Legal
Independent contractor agreement
INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR AGREEMENT — DRIVERRUNS
1. WHAT THIS IS
You are an independent business. DriverRuns is not your employer, and nothing here creates employment, a partnership, or a joint venture. You are not required to work any hours, accept any particular run, or work exclusively with us.
2. WHAT YOU ARE PAID
DriverRuns sets the price. There are two rate cards — one for what the customer is charged, one for what you are paid — and BOTH ARE PUBLISHED IN FULL. Yours is at /rates, which needs no account, so you can read it before you decide whether to apply.
Every run you complete pays you, at minimum, the published run minimum, whatever is in the basket. Above that floor a run is made of these lines, all of them on the card:
- a base for the run, which differs for a shop and for a collection
- a rate for every loaded mile you drive
- a rate for every item you find
- extra stops, and heavy items
- paid waiting time, by the minute, from when you arrive — on the runs where waiting is the job, such as hot food you have to stand and wait for
- any add-ons the customer bought, in full: if they paid for an insulated bag or a sealed hand-off, that money is yours, not ours
Fuel and bad-weather surcharges reach you IN FULL and we take nothing from either. The fuel figure is indexed to a published government price and the weather band comes from the National Weather Service, so both are numbers you can check against a source that is not us.
100% OF EVERY TIP IS YOURS. Our fee is worked out before a tip exists, so there is no arithmetic by which a tip can reduce what we take or increase it.
WE PAY THE CARD PROCESSING, NOT YOU. Because the charge runs on your own payment account, the processor's cut would normally come out of your balance — on the whole amount, including the groceries you fronted, which on a large basket is a large number. It does not. The customer covers it, and that is on the published card too.
WHAT DRIVERRUNS KEEPS is the difference between the two cards, line by line. It is not a percentage of your work, it never comes out of your pay, and it does not move when your basket does.
THE EXACT FIGURE FOR A RUN IS SHOWN TO YOU BEFORE YOU ACCEPT IT and does not change afterwards, even if we change the rate card the next day. Every run stores which version of the card priced it, so a past run can always be checked against the card that actually applied to it.
3. YOUR LEVEL, AND HOW IT MOVES
Your level multiplies the work part of your pay — the base, the driving and the item rate. It does not touch reimbursement, surcharges or tips, because raising a multiplier on money that is already yours or already somebody else's would be arithmetic dressed up as a raise.
There are four levels, and the only thing that moves you up them is the number of runs you have COMPLETED, for as long as you have been here:
Bronze from your first run the base rate Silver at 50 runs +8% on the work Gold at 200 runs +15% on the work Platinum at 500 runs +22% on the work
THE LADDER ONLY EVER GOES UP. There is no demotion, no decay, and no way to fall back down. Taking a month off, turning work down, or shopping less than you used to does not move you.
NOTHING ELSE FEEDS IT. Not a rating, not an acceptance rate, not speed, not how many runs you turn down, not whether a customer liked you. Those things are not inputs to this ladder because they are not inputs anywhere: there is no field in this software by which a star rating can reach what you are paid.
A separate figure — the most of your own money we will ask you to front on one run — also rises with completed runs and also never falls. It is described in §5. It is not a rating either.
4. TURNING WORK DOWN COSTS YOU NOTHING
There is no acceptance rate. There is no score that affects what you are offered. Declining a run, or being unavailable for any length of time, has no effect on your standing, your position in any list, or what you may charge.
5. HOW THE MONEY WORKS — INCLUDING THE PART WHERE YOU PAY FIRST
You are shopping as the customer's disclosed agent: you buy their shopping on their behalf, and the goods are theirs from the moment you pay for them.
Read this part carefully, because it is the one that costs you money before it pays you.
Before you shop, the customer's card is AUTHORIZED on your own payment account for a ceiling that covers the expected basket plus a buffer. An authorization is a hold. It is not money you can spend at the till.
YOU PAY THE SHOP'S REGISTER WITH YOUR OWN FUNDS. When you finish the run we capture what the receipt actually says, and that single capture reimburses what you spent, pays your fee, pays your mileage and passes on 100% of any tip. It lands in your own payment account and then follows your payout schedule, which means there is a gap between paying the shop and being paid back.
