Contractor Terms

These Contractor Terms are an agreement between FILTERATY Ltd. ("Filteraty", "we", "us") and the business applying to be, or listed as, a contractor on the Filteraty service (the "Contractor", "you"). They apply in addition to the Terms of Use, the Privacy Policy, and the Reviews & Content Policy; where they conflict for contractor-specific matters, these Contractor Terms govern.

You accept these Terms by submitting a contractor application, and you re-confirm them when you activate your account. You must have authority to bind the business you register.

Filteraty introduces your business to homeowners who have described a matching project, publishes a verification record of what we checked about your credentials, and hosts messaging up to the introduction. That is the whole service:

• We are not a party to your contracts. You contract with and invoice the homeowner directly. We take no commission or percentage of your project price, we do not process or hold any part of it, and we are not involved in collecting it.
• We do not guarantee volume or outcomes. Matching depends on what homeowners post; we make no promise of leads, matches, responses, or hires.
• We are not your employer, agent, or partner. You are an independent business. You decide which projects to pursue, how to price them, how to schedule and perform the work, and with what tools and people. Nothing in these Terms creates an employment, agency, partnership, or joint-venture relationship, and you are responsible for your own taxes, employment obligations, and business operations.

Listing and matching are currently free for contractors. If we introduce fees (for example, a subscription):

• if a fee would apply to something you already use, you will get at least 30 days’ advance notice before it can affect you (a new, optional paid offering may launch without pre-announcement — it cannot touch you unless you opt in);
• you will never be charged without your express, affirmative opt-in to the specific paid offering — silence or continued use of a free listing will never become a charge;
• pricing, billing period, renewal, and cancellation terms will be stated before you agree, with a review-and-confirm step before any charge.

Everything in your application and profile must be true, complete, and kept current. Misrepresenting credentials is grounds for immediate removal.

Verification runs on the separate consents you give at application — each one its own checkbox, each recorded with its wording version and timestamp: (1) consent to verify your identity; (2) consent to a criminal record check (this check runs only if and when the feature is active, and only ever on this consent); (3) consent to confirm your registration, licences, and insurance with issuing bodies and public registries; (4) consent to publish the verification record on your public profile.

You may withdraw any of these at any time by contacting us. Because a listing is a published verification record, withdrawing a consent the listing depends on means the listing is removed. Your public profile is indexed by search engines; we remove delisted pages at the source, but cannot guarantee third-party caches.

What we publish and what we never publish is defined in the Privacy Policy. We never publish criminal-record contents, identity documents, insurance policy numbers, or dates of birth.

You warrant, on application and continuously while listed, that:

• Licensing — you hold every licence, certification, and registration the law requires for each trade you list and each municipality you work in, including, as applicable: an ECRA/ESA electrical contractor licence for electrical work; TSSA contractor registration and certified technicians for fuels/HVAC work; a Certificate of Qualification for compulsory trades such as plumbing; and municipal trade licences where the municipality requires them (for example Toronto’s building renovator and trade licences under Municipal Code Chapter 545, Mississauga’s and Vaughan’s trade-licensing by-laws, and equivalent by-laws in other GTA municipalities where they exist).
• Insurance — you carry commercial general liability insurance of at least $2,000,000 (Filteraty’s marketplace minimum for listing) and any higher or additional coverage your licences or contracts require. For some licences, such as ECRA/ESA, $2,000,000 insurance is itself a legal licensing condition.
• WSIB — you maintain WSIB coverage where the law requires it, or you genuinely qualify for the home-renovation (direct-to-occupant, no employees) exemption you declared. You understand the exemption is narrow and conditional, and that taking non-exempt work removes it.
• Currency and notice — you will tell us promptly if any licence, insurance policy, WSIB coverage, or other credential we verified lapses, is suspended, is revoked, or materially changes. The verification record we publish states what we checked and when; keeping the underlying credentials current is your obligation, and our record being stale because you did not tell us is a breach of these Terms.

We verify credentials at a point in time and may re-verify at any time, including against public registries and (for WSIB) the public clearance service. You will cooperate with reasonable re-verification requests.

