Payment terms & service agreement

1. What OnceSwap is

OnceSwap is a marketplace platform for digital freelance work. When a creator and a client agree on a project, the client pays the full project amount up front through Stripe, our regulated payment processor. Payments are collected by Stripe and settle into OnceSwap's Stripe account, where they remain until the work is delivered and the review period described below has run its course. OnceSwap then instructs Stripe to pay the creator, or to refund the client, according to the rules on this page.

Project funds are not held in OnceSwap's own bank accounts. They are held by Stripe, the regulated institution, and they are allocated to the project they belong to rather than pooled into OnceSwap's general balance. That allocation is structural rather than a matter of policy: allocated funds cannot be consumed by anything other than the project they belong to. A refund on a different project, a chargeback, an automatic payout to OnceSwap's own bank, and Stripe's own processing fees all draw on OnceSwap's balance and leave allocated project funds untouched.

What allocation does not do is make the funds immovable. As the account holder, OnceSwap remains able to instruct Stripe to move an allocated balance deliberately. It undertakes not to: project funds are never drawn on as working capital and are applied to nothing other than paying the creator or refunding the client on that project. That undertaking is a commitment OnceSwap can be held to, not a technical impossibility, and it is stated as one here rather than dressed up as a guarantee it is not.

Stripe, not OnceSwap, is the licensed payment institution that provides the payment service. Stripe collects the client's payment, holds the project funds, and carries out every transfer to the creator and every refund to the client. OnceSwap holds no payment licence and does not provide payment services itself: it operates the platform and gives Stripe the instructions set out on this page. Project funds are never paid into, or held in, any bank account of OnceSwap's.

OnceSwap is not a party to the underlying service agreement between creator and client, and is not an escrow agent, a bank, or a money transmitter. OnceSwap does not accept deposits, does not pay interest, does not lend against project funds, and does not offer money transmission as a service. Its role is limited to operating the platform that records the project, coordinates delivery and review, and instructs Stripe to release or refund project funds according to fixed, published rules.

Payment outcomes follow those rules rather than OnceSwap's discretion. Approval, the expiry of the review period, and the revision and dispute processes described below determine whether funds are released or refunded. OnceSwap does not arbitrate the quality of the work, and does not decide payment outcomes case by case outside the processes set out on this page.

2. Funding

A project becomes active only once the client has paid the full agreed amount. The creator is notified when funding is complete and should not begin work before that point.

Before paying, the client is asked to confirm that they want the work to start as soon as the project is funded. A client buying as a consumer has a 14-day right of withdrawal from the creator's service; by confirming, they accept that this right is lost once the work has been fully delivered, and that withdrawing after work has started may mean paying for the part already done. The confirmation, and the exact wording shown, are written into the project record before any payment is taken.

If the client does not fund the project within the funding window stated on the payment page, the funding link expires and the project is closed without obligation on either side.

3. Delivery and review

When the creator delivers the work, a review window opens for the client — 72 hours by default, unless a different window is stated on the project. During this window the client may approve the work, request a revision (within the number of revision rounds included in the project), or flag a problem.

If the review window closes without any action from the client, the work is treated as approved and payment is released to the creator. Silence is approval — but only once OnceSwap has confirmed that the client was told the work was ready for review. The review clock runs from that confirmed notice, not from the moment of delivery. If the notice could not be confirmed as delivered, no automatic release takes place. The funds stay held, OnceSwap re-sends the notice, and a fresh review window starts from that point; it can only end in approval once a notice has been confirmed delivered. Re-sending is the only step OnceSwap takes here. It is a check on whether the client was told, not a decision about the outcome: OnceSwap does not choose at this point between releasing and refunding, and the outcome still follows the rules on this page. Silence in an inbox that never received anything is not approval.

4. Revisions

Each project includes a fixed number of revision rounds, stated at project creation (two by default). A revision request restarts the delivery process: the creator resubmits, and a fresh review window opens.

Once the included revision rounds are used, the client's remaining options are to approve the work or open a dispute. Additional revisions beyond the included rounds must be agreed and funded as a separate project.

5. Release of funds

Payment is released to the creator when the client approves the work, or when the review window expires without client action. OnceSwap has no discretion in this. It does not decide whether to honour an approval, and the outcome does not depend on anyone at OnceSwap agreeing with it. Release is carried out at once in the normal case, and in any event within one business day of the approval or of the review window closing. Upon release, any withheld final assets (such as full-resolution masters or external file links) are made available to the client.

