# Woodstitch Rater Agreement **Effective date:** 3 November 2026 **Version:** 1.3 This Rater Agreement ("Agreement") is a contract between you and Woodstitch ("Woodstitch", "we", "us"). It governs your access to the Woodstitch rating platform and your eligibility to be paid for work you submit through it. **Read section 4 and section 8 carefully. They describe when we will not pay you, and when we may require you to return money we already paid.** By clicking "Continue with Google" or otherwise creating or using a Woodstitch rater account, you agree to this Agreement. If you do not agree, do not create an account. --- ## 1. What the work is Woodstitch pays people to listen to audio recordings and give their own honest opinion about what they hear. A task may ask you to compare two recordings, judge whether a recording was spoken by a person or generated by software, rate quality, or answer similar questions about audio. The value of this work depends entirely on the answers coming from a real human being who actually listened. That is the whole product. An answer produced any other way is worth nothing to us and to our clients, and is not work we will pay for. ## 2. Who may be a rater To hold a rater account you must: a. be at least 18 years old; b. **live in the United States, and be physically in the United States every time you do work on the platform.** For this Agreement, "the United States" means the 50 states and the District of Columbia; it does not include U.S. territories. Being a U.S. citizen or holding a U.S. account while you are physically elsewhere does not qualify; c. be an individual human being, acting for yourself; d. use one account only, and not hold or control any other Woodstitch rater account; e. provide accurate information about yourself, including a Google account that belongs to you and a true account of where you are located; and f. have the legal right to receive payment in the United States. We may limit eligibility further for particular tasks, and we may open the platform to other countries in future by updating this section. Until we do, an account used from outside the United States is not eligible for payment, however good the work. You may not create or operate an account on behalf of anyone else, sell or transfer your account, or allow another person to use it. ## 3. Your core promises about how you work Each time you submit an answer, you represent and warrant that: a. **You personally listened** to the audio in the task, through a working audio device, for long enough to form a genuine judgement. b. **The answer is your own honest opinion**, formed by you, from listening. c. **You did not use any automated, algorithmic, machine-learning, artificial-intelligence, scripted, or programmatic means** to produce, suggest, influence, or submit the answer — including but not limited to large language models, audio classifiers, speech or deepfake detection tools, bots, macros, autoclickers, browser automation or extensions, or any service that answers tasks for you. d. **No other person** answered for you, and you did not coordinate answers with anyone else. e. **You were physically in the United States** (as defined in section 2) when you did the work and submitted the answer; **you did not connect through a VPN, proxy, Tor, hosting or datacenter network, remote desktop, emulator, or similar technology — for any reason, including privacy**; and you did not otherwise misrepresent your location, device, or identity. Turn any VPN off before you work. f. **You are giving real attention** to the task — not clicking through to collect payment, not answering at random, and not answering faster than it is possible to have actually listened. g. You have not attempted to interfere with the platform, including by manipulating timing data, replaying or reverse-engineering task content, scraping audio, or exploiting any bug or defect to earn more than your genuine work would earn. These promises are the foundation of this Agreement. We rely on them directly when we pay you and when we sell the results of your work. ## 4. Payment, and when we will not pay ### 4.1 How earning works Each accepted answer earns the amount shown in the platform at the time you submit it. Earnings accumulate as a balance. A daily earning limit applies and is shown in the platform; it may change at any time. ### 4.2 Payment is for accepted work only **An answer earns money only once we accept it.** A balance shown in the platform is a provisional record of work submitted, not a debt we owe you, and not a guarantee of payment. We may review any answer at any time, before or after it contributes to your balance, and before or after a payout. ### 4.3 When we may withhold payment We may decline to pay for some or all of your work, remove earnings from your balance, withhold a pending payout, and suspend or close your account, if we determine in our reasonable judgement that: a. you breached any promise in section 3; b. your answers were produced or assisted by automated means, artificial intelligence, a bot, a script, or any non-human process; c. your answers were not those of a human listener who actually listened; d. the quality or attentiveness of your work falls below the standard reasonably required by the task — including answering too quickly to have listened, answering at random, answering in a fixed or mechanical pattern, failing attention or quality checks embedded in the work, or