What DPOC actually pays, and how the fee works

DPOC prices the job before you ever see it. A homeowner answers questions about their property, the engine returns a price, the homeowner agrees to that price and books it. Then the job goes to a crew at a fixed payout. You are not bidding against three other trucks and you are not buying a phone number and hoping someone picks up — you accept work that is already sold, and DPOC keeps a percentage of the job. That percentage is the entire business model. There is nothing else.

The fee is a percentage, and it moves

Three things move it: your tier, the trade, and the size of the job. Bigger jobs carry a lower rate, because the work of finding a homeowner, pricing the job and standing behind the outcome does not scale with the size of the pour. Rather than describe the curve, here is a driveway-sized concrete job run through the same fee engine that pays a crew.

Read the columns left to right. Platform fee is DPOC's share of the homeowner price. What you are paid is what moves to your account. Net after costs is that payout minus materials and minus labour — and the labour figure there is your own crew's wages at the market rate for the trade, already paid out. The net column is what the business keeps on top of everyone's day rate, not instead of it.

Where the ladder stops being a ladder

The fee curve is not the only thing setting that rate. Every tier also carries a contractor margin DPOC guarantees, and the engine will cut its own fee to reach it. On a cost-heavy trade like concrete, where materials and wages eat most of the job, that guarantee is usually what sets the fee — the curve never gets a chance to bind.

That has a consequence worth knowing before you read a tier ladder anywhere else on this site. On a job too thin to carry anyone's margin, the engine wants to cut the fee below what DPOC will accept from any crew at any tier. A floor stops it there, and all four tiers land on the same rate. Promotion buys you nothing on that job, because the job itself is underpriced — which is exactly what the estimate will say about it.

So the honest description is a four-step ladder with a floor under it. Above the floor every step is real money, and the gap widens as jobs get bigger. Below it there is no ladder at all, for anyone.

Here is the same engine on a different trade, where the curve rather than the margin guarantee is doing the work:

Four rates, four payouts, four nets. Nothing changed except the trade's labour and materials profile, and that alone is enough to move where the guardrail bites. If you want to know what a tier is worth to you specifically, the number that matters is your trade at your typical job size — not the headline band.

What “net after costs” actually means

Labour is modelled, not measured. Each trade has a crew size, a market hourly rate and a production rate, and the engine derives person-hours from the quantity. That model is what the labour deduction uses.

Which means it is a forecast of your cost, not your timesheet. Beat the model and you keep the difference. Run slow and it comes out of the net column and nowhere else — the homeowner price does not move because you had a bad day. That cuts both ways and it is the single biggest lever you control on a DPOC job.

Materials and disposal are modelled as a share of your payout, set per trade. Both tables above also assume you hold your own active licence, so net there is before the licence-coverage premium if one applies to you.

Licence coverage

DPOC holds CSLB #999194. Every job runs under this licence — ours, not a subcontractor's. That is the reason a homeowner can buy a fixed price off a website at all: one licensed, insured, bonded company is standing behind the outcome, and the crew on site is working under that company's licence rather than presenting its own.

Crews without their own active licence work under DPOC's licence and carry a higher platform fee for that coverage, because DPOC's licence and bond are what carry the risk on the job. Crews with their own active licence pay less — add a verified, unexpired licence to your account and the premium comes off every job from that point on.

The full arithmetic on that, including what a year of work costs under each arrangement, is the sibling post: /blog/working-under-a-contractor-licence

When you actually get paid

DPOC is the merchant of record. The homeowner's card is charged by DPOC, not by you, and DPOC carries the processing cost and the chargeback risk. The release runs like this:

1. The homeowner pays DPOC for a milestone on the job.
2. That money is held pending the homeowner's approval of the milestone. It is not an escrow account and DPOC does not call it one.
3. The homeowner approves the milestone. That approval is the trigger.
4. DPOC transfers your share to your connected payout account. The amount is the one recorded on the job when the fee was set — not a figure someone types in at release time.
5. It settles to your bank on your payout account's normal schedule, or immediately if you take the optional instant payout, which carries a small extra charge.

Three things worth saying plainly about that. There is no day count anywhere in it — DPOC does not pay on net-thirty and does not pay on a weekly cycle, because the release is event-driven and the event is the homeowner approving the milestone. Your payout account has to be onboarded before anything can move; a finished job with no connected account is a transfer that cannot be made. And if a homeowner opens a dispute, the release freezes until it is resolved, and a refund reverses the transfer.

How you move up a tier

Four tiers. Starter is where every crew lands. Each step above it lowers the disclosed fee band, and — as the two tables show — lowers what you are actually charged wherever the curve is the binding constraint.

Every tier publishes its own qualification thresholds, and they are all things DPOC can read off your own job history rather than form an opinion about:

• Completed DPOC jobs. Not work you did elsewhere — work you did here.
• Your homeowner rating.
• Your callback rate: the share of jobs that came back.
• How fast you respond to a matched job.
• An active licence and insurance on file, from Verified upward.

The thresholds themselves are published per tier, and they get steeper each step — Elite is deliberately rare and most crews will not reach it. Rather than reprint them here where they could drift out of date, the sibling post walks the ladder with the current numbers: /blog/contractor-tier-progression

What you give up

The price is set by the engine, not by you. You cannot mark a job up because you looked at the property and think it is worth more. You cannot discount to win it either — you already have it. If a job is priced wrong for the work in front of you, the move is to decline it, and the engine's own guardrail will often refuse the job before you ever see it.

That is the actual trade, and it will not suit everyone. If your edge is estimating — if you win work by reading a job better than the next truck and pricing it sharper — that edge is worth nothing here. This is a worse deal for you than the phone book, and you should not apply. If your edge is doing the work well and doing it fast, and you are tired of paying for phone numbers that never pick up, the tables above are the whole pitch.

One more, said straight: a percentage of a job is a larger number than a lead fee on a job you would have won anyway. If you close nearly everything you quote and your lead cost is low, buying leads may genuinely beat this. That comparison is worked out with real arithmetic rather than assertion: /blog/no-lead-fees-the-math