Payouts to the creator's bank account are processed via Stripe to the creator's verified payout account.

6. Refunds

The client is refunded in full if the creator misses the delivery deadline without delivering, or if a redelivery deadline expires after a revision request.

Refunds are returned to the original payment method via Stripe.

7. Disputes

Only the client may open a dispute, and doing so requires a refundable deposit of 10% of the project amount, between 100.00 SEK and 850.00 SEK. The deposit is charged separately from the project payment and is never taken from the creator.

A dispute is opened from the project's review page, where the client states the problem and pays the deposit. It cannot be opened by emailing OnceSwap, and nothing said in an email to OnceSwap starts a dispute or stops a review clock. This is not administrative preference: a dispute opened on the review page is written into the project record at the moment it is raised, visible to both parties, with its clocks running from that entry. A grievance sent privately to OnceSwap would leave the creator unaware, the record incomplete, and the outcome resting on correspondence only one side can see.

What a dispute decides, and what it does not. Creator and client have their own agreement with each other about the work: what was ordered, what it was worth, and what either owes the other. OnceSwap is not a party to that agreement and does not determine it. A dispute here decides one thing only — where the funds OnceSwap is holding for this project are sent — and it decides it by applying the published rules on this page to the project's event record. It is not a ruling on the underlying agreement, it does not settle who was in the right, and it does not extinguish any claim either party has against the other. Both remain free to pursue that agreement between themselves or through the courts, before or after a dispute here, and OnceSwap will provide the project record to either party for that purpose.

OnceSwap makes this determination because it is holding the money, not because it is in a position to judge the work. Someone has to decide where held funds go, and leaving them held indefinitely would be the one outcome that serves neither party.

When a dispute opens, the client's statement of the problem is written into the project record, and the creator is asked to respond. The creator has 48 hours to do so, counted from the moment OnceSwap confirms that the request reached their inbox — a deadline running against a message nobody received is not a deadline. If the creator does not respond within that window, the project amount is refunded to the client, the deposit is returned to them, and the dispute is closed as unanswered. That closure is not a finding of fraud or bad faith and does not, on its own, affect the creator's account. A repeated pattern of unanswered disputes is flagged for human review.

If the creator responds, an operator examines the project's full event record and answers one narrow question: was the delivered work what the project described? Nothing else is judged. Both parties can see the project's timeline; the operator additionally sees payment details and internal notes, which are never shown to either party.

If the operator finds the work was not what was described, the project amount is refunded to the client and the deposit is returned to them in full. If the operator further concludes that the mismatch was deliberate, the creator's account is suspended; that decision is made only by a human, never automatically, and can be reversed by OnceSwap on review. If the operator finds the work matched the description, the project amount is released to the creator and the deposit is transferred to the creator as compensation for the delay.

Where the creator says the wrong files were delivered by mistake, the operator may allow one resubmission of the correct files. No further deposit is charged. If the corrected work is ultimately released, a resubmission cost equal to the dispute deposit is deducted from the creator's payout and refunded to the client, as compensation for the review cycle the error cost them. The client has 72 hours from confirmed notice to approve the corrected files or object; if they do neither, the payment releases with that deduction. An objection goes straight to an operator's ruling, with no further resubmission.

OnceSwap retains no part of the deposit under either outcome, and charges no fee for operating a dispute. This is deliberate: OnceSwap decides the outcome, and a structure that paid the platform more for one ruling than the other would not be defensible.

Every action taken on a project is recorded in an append-only event ledger. OnceSwap's systems have no path that edits or deletes a ledger entry; corrections are made by appending a new entry, never by revising an old one. Each entry also stores a cryptographic hash of the entry before it, so if any historical entry were altered by any means, every entry after it would stop matching and the alteration would be detectable rather than silent. This record is the authoritative account of what happened.

Either party may download that record from their project page at any time, including during a dispute. The file contains every entry, its hash, and the instructions to verify the chain independently — it is built to be checked without OnceSwap's cooperation, because a record only the party being judged can verify is not evidence. A small number of entries carry operator-only content and are supplied with the content withheld but its hash included, so the record still verifies end to end and the withheld content stays fixed and checkable if it is later disclosed.