YOU CAN CUT THAT GAP TO MINUTES. From your payouts page you can send whatever is in your balance straight to a debit card instead of waiting for the normal schedule. Stripe charges a small fee to do that and DriverRuns takes none of it — the whole fee is the card network's, and the amount is shown before you confirm. Waiting costs nothing.
Because you front the basket, there is a limit on how much of your own money we will ask you to put up on any one run. It starts low and rises as you complete runs. It only ever goes up — declining work, being unavailable, or anything else about how you choose to work never lowers it, and it is not a rating.
What DriverRuns keeps is the spread between the two published rate cards, which is inside what the customer pays for delivery and never comes out of your pay or your tips.
If a basket comes to more than the authorized ceiling, STOP AND ASK IN THE APP. The ceiling cannot be raised after checkout, so anything you spend above it cannot be captured and cannot be paid back to you. Do not cover the difference yourself.
MONEY PAID TO YOU FOR A SHOP IS FOR THAT SHOP. If money reaches your account for a run and you do not buy the goods and deliver them, that money is not yours. It is the customer's, and keeping it is theft. We will ask you for it back, we will recover it from anything else owed to you, and we will report it to the police and give them the whole record of the run — the times, the messages, the photographs and the payment.
To be plain about what this is NOT: a run that goes wrong is not this. An item that is out of stock, a shop that is shut, an order you cannot collect, a customer who will not answer, a delivery you cannot complete — none of those are theft, and none of them cost you anything as long as you say so in the app and follow what it tells you. This clause is about taking the money and not doing the shop. If you are unsure, stop and message us; that is always the safe thing to do.
6. WHAT YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR
Your own vehicle, your own insurance, your own taxes, and your own expenses. You are responsible for following the law wherever you are shopping and delivering. You must not send anyone else to perform a run you accepted without telling us.
7. AGE AND RESTRICTED GOODS
You must be at least 18 to shop. Some runs are restricted: alcohol requires you to be at least 21 and to complete the recorded handoff steps in the app. We check your date of birth against that requirement and will not let you claim a restricted run when you do not meet it, and you must not accept one another way. Where a jurisdiction requires a certification we do not yet verify, holding it remains your responsibility.
8. SUBSTITUTIONS
If something is unavailable, you propose — you do not decide. Either the customer told you in advance what they would accept, or you ask them and wait. Nothing goes in the bag that the customer has not agreed to. An item you could not find costs the customer nothing.
9. IF A CUSTOMER DISPUTES A CHARGE
A customer can ask their bank to reverse a payment. When that happens the bank pulls the money back out of the payment account the charge was made on — which is yours, because you are the merchant on your own runs. That is the ordinary consequence of running your own business: the work was yours, the payment account is yours, and so is the outcome. DriverRuns does not cover it for you, and does not take it out of anything else you are owed.
A dispute is a claim, not a finding. It may be a genuine mistake, or a customer who received their shopping and disputed anyway. Because of how your payment account is set up, you cannot answer the bank directly — so tell us as soon as you hear, and we will submit what the app already recorded: the receipt photograph, the delivery photograph and its location, your messages with the customer, and the times of every step. We do not decide the outcome and neither does the customer; the bank does.
10. YOUR RECORD
We keep a record of runs you completed and whether orders arrived as agreed. It is not a performance management system: no rating, acceptance rate or speed measurement is used to withhold work, reduce what you may charge, or end this agreement automatically. A human reviews anything that looks wrong.
11. ENDING IT
Either of us may end this agreement at any time, for any reason, with notice. Ending it does not affect money already owed to you for work already done.
12. ACCEPTING
You accept this agreement by TYPING YOUR FULL LEGAL NAME in the signature box at the end of it. That typed name is your signature. You cannot sign up without it, and ticking a box on its own is not enough.
We record the date and time, the exact words of this agreement as they were shown to you, the version number above, and your name exactly as you typed it. If this agreement is ever changed, what you signed stays recoverable in the form you signed it — a later version does not replace it.