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, AND HOW YOU CAN CHECK IT
DriverRuns sets the price. There are two rate cards: one for what the customer is charged and one for what you are paid, and BOTH ARE PUBLISHED. Yours is on your rates page, in full — a base per run, a rate per loaded mile, a rate per item you find, extra stops, and heavy items. There is a minimum for any run you complete.
What DriverRuns keeps is the difference between the two cards, line by line. It is not a percentage of your work and it never comes out of your pay.
The exact figure for a run is shown to you BEFORE you accept it, and it does not change afterwards even if we change the rate card. Every run records which version of the card priced it.
Fuel and bad-weather surcharges reach you in full — 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. ACCEPTING
Typing your name below and submitting this form is your signature. We record the date, the exact words of this agreement as shown to you, and your name as typed.