after an enforcement action: five clauses account for nearly every suspension, and finding them takes about twenty minutes. Nobody reads consumer terms, but when the document governs your income, an enforcement action does not distinguish between a rule you broke and a rule you never saw.

You do not need to read all of it, only the five below.

The five that matter

Off-platform contact. Almost every marketplace forbids moving a buyer to direct contact, and most detect attempts automatically by scanning messages for contact details, including obfuscated ones. This is the most-triggered rule in the trade, and a large share of the triggers are accidental: an email address in a delivered file's footer, a social handle mentioned in passing, a signature block you forgot was there.

What matters practically is what counts as an attempt. Some platforms only act on completed transfers, some act on the mention. Find that sentence.

Payment routing. Related but separate: taking money outside the platform for work found on it. This is usually a permanent-ban clause rather than a warning clause, and it applies even when the buyer proposed it and even when the platform's fee felt unreasonable. The economics never justify it, because the account is worth more than the fee - why not to put everything on one platform is the correct hedge against a fee you dislike.

Content limits. What may be assessed, what may be depicted, what may be said. These vary far more between platforms than people assume, and the gap is where honest mistakes live: a format that is standard on one marketplace is a violation on another.

Read what is prohibited in delivered work, not just in listings.

Retention and reuse. Whether you may keep submitted material, for how long, and whether anything you produce may be republished as an example. This one is silently breached constantly, usually by earners building a portfolio, and it interacts with your own record-keeping obligations - how long to keep what is where those two pull against each other.

Verification and eligibility. Age and identity checks, jurisdictions the platform will not pay into, and what happens to an account when a document expires. An expired document is a common and entirely avoidable interruption to payouts.

The clauses that decide your money

Two more are worth reading not because they get you suspended but because they cost you.

Fee structure and the notice period for changing it. A commission that can change at short notice is a different business than one requiring thirty days, and the notice arrives as an email you will otherwise archive unread. In the EU the Platform-to-Business Regulation sets a floor: platforms must notify business users of changes at least 15 days in advance, on a durable medium such as email, as Ireland's Competition and Consumer Protection Commission summarises.

Payout terms: the hold period, the withdrawal threshold, and what happens to a balance on an account that closes. The last one is the clause almost nobody checks and the only one that can cost you money you have already earned.

Keep a dated copy

Terms change, and platforms rarely publish a diff. When you dispute an enforcement decision, or when you discover a fee rose, the version you agreed to is the fact in question and it is no longer on the site.

Save a copy the day you join. A PDF print, dated in the filename, in the same folder as your other business records. Do it again whenever a change notification arrives, so you hold a chain rather than two disconnected snapshots.

This costs a minute a year and is the difference between "the terms used to say" and being able to show what they said. It is the same discipline as reading the terms email rather than filing it, and the two are the same habit.

Reading them under pressure is too late

The pattern is always the same. Something happens, you go looking for the rule, and you discover both the rule and the fact that you breached it in the same minute. By then your options are an appeal rather than a decision.

The specific case worth rehearsing is the buyer who asks to continue elsewhere. It arrives politely, it usually comes with a reason that sounds like convenience rather than evasion, and the correct reply is one sentence declining and continuing the job as normal. The buyer who wants to go off-platform covers the phrasing. From the buyer's side this is not usually an attempt to get you banned; how commissioning conventions actually work suggests most of them simply have not thought about your account at all.

The other rehearsal worth doing is what you do in the first hour of a suspension, because the first hour is when evidence is still gatherable - what to do first is short and worth reading before you need it. Under the same EU regulation, a platform that restricts or suspends you must give a statement of reasons, and termination needs 30 days' notice, with some exceptions.

Two clauses people misread

Claims about what your assessment is. Rules commonly prohibit presenting a subjective assessment as a clinical or diagnostic measurement, and this catches earners who were trying to sound rigorous rather than trying to mislead. Being precise is fine; the line is presenting precision as medical authority, and the documented measurement conventions are what precision actually looks like when it is done properly.

What the platform may do with submitted material. The clause governing whether submissions feed automated systems, and on what basis, is a live question for your buyers and therefore occasionally for you when they ask. What happens to material inside an automated pipeline is the general account; the specific answer is in the terms of whichever platform you are on, and pointing a buyer at that clause is a better reply than reassurance.

Where to actually read them

The document you want is usually not the consumer terms. It is the supplier-side agreement, often on a separate page, and it is the one containing the fee schedule, the payout terms and the conduct rules.

Rate Cock's judges page is the entry point to that document there, and reading it end to end before listing is an hour that pays for itself the first time somebody asks you something the rules already answer. The habit to build is not reading one platform's rules once, but re-reading whichever platform you are joining every time you join one, because the assumption that they are broadly the same is exactly the assumption that produces an honest breach.