Everything from creating your account to getting paid for finished work. Collective Loft is a professional network for creatives who are serious about collaboration. Not a feed to perform for. Not a gig marketplace. A room with a lock on the door, where you find your people, agree on real terms, and do the work.
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.
A welcome email lands in your inbox the moment you join. It comes from noreply@collectiveloft.com, so replies are not monitored. Questions always go through the Help page.
Joining is free, and a free member is a real member. You have a profile, you appear in Discover and Matching, people can reach you, and when they do you can agree terms, work in the Loft Studio, get paid, and build a rating from finished work. That never expires and never needs a card.
Membership is $10 a month, and what it buys is the right to start things: posting a Collab Brief, and reaching out to someone first. There is a 7-day free trial, your card is not charged until it 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.
That split is deliberate. The person starting a project has a budget. The person answering is looking for work, and charging them to be found is the thing this platform was built to argue against. It also puts the filter where it belongs: people who exploit creatives do it by contacting a great many at once, and that is exactly the side that costs money here.
If you joined through a founding claim link, your first 90 days carry full membership, including posting briefs and reaching out. No card is needed. When the 90 days end you become a free member, keeping your profile, your rating and your badge, and you add a card whenever you want to start something of your own again.
Manage or cancel your plan anytime from your profile. Cancelling stops the next renewal, you keep everything through the end of the period you already paid for, and then you are a free member again. Nothing is closed or emptied. Any collaboration already running carries on to the end with full access for both of you, and any brief you already posted stays live.
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.
If you are enrolled, membership costs nothing. Sign up with your school email address, we send a six-digit code to that address, you enter it, and you have a free year with full access and no card. Re-verify the same way each year for as long as you are a student.
This works in countries where school email domains are reserved for accredited institutions, which covers the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, India, South Africa and around thirty others. Some countries put universities on ordinary domains with nothing to tell them apart, so the check cannot recognise them yet. If that is you, send us a note from the Help page.
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.
Collaborations you finished stay on record, credited to a former member instead of to you. The terms you agreed, the ratings you gave and received, and the files inside a shared Loft Studio are part of your collaborator’s history too. Deleting them would rewrite someone else’s reputation to settle your exit, so we do not. Your name and everything personal comes off. The work stands.
Your profile is how the right people find you. The fields that carry the most weight:
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:
| Type | What it means |
|---|---|
| Creative exchange | Skills traded between the two of you. No money changes hands. |
| Paid | One person pays the other. A fee, payment schedule, and rights are agreed upfront. |
| Revenue share | No upfront fee. The two of you split revenue the work generates. |
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:
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.
The person who owns the collaboration is the payer. The person they are working with is the recipient. Only paid collaborations move money. Creative exchange and revenue share do not run through this flow.
A collaborator cannot be paid until their payout account is ready. Until then, the payer sees a note that payment is paused. If you are expecting to be paid, connect your payout account early so nothing holds up the work.
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:
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.