answering inconsistently with the audio in ways that indicate you were not listening; e. you hold or control more than one account, or your account is linked to another account that breached this Agreement; f. you misrepresented your identity, location, residency, or device, or accessed the platform through a VPN, proxy, Tor, datacenter, hosting provider, emulator, or remote-control connection, whatever your reason for using it; g. you obtained earnings by exploiting a bug, defect, or misconfiguration; h. you did the work while outside the United States, or you do not live in the United States, whether or not you concealed it; i. paying you would violate applicable law or sanctions, or you cannot complete required identity or tax verification; or j. you have otherwise acted fraudulently or in bad faith toward Woodstitch, its clients, or other raters. Where we withhold payment under this section, we may withhold **all** earnings associated with the account, not only the specific answers we identified, because conduct of this kind puts the reliability of all of that account's work in question. ### 4.4 Our determination, and your right to respond We decide whether work meets the standards of this Agreement. We will act in good faith and on a reasonable basis, and we will not withhold payment arbitrarily or to avoid paying for genuine work. **If we withhold earnings or close your account, you may contest it.** Write to hello@woodstitch.com within 60 days. Tell us what happened. We will review your account and respond, and if we got it wrong we will reinstate and pay you. This is a real review, not a formality — honest raters sometimes get caught by automated signals, and we want those cases corrected. ### 4.5 Payouts Payouts are made through our payment processor once your balance reaches the published minimum. You must complete the processor's identity and tax requirements. Payment processing is subject to the processor's own terms, and delays caused by the processor are not a breach by us. You are responsible for any taxes on what you earn. You are an independent contractor, not an employee, and this Agreement does not create an employment, partnership, or agency relationship. ### 4.6 Inactive balances If your account is inactive for 12 months and your balance is below the payout minimum, we may close the account and forfeit the balance, after emailing the address on the account. ## 5. Quality and attention checks Tasks may include checks designed to detect inattentive or non-human answering, including items with a known correct answer, repeated items, items with deliberately obvious content, and measurement of your timing and interaction with the player. **You agree not to attempt to identify, flag, publish, circumvent, or share information about these checks.** Doing so is itself a breach of this Agreement. ## 6. Data we collect To protect the integrity of the work and to detect fraud and automation, we collect and analyse technical information including your IP address, its network operator and approximate location, device and browser characteristics, a device fingerprint, timezone and language settings, timing and interaction patterns, and indicators of automation or remote control. We use this to verify that you are a single human being working honestly, to enforce this Agreement, and to decide questions of payment. When you set up payouts, our payment processor, Stripe, verifies your identity and shares with us the details you give it, such as your name, date of birth, phone, address, and the bank you are paid into (never your full account number). We store these to pay you, meet tax and legal obligations, and prevent fraud. You consent to this collection and use. Our [Privacy Policy](/legal/privacy) describes it in full and governs personal data generally. ## 7. Ownership of your work You assign to Woodstitch all right, title, and interest in the answers, ratings, judgements, and other data you submit, including all intellectual property rights, worldwide and in perpetuity. We may use, reproduce, publish, license, and sell this data, including to our clients, and including in aggregated or anonymised research results. You waive any moral rights in it, to the extent permitted by law. You retain no claim to results derived from your work. We will not publish your name or email address in connection with your individual answers without your consent. ## 8. Recovery of money we already paid you **This section survives the closure of your account.** ### 8.1 Your obligation to repay If we pay you for work and later determine, on reasonable evidence, that the work breached section 3 — in particular that answers were produced by artificial intelligence, automation, a bot, a script, another person, or any non-human process, or that you misrepresented your identity or location to obtain the work — then **the amounts we paid for that work were obtained in breach of this Agreement and you must repay them to us on demand.