01
Do a job you're good at
Sarah needs her CV rewritten. You write for a living. You take the job, she confirms it's done, and the credits land in your wallet.
+3 credits earnedHome / How it works
The whole system in one page.
No jargon, no token economics, no crypto. A credit is a promise your town keeps: you did work for one neighbour, so another neighbour will do work for you.
02
Bank the credits
Credits sit in your wallet until you need them. They are earned by doing, never bought, so every credit in the town represents real work done for a real neighbour.
Wallet: 11 credits03
Spend them with someone else
Your bike needs a service. Dev three streets over fixes bikes. You spend your credits with him, he spends his with the dog walker. Nobody invoices anybody.
-4 credits spentPricing a job
Guide prices, agreed up front.
Credits are not pegged to pounds. A straightforward hour of most skills sits around 2 to 3 credits, and every category shows a suggested range based on what the town has actually agreed before. You and the other member settle the price before the job starts, and it cannot change afterwards.
Uneven jobs are fine. A big garden tidy might be 8 credits against a 2 credit CV polish; the wallet absorbs the difference so nobody has to find a perfectly equal swap.
When something goes wrong
Credits held, humans decide.
Credits only move when the person who requested the job confirms it is done. If there is a disagreement, the credits freeze and a real person reviews the messages, the listing and the work. Outcomes are simple: released, returned, or split.
Members who repeatedly land in disputes lose listing rights long before they lose a dispute. Patterns matter more than verdicts.
The rules that keep it honest
Three deliberate limitations.
Credits cannot be bought
Every credit in circulation was earned by completed work. The moment money buys credits, the platform becomes a payments product with regulatory weight the pilot does not need, and wealthy members could consume the town's labour without contributing any. Earned only, full stop.
Your wallet, your town
Credits are earned and spent within your town. That is what keeps a plumber in Amersham from owing favours to a designer in Aberdeen, and what makes every credit locally trustworthy: the person honouring it lives here too.
No expiry during the pilot
We want to learn how people actually save and spend before writing rules about it. If expiry is ever introduced to keep credits circulating, existing balances keep the terms they were earned under.