# The Thumb on the Scale

We introduced a charge for contractors to change the order buyers saw suppliers in. We wrote that into the terms before anyone asked us to.

- 3 August 2026
- Aditya Kannan & Piotr Gospodarczyk

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Handee, the compliance system we built for multi-site property operations, decided which contractors an operator was shown when a job needed doing. This month we introduced a charge for contractors who wanted to change that order.

That was a conflict of interest. We did not think it was an unmanageable one, but the first honest thing to say about it was what it was.

## The uncomfortable sentence

A marketplace that ranks suppliers and also sells them a ranking boost has a buyer on one side who assumes the order means something, and a seller on the other who has been told it can be bought.

Both are right, and the gap between them is where most of these products quietly live. The order looks like a recommendation. Some of it is a payment.

You can decline to build the feature. We considered it, and the argument against it is that the alternative is only ever a different arbitrary order, usually alphabetical or whatever the database happened to return, with no principle behind it either. We would rather charge for a bounded, disclosed influence than pretend the unpriced version was impartial.

Having decided to build it, the work was almost entirely about limits.

## Three limits, in order of importance

The compliance check ran first and on its own, so paying could not make anyone eligible. A contractor without the certificates that site required never reached the list at all. This was the whole product, and no amount of money touched it.

Then proximity, which paying also could not beat. The score was mostly about how close the contractor was to the building, then how much life was left on the certificates the job needed, then the paid boost. The paid weight was deliberately set below the gap between one distance band and the next. A contractor who paid would rank above an equally close one who did not, and never above one who was nearer.

And the ranking decided nothing in any case. It sorted a list. The operator still selected each recipient by hand.

## A promise in a document, a constraint in a test

The second limit was the one that would rot. Weights get tuned, someone reasons that twenty is a bit thin for a paid feature, and a year later the boost quietly outranks a closer supplier and nobody remembers it was not meant to.

So we wrote it as a test that failed the build: a supplier who paid had to outrank an equally close one who had not, and never a closer one. A change to the numbers past that line stopped the release.

This distinction is worth more than it sounds. A rule in a policy document is a promise, kept for as long as the person who made it is still in the room. A rule in a test is a constraint on everyone who comes after, including on us in a quarter when revenue is thin. When a supplier tells you they will not do something, the useful question is which of the two they have got.

## Putting it in the terms rather than the sales page

The parameters were published in Handee's terms of service, in the section on how contractors were ranked. That was a deliberate choice of venue over the help centre or a footnote in a pricing table, because the person reading the terms was an operator deciding whether to trust the list.

The section gave the weights, stated that the ranking ran after eligibility and could never get round it, and confirmed that the operator made the selection. It then said, in as many words, that this was remuneration which would influence ranking and that we were telling them so plainly.

The cost of writing it that way was precise. It made the feature sound weaker to the contractors it was for, because the accurate description of a bounded boost was that it changed the order among close equals and often changed nothing at all. Our own marketing wanted a stronger sentence. The stronger sentence was not true, and we had already published one release note about the last time we let a persuasive claim out ahead of the software.

There is a European regulation that requires platforms to disclose ranking parameters. We would like to claim we did this because it was right. It was also required, and saying only the first half would be its own small dishonesty.

## Why any of this should matter to you

Every supplier you evaluate has somewhere their revenue and your interests point in different directions. Usage-based pricing rewards inefficiency, seat pricing rewards sprawl, and a ranked marketplace rewards whoever pays.

The question is not whether that divergence exists, because it always does. It is whether the supplier can tell you where theirs is without being cornered into it, how far they have bounded it, and whether the bound lives anywhere that would stop them crossing it on a bad quarter.

Most procurement processes never ask. They ask about uptime and roadmaps and reference customers, all of which the supplier has prepared for. The unprepared question is: where does your business model make you want something I would not want, and what stops you?

The number we promise clients is the human time recovered on the work they hand us. That promise is only worth as much as our willingness to publish the parts that do not flatter us, and this is one of them.

Handee was retired on 30 August 2026.

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