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Terms of Service

Effective date: October 3, 2026

1. What TerminalHire is

TerminalHire is a place to post fixed-price paid tasks on your code and to take them on. A poster describes the work and sets the price. A developer claims the task, does the work in their own terminal with whatever tools they use, and sends it back. The poster reviews it and decides whether to accept it.

TerminalHire is run by Staqs, Inc. (“we”, “us”).

You sign in with your GitHub account. By using TerminalHire you agree to these terms and to our privacy policy.

You must be at least 16 to use TerminalHire.

2. Posting a task

Before a paid task can be published you need three things: the TerminalHire Poster GitHub App installed on the repository, a saved card, and a confirmed email address.

A developer who claims your task gets read access to the repository: every file at the commit you posted, the history behind it, and every branch, including branches you push later. Each access credential lasts one hour. You are shown this notice before you publish. Nobody at TerminalHire scans the repository for secrets, so removing anything a stranger should not see is up to you.

The developer’s work comes back as a patch, which we apply on a branch in your repository on your behalf, with the developer as the commit author. Developers do not push to your repository.

You can let an AI tool draft and publish postings for you by creating a connector in your dashboard. A posting it publishes is published under your account. You can revoke a connector at any time.

3. Claiming a task

During the beta, paid tasks are open to developers we have approved. Approval is an invite list. It is not a score or a check of anyone’s history, and we do not vouch for any developer. To claim a paid task you also need a payout account with Stripe.

On an approval-only posting, nothing is delivered and no patch is accepted until the poster approves you.

4. Payment

Saving a card charges nothing, and neither does publishing a posting. Your card is charged the posted amount when you accept finished work, by clicking accept — payin the browser. If a paid task has automatic acceptance on and you don’t decide by its deadline, the work is accepted and your card is charged 24 hours later. We record the acceptance only after Stripe confirms the charge. If the card is declined, nothing is accepted and nothing is paid out.

Nothing is ever purchased inside an AI tool. Accepting work, and paying for it, happen only on terminalhire.com.

The developer receives 90% of the posted amount. TerminalHire keeps 10% and pays Stripe’s processing fee out of it. Prices and payouts are in US dollars. Developers are paid through Stripe, in the countries listed under postings and claims.

5. Refunds

Before you accept work there is nothing to refund, because nothing has been charged. Some older postings were paid for up front, before charging at acceptance replaced that. You can ask for a refund on one from the dashboard. If nobody has claimed it, taking it down refunds it. If someone has, a person on our team reviews the request.

Once you accept work and the charge goes through, the payment is final. We refund an accepted charge only for fraud, for a charge you did not authorize, or when Stripe reverses it. Send any refund request to support@terminalhire.com.

6. Acceptable use

You may not use TerminalHire to:

  • submit or post malware, or anything built to steal credentials or data;
  • do anything illegal;
  • get around the checks we run on a patch;
  • post a repository you do not have the right to share.

Some of this is enforced in the product. A patch is refused, or held for the poster to decide, when it changes CI configuration, install scripts or dependencies, adds network calls, or is obfuscated.

7. Ownership of submitted work

A patch belongs to the developer until the poster accepts it and the payment goes through. From then on it belongs to the poster. Before that, the patch may already sit on a branch in the poster’s repository so the poster can review it. The commit names the developer as its author, and an accepted task becomes part of the developer’s public record on TerminalHire.

8. Liability

TerminalHire is provided as is, without warranties of any kind. We do not vet developers. Any test results we show you help you decide; they are not a promise that the work is correct. Whether to accept a piece of work is the poster’s decision alone.

To the extent the law allows, our total liability for any claim is limited to the fees TerminalHire received for the transaction the claim concerns.

9. Code audits

Code audits are sold and carried out by Staqs, Inc. ("we").

What you get. A developer working for Staqs reviews your repository at the commit you chose when you ordered. They work with the help of AI tools and write a report. The report contains:

  • an answer to the question you gave us;
  • our findings, each with the evidence behind it;
  • what we found fine, and what can wait;
  • draft fix tasks with recommended prices.

The audit changes nothing in your repository, and it does not cover changes made after that commit.

What it is not. An audit is not a guarantee that your code is free of defects or vulnerabilities. We do not certify or approve your software. You decide what to fix and who fixes it.

How we handle your code.

  • A developer working for Staqs reads your code. Every developer who does has a confidentiality agreement with Staqs.
  • We use your code only to do your audit and any fix tasks you post. We do not publish it, share it or sell it.
  • Our developers use AI tools to help them. They may only use tools under settings that do not allow your code to be used to train AI models.
  • Our access to your repository ends when we deliver the report. You can also remove it at any time from your GitHub settings.
  • We delete our copies of your code within 7 days of delivering the report. We keep the report.
  • If someone working for Staqs breaks these commitments, Staqs is responsible to you.

Payment and refunds.

  • You pay when you accept a price.
  • If we can't deliver the report, we refund you in full.
  • Refunds after delivery are at our discretion.

Credit. Half the amount you paid, after any discount code, comes off fix tasks you post on TerminalHire within 30 days of delivery, up to that amount. We may offer more credit in writing; the offer says what it covers and when it ends. Unused credit expires. It is not cash and cannot be transferred.

If we missed something.Suppose we missed a problem that falls inside the audit and was plainly visible in the commit we reviewed. If you tell us within 30 days of delivery, we will re-review that area at no charge. If we can't, we refund the audit fee.

Limit of liability. Our total liability for an audit is the fee you paid for it. Neither of us is liable for indirect or consequential losses, such as lost profits or lost data.

10. Ending your use

You can stop at any time. Uninstall the GitHub App from GitHub’s settings, revoke your connectors in the dashboard, and delete your server-side profile with terminalhire sync --delete.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms. If we do, we may withdraw its open postings. A developer is still paid for work a poster has already accepted, unless the charge for it was fraudulent.

11. Changes to these terms

When we change these terms we post the new version on this page with a new effective date. If a change is material, we also email the posters and developers who gave us a contact address.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles.

12. Contact

Questions about these terms go to support@terminalhire.com. See also the support page.