Independent work is real work.
The number of people earning income outside a traditional job keeps growing. Photographers booking weddings. Bartenders picking up event shifts. Tutors with a roster of families. Designers juggling five clients. Personal trainers running their own book of business.
All of them are running real businesses. But the tools haven't caught up.
Contracts live in Word docs that nobody updates. Payment happens on Venmo with no paper trail. Tax season is a panic. And there's no single place to send a potential client who asks, “how much do you charge?”
We built PayWelly because the people doing this work deserve the same infrastructure that bigger businesses take for granted — without the bigger business overhead.
Four principles.
Independent work is real work.
The people doing it are running real businesses, even if they don't call themselves that. Our job is to make that easier, not to redefine it.
The boring parts matter most.
Contracts, payments, and tax forms aren't glamorous, but they're the difference between a hobby and a livelihood. We focus on the boring parts so our users can focus on the work.
Control belongs to the user.
Contractors set their own rates, choose their services, and decide who they work with. Businesses choose who they engage and on what terms. PayWelly is the infrastructure underneath — not the boss, not the broker.
Trust comes from clarity.
Money in escrow, signed contracts, verified identities, automatic tax forms. No surprises, no chasing.
Contracts, payments, and taxes. One link to share.
A pro creates a profile and gets a public page they can share anywhere — Instagram, text, email, in person. Clients land on the page, send a contract, and fund the engagement through escrow. The work happens off-platform. When it's done, payment releases same-day, lands in the contractor's PayWelly wallet, and Form 1099-NEC is generated automatically at year-end.
Pricing is paid by the client, not the contractor. Bookings from a contractor's public page take a 15% commission. Marketplace and corporate hires take $19.99 + 15%. The contractor always receives 100% of engagement pay.
Per-engagement contracts
ESIGN-Act valid signatures with timestamps, IP, user-agent, and a SHA-256 PDF hash on every signed copy.
Stripe escrow
Funds are held in Stripe through the engagement and released the same day the business approves.
Automatic 1099-NEC
W-9 collected at onboarding, 1099-NEC filed at the federal $2,000 annual threshold. No tax-time scramble.
What we are not.
The lines we hold so PayWelly stays outside the labor-broker definition.
PayWelly is not an employer, staffing agency, merchant of record for the underlying work, or labor broker.
Every engagement is governed by a per-engagement Independent Contractor Agreement between the poster and the contractor. Both parties click-sign with timestamps, IP address, user-agent, and a SHA-256 hash of the exact PDF that was signed. That signature event is ESIGN-Act valid per 15 USC §7001.
We provide the contract, the escrow, the W-9 collection, and the 1099-NEC filing infrastructure. We do not provide the labor.
The company.
- Legal entity
- PayWelly LLC
- Registered address
- 8 The Green, Suite D
Dover, DE 19901
United States - Customer support
- team@paywelly.com
- General inquiries
- team@paywelly.com