** This applies to amounts already withdrawn and already in your possession. It applies whether the breach is discovered a week or two years after payment. You agree that such amounts are held by you for our benefit until repaid. ### 8.2 Where the breach taints the account Where the breach was systematic — for example, automated answering over a period, or an account created or operated under a false identity — the repayable amount is **everything we paid that account**, not only the specific answers we were able to identify as automated. You agree this is a reasonable measure of our loss, because such conduct makes the whole of that account's work unusable to us and to our clients, and because the practical difficulty of separating good answers from bad is a direct result of your breach. ### 8.3 Our enforcement rights We may, in addition to any other remedy available to us at law: a. demand repayment in writing; b. offset the amount against any balance or future earnings on any account we reasonably believe you hold or control; c. reverse or claw back payments through our payment processor where it permits; d. refer the debt to a collection agency; e. **bring legal proceedings against you to recover the amounts paid**, together with interest and, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, the costs of recovery including reasonable legal fees and the reasonable, documented cost of the investigation that established the breach; and f. report conduct we reasonably believe to be fraudulent to law enforcement, and cooperate with any investigation. Interest accrues on unpaid amounts from the date of our written demand at the lesser of 1% per month or the maximum rate permitted by applicable law. ### 8.4 Fraud is not merely a contract breach You acknowledge that submitting machine-generated answers while representing them as your own human judgement, in order to obtain payment, is a misrepresentation made to obtain money. Nothing in this Agreement limits any claim we may have for fraud, deceit, unjust enrichment, or any statutory claim, or any remedy available for them. ### 8.5 Damages beyond repayment Where your breach caused us loss beyond the amounts we paid you — for example a client refund, the cost of re-running a study, or reputational harm — we may claim that loss as well. We will not seek punitive or speculative damages against an individual rater for ordinary quality shortfalls; this section is directed at deliberate fraud and automated answering. ## 9. Suspension and termination We may suspend or close your account at any time, with or without notice, where we reasonably believe this Agreement has been breached or where required to protect the platform, our clients, or other raters. This includes automatically placing an account on hold, or refusing to create one, when the technical information described in section 6 indicates that you are outside the United States or connecting through a VPN, proxy, or datacenter. We are not required to tell you which information led to a suspension, a hold, or a refusal. You may close your account at any time by writing to us. Closure does not affect your obligation under section 8, our rights under section 4, or the assignment in section 7. Sections 3, 4.2–4.4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, and 12 survive termination. ## 10. Disclaimers and limitation of our liability The platform is provided "as is". We do not guarantee that work will be available to you, that any particular amount of work or earnings will be offered, or that the platform will be uninterrupted or error-free. Availability of tasks is not promised and may change without notice. To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability to you arising out of or relating to this Agreement is limited to the greater of (a) the total amount we have paid you in the 12 months before the claim, and (b) US$100. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages, or for lost profits or lost opportunity. Nothing in this Agreement excludes or limits any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, or any right you have under applicable consumer or employment law that cannot be waived. ## 11. Indemnity You will indemnify us against losses, liabilities, and reasonable costs we incur arising from your breach of section 3 or section 8, or from any claim that your submissions infringed a third party's rights. ## 12. Governing law and disputes This Agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Ohio, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts located in Ohio have exclusive jurisdiction, and you consent to personal jurisdiction and venue there — **except that we may bring proceedings to recover money under section 8, or to obtain injunctive relief, in any court having jurisdiction over you.** If any provision of this Agreement is held unenforceable, it will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, or severed, and the remainder will stay in force. ## 13. Changes to this Agreement We may change this Agreement. We will post the new version with a new effective date and version number, and where the change materially affects your rights we will notify you by email or in the platform before it applies to you. Changes do not apply retroactively to work already submitted. Continuing to submit work after a change takes effect means you accept the new version. **A change cannot retroactively create an obligation to repay money for work that complied with the version in force when you did it.** ## 14. Entire agreement This Agreement and the [Privacy Policy](/legal/privacy) are the entire agreement between us about the rating platform. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign this Agreement; we may assign it in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets. --- **Questions, or contesting a decision:** hello@woodstitch.com Woodstitch — version 1.3, effective 3 November 2026