Since you already now this person for more than a year, why keep using Homejoy? You could make a deal with her that benefits both parties (she'd get 100% of the profits and you'd pay less since Homejoy is not in the middle) - just curious how Homejoy manage to keep clients coming back to them.

I would expect that, the same way staffing services do (staffing services also offer an out for this, with a fee to the employer in the contract), their agreement with both the customer and the contractor/employee prohibits either from contracting with the other outside of Homejoy once they've been matched through Homejoy.

Not sure how they enforce it, though.

homejoy handles all billing and scheduling. i'm satisfied with the price and benefits

If anything, your story backs up the OP's one - your experience depends entirely on the quality of your cleaner, which is something that Homejoy do not control.

Yes, I agree that Homejoy's scheduling and billing experience is very nice.

I've been using different cleaners every time because of my experiences. But maybe next time, I should try sticking with just one. That way, the cleaner and I can start to build a relationship and they can get to know our apartment better. Then, maybe we can have a better overall experience.

The billing makes sense but, can you provide any detail about why scheduling is important to you? Is this really an ad-hoc service for you?

In my experience with HomeJoy and Exec (now HandyBook), they understand the value of recurring revenue and are actively pushing for customers to have regular service. For this kind of service, I would think that would be very normal.

I do use recurring service with Homejoy, every two weeks.

Scheduling is basically on autopilot, unless there's the odd case of my cleaner cannot come (weather, sickness, other stuff), or my cleaning date falls on a holiday. Being able to have Homejoy handle all the details of adjusting appointments (since they know my desired cleaner's full availability) is nice.

That sounds like the way all traditionally "scheduled" services work. That's what makes me wonder about this model. A scheduled service is just not the same a ride.

The interesting thing is that Homejoy built that software, but instead of selling it to all of the local cleaning companies, they started a business to replace all of the local cleaning companies.

We'll see long term which of those two areas is more important (i.e. running a cleaning service, vs writing software for a cleaning service).