In your dealings with homeowners found through Filteraty, you will comply with all applicable law, and in particular you warrant that you will:

• comply with Ontario consumer-protection law in your consumer contracts — including the written-agreement requirements, the cooling-off rights that apply to agreements negotiated at the consumer’s home, and the rules limiting how far a final price may exceed your estimate;
• put your agreements with homeowners in writing before work starts;
• advise the homeowner in writing when the scope of work legally requires a building permit, never tell a homeowner no permit is needed unless that is true, and apply for permits only where properly authorized;
• comply with the Ontario Building Code, occupational health and safety law, and municipal requirements applicable to the work;
• perform only work your licences allow, and subcontract regulated work only to appropriately licensed persons — noting that a WSIB home-renovator exemption never extends to your subcontractors or employees;
• not misrepresent your identity, credentials, pricing, or the benefits of hiring you, on or off the platform.

The work itself — its quality, safety, timeliness, price, warranty, and completion — is entirely your responsibility, owed to the homeowner under your contract with them.

Homeowners who report hiring you may review you, under the Reviews & Content Policy. You agree that:

• you will not write, commission, or incentivize reviews of your own business or a competitor’s, and anyone with a material connection to your business who posts about it must disclose that connection (this is federal deceptive-marketing law, not just our policy);
• you will not offer a homeowner anything in exchange for a review, for a positive review, or for removing or changing a review;
• where the platform offers a review-response feature, you may respond to reviews professionally through your account, and your responses are subject to the Reviews & Content Policy;
• we display genuine reviews — positive and negative — per the Reviews & Content Policy, and delisting does not remove reviews of work already done.

You keep ownership of what you upload (portfolio photos, business descriptions, responses). You grant Filteraty a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, reproduce, and display it to operate, provide, and promote the Service, including showing your profile in match results. Evidence documents you upload for verification are used for verification and audit only, are never published, and are handled per the Privacy Policy.

You may end your listing at any time by closing your account; consents and obligations tied to already-published records survive as described in the Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or remove your listing, or terminate this agreement, where:

• a required credential has lapsed, been suspended, or been revoked, or you failed to notify us of a material change (Section 5);
• your application or profile contained a misrepresentation;
• you breach these Terms, the Terms of Use, or the Reviews & Content Policy, including review manipulation;
• your conduct presents a genuine safety, fraud, or legal risk to homeowners or to Filteraty.

Except where the risk is immediate or the breach is fraud, we will tell you the reason and give you a reasonable opportunity to respond or cure (for example, reinstating a lapsed credential) before final removal. An expired credential is first disclosed on your profile as expired, not silently delisted, consistent with how the verification record works.

Termination does not affect contracts you already have with homeowners. Sections 5–7 and 10–13 survive termination.

You will indemnify and hold harmless FILTERATY Ltd. from third-party claims, losses, damages, and reasonable legal costs arising from: the work you perform or fail to perform for any homeowner; your breach of these Terms, including the credential warranties in Section 5; your violation of law; or content you provide. This indemnity does not apply to the extent a claim results from Filteraty’s own negligence or misrepresentation.

The Service is provided "as is". We do not warrant that listing will produce leads, matches, or hires, that homeowner project descriptions are accurate, or that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free. Homeowners are independent parties; we are not responsible for their acts, omissions, or payment behaviour.

To the extent permitted by law, Filteraty is not liable to you for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, or for loss of profit, revenue, data, or goodwill. Our total aggregate liability to you for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of (a) the fees you paid Filteraty in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, and (b) CAD $500. These limitations do not apply to liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or to any liability that cannot be excluded by law.

These Terms are governed by the laws of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable in Ontario. Disputes are subject to the jurisdiction of the courts of Ontario, including Small Claims Court where the claim qualifies. There is no mandatory arbitration. Talk to us first if something is wrong: info@filteraty.com — an invitation, not a precondition.

We may update these Terms; material changes are notified at least 30 days before effect, and continuing to keep your listing after that date means you accept them. A change introducing a fee always requires your express opt-in (Section 3). Version history is available on request.

If a provision is unenforceable, the rest remain in effect. You may not assign this agreement; we may assign it as part of a reorganization or sale, on notice, with these Terms continuing to apply. These Terms plus the documents they incorporate are the entire agreement about your listing.

FILTERATY Ltd., Toronto, Ontario, Canada — info@filteraty.com