8. Fees

OnceSwap charges the creator a platform fee of 10% of the project amount, capped at 3300.00 SEK per project, stated in full before the project is created. The smallest project OnceSwap accepts is 550.00 SEK. The client always pays exactly the quoted project amount, with no markup. There are no subscription fees, no percentage-of-invoice factoring, and no charges on refunded projects. The only other charge on the platform is the refundable dispute deposit described in section 7, which is paid by the client, never by the creator, and from which OnceSwap retains nothing.

9. Payment processing

All payments, fund holding, payouts, and refunds are processed by Stripe. OnceSwap never stores card numbers or bank credentials — these are collected by Stripe on its own pages and are never transmitted to OnceSwap. Creators complete identity and payout verification directly with Stripe before they can receive funds.

Release moves funds to the creator's connected Stripe account. Stripe then pays out from that account to the creator's bank on Stripe's own payout schedule, which typically takes several business days and is usually longer for a creator's first payout.

10. Payment records

When a project is funded, OnceSwap records details of that payment alongside the transaction: the amount, currency and payment method, the billing country, the cardholder name and email address where the card issuer supplies them, and the card's brand, funding type and last four digits. It also records the result of the 3-D Secure check and a card fingerprint — an identifier Stripe derives from the card, which stays the same for that card across payments and from which the card number cannot be recovered.

These records exist to confirm who paid, to detect fraud and duplicate accounts, and to keep an accurate history of every transaction. They are visible only to OnceSwap. They are never shown to the creator, to any other client, or to any third party, and they are kept for as long as accounting and fraud-prevention obligations require. The full card number and security code are never transmitted to OnceSwap and are never stored by it at any point.

OnceSwap also keeps a record of how each party has acted on the platform: projects funded, how quickly funding arrived, deliveries made, approvals given, and disputes raised together with how they were decided. This history belongs to the transaction record and may be used to inform future features, such as reduced fees or a lower dispute bond for parties with a record of completed projects.

11. What is delivered, and what OnceSwap can attest to

When a creator uploads a file through OnceSwap, its contents are fingerprinted at the moment of delivery and that fingerprint is written into the transaction record, which cannot afterwards be changed. If a question later arises about whether a file is the one that was delivered, either party can establish it against that fingerprint. Neither party can substitute a different file and present it as the delivered one.

When a creator delivers by external link instead, OnceSwap never holds the file and records no fingerprint. In that case OnceSwap can confirm that a delivery was made and when, but cannot attest to what was in it or whether it later changed. Creators who want the stronger record should upload the file rather than link to it.

A fingerprint establishes that a file is unaltered. It says nothing about whether the work was good. That question is decided by approval, by the review clock, and by the process in section 7.

12. A dispute decision is final

Once a dispute decision has been carried out and the funds have moved, that decision is final. OnceSwap does not reverse it, and there is no appeal to OnceSwap against it. This is stated here, before anyone pays anything, because it is a condition of using the service rather than a position taken after the fact. An account suspension is different: it moves no money, and OnceSwap may reverse it on review, with the reversal appended to the same record as the suspension.

The reason is practical and worth being plain about. Once funds have been released to a creator's payout account they leave OnceSwap's reach entirely; reversing a decision at that point would mean paying one party out of OnceSwap's own funds. A remedy that cannot be delivered is not worth publishing, so none is offered.

What replaces it is that the decision is made before the money moves, not after. Funds are held throughout the dispute, both parties put their case, and the decision is taken against the rules published on this page. That is the point at which the outcome can still be affected, and it is the point at which it is examined.

Either party may request the project's complete record at any time, including after a decision. It contains every event, its cryptographic hash, and the instructions to verify independently that nothing has been altered. Section 7 sets out what a decision does and does not determine: it decides where the held funds are sent, and it does not settle the agreement between creator and client or extinguish any claim either has against the other. Both remain free to pursue that between themselves or through the courts.

13. Governing law and jurisdiction

These terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by Swedish law. OnceSwap is operated as a sole trader established in Varberg, Sweden, and the courts of Sweden have jurisdiction, with Varbergs tingsrätt as the court of first instance.

This does not remove protections that a party cannot be deprived of by agreement. Where a client uses OnceSwap as a consumer rather than in the course of a business, the mandatory consumer law of their country of residence continues to apply and they retain the right to bring proceedings in their own local courts. Nothing on this page limits that.

Where the parties to a project are in different countries, these terms govern the relationship between each party and OnceSwap. They do not govern the underlying service agreement between creator and client, which is that agreement's own concern.