How Collective Loft works.

Founding members arrive through a personal claim link sent by email. Click it, set a password, and you land straight in onboarding. Everyone else starts from the landing page.

1. Click Join Collective Loft on the landing page.
2. Enter your first name, last name, email, and a password of at least 8 characters.
3. You are signed in immediately and taken to membership.

Membership is $15 a month, with a 7-day free trial. Your card is not charged until the trial ends, and you can cancel anytime before then at no cost. Checkout runs through Paddle, our merchant of record, which also handles any sales tax or VAT for your country, so the price you see at checkout is the full price.

The membership is the filter. It keeps the people who exploit creatives out, so everyone inside has agreed to real terms and has skin in the game. It is what keeps this a protected place to work.

Manage or cancel your plan anytime from your profile. Cancelling stops the next renewal; you keep access through the end of the period you already paid for.

Want your money back? You have 14 days from any payment to request a full refund, for any reason. Refunds are issued by Paddle, our merchant of record. Ask them directly at paddle.net, or send us a note from the Help page and we will pass it on.

Cancelling your subscription and closing your account are two different things. Cancelling stops the billing and leaves everything else where it is. Closing removes you from the platform.

To close it, open the menu and choose Close your account at the bottom. You confirm your email and password, tell us why you are going, and it happens immediately. Your profile, photos, portfolio, and links are deleted, and any subscription is cancelled so you are not charged again. You get an email confirming it.

Your profile is how the right people find you. The fields that carry the most weight:

• Disciplines and skills. What you make, and specifically how. These drive discovery and matching.
• Headline and bio. A line and a paragraph in your own voice. This is what a stranger reads first.
• Right now. What you are actively working on, so people reach you about the right thing.
• What you are seeking. The disciplines and skills you want to collaborate with.

You can edit any of this at any time from your profile. A fuller profile gets better matches, so it is worth returning to as your work changes.

There are three ways to find a collaborator, and they work together.

Browse every creative on the platform. Filter by discipline, skill, and distance, and sort by who is recently active or has completed the most collaborations.

A ranked view of the people who best fit what you are making now, based on your disciplines, skills, and collaboration history. Matches improve as your profile fills out.

Post a brief that says what you are making and who you need. Other members apply, and you review them. Or apply to briefs others have posted. When someone applies to your brief, you get an email.

Before any work begins, both people agree on terms. This is what makes Collective Loft different from a handshake: the agreement is written down, and it protects both sides.

You choose one of three compensation types:

Terms move back and forth until you both accept. One person proposes, the other can accept, modify, or decline, and each hand-off sends the other person an email. Once both accept, the terms lock and a Loft Studio opens automatically.

The Studio is the shared room where the work happens. It opens the moment terms are accepted, and holds everything about the collaboration in one place:

• Overview and terms. The agreement you both accepted, locked.
• Milestones. Track the work from first draft to finished.
• Files. Share drafts and deliverables.
• Messages. A chat between the two of you, in the room with the work.

When the work is done, the collab owner confirms it complete. Both people are then invited by email to rate each other. Completing a collaboration is what builds your reputation on the platform, so it is worth doing properly.

On a paid collaboration, money moves through Collective Loft directly to the person who did the work. Payments run on Stripe, a payment provider built for exactly this. To receive money, you set up a payout account once. After that, you are paid straight into your bank.

1. Go to your own profile and click Connect payout account.
2. You are taken to Stripe to set up payouts. Stripe collects your bank details and the identity information it is legally required to verify. Collective Loft never sees your bank details.
3. When you finish, you return to your profile and a Payout ready badge appears. If you leave partway through, the button reads Finish payout setup so you can pick up where you left off.

Payment happens inside the Loft Studio, in the Payment section, and only the collab owner sees it. What you see depends on the payment schedule in your terms:

• On delivery or lump sum. One button pays the full agreed fee.
• Milestone-based. Each milestone shows its share of the fee, and you pay them one at a time as the work lands.

Paying takes you to Stripe’s secure checkout. When the payment clears, the Studio marks it paid and the money is on its way to your collaborator’s bank.

Collective Loft takes no fee on collaborations. The full agreed amount goes to the creative who did the work. On a $500 project, the creative receives $500. The platform is funded by membership, not by taking a cut of your work.

Your reputation on Collective Loft is built from finished work, not followers. After a collaboration completes, you and your collaborator rate each other and can leave a review. Those ratings appear on your profile under Community Voice.

Ratings only ever come from real, completed collaborations, so they mean something. It is a slower and truer signal than a follower count, and it is what the next person reads when they consider working with you.

Questions go through the Help page. There is a short FAQ, and a contact form that reaches a real person. We reply to the address you give us. A member of the team reads every message.