Getting started

Surrounders is a free services marketplace in Cyprus that connects customers with independent local professionals across 10 categories: home cleaning, personal training, yoga, beauty, tutoring, pet care, handyman work, photography, music lessons, and cooking classes. It launched in 2026, starting in Limassol, with an interface in English and Russian.

Booking is request-based: you choose a professional, pick a time from their real availability calendar, and send a request; the pro confirms, and both of you get reminders. Reviews can only be written after a completed booking, so every rating reflects a real appointment.

The platform is free for both sides and never handles money - customers pay professionals directly, and pros keep 100% of their price. Beyond one-off bookings, Surrounders is built for the services you use every week: recurring schedules, a personal calendar of everything you have booked, chat with every pro in one place, and invites that let you bring your own trusted professionals onto the platform.

Surrounders works in 3 steps: find a professional, request a time, get confirmed. The whole flow takes about a minute once you know who you want.

1. Find. Browse a category or search, then compare pros by price, reviews from completed bookings, response time, and languages spoken - there is a "speaks my language" filter if that matters to you. You can message any pro with questions before booking anything.

2. Request a time. Every listing shows the pro's real availability. Pick a slot at least 2 hours ahead, choose your reminder preferences, and send the request. For services at your home, the pro sees your exact address only after confirming.

3. Get confirmed. The pro accepts, the booking lands in both calendars, and reminders arrive when you asked for them - anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 day before. If a pro does not respond within 48 hours, the request simply expires and you are free to book someone else.

After the appointment, you pay the pro directly as agreed, and you can leave a review - or set the whole thing to repeat weekly and never think about scheduling it again.

You can browse everything - categories, professionals, prices, reviews - without an account. An account becomes necessary at the moment you want to act: booking a time or messaging a pro requires signing up and verifying your email.

Creating an account takes about 1 minute: name, email, password, or one tap with Google. The email verification step exists for everyone's benefit - it is one of the reasons every person you deal with on the platform is reachable at a real address, and it keeps drive-by spam out of pros' inboxes.

No card details are ever asked for, at signup or later - the platform has no payments to charge. After signup you can optionally pick your interests and city to get more relevant results, or skip that entirely and just search.

Surrounders works fully in any mobile browser, and you can install it to your home screen in a few seconds - it then opens and behaves like an app, with push notifications for bookings and messages.

To install: open surrounders.com in your phone's browser, then choose "Add to Home Screen" (Safari on iPhone: the share button; Chrome on Android: the browser menu, or accept the install prompt when it appears). Everything works the same as the website - same account, same bookings, same chat.

Native apps for iPhone and Android exist as well - if you find Surrounders in the App Store or Google Play, it is the same product and the same account, with a few phone-native extras like Face ID sign-in. Either way, the browser and home-screen versions are never a lesser experience: they are the full product.

The Surrounders interface works in 2 languages today - English and Russian - with Greek on the way. Everything is translated: pages, booking flows, notifications, reminders. You pick your language in settings and the whole product follows, including the emails you receive.

Just as important: professionals list the languages they personally speak, and search has a "speaks my language" filter. In a city like Limassol, where a cleaner might speak Russian and Greek but limited English, matching on language is often the difference between a smooth booking and a guessing game.

Russian speakers can use Surrounders end to end without needing English at all - «русскоговорящий мастер» is a filter, not a lucky find. Greek-speaking pros are very much present on the platform already; the Greek interface itself ships once the translation meets a native-quality bar rather than a machine-translated one.

Surrounders is live in Limassol first - that is where most professionals and bookings are today. Professionals from anywhere in Cyprus can create profiles and list their services, so you will find some pros in other cities, but Limassol is where the marketplace is genuinely stocked in 2026.

Being honest about this matters more than pretending: a marketplace is only useful where it has real supply. Limassol got the first push for a practical reason - it has the island's densest mix of locals, expats, and Russian-speaking residents who need exactly these services.

If you are elsewhere in Cyprus: search anyway. Some pros travel between cities (each profile shows a service area), remote services like online tutoring and music lessons work from anywhere, and new professionals join weekly. Nicosia, Larnaca, and Paphos are the natural next steps as supply grows - and if you are a professional in one of those cities, being early means being the obvious choice when customers arrive.

Onboarding on Surrounders is 2 short questions after you sign up: which service categories interest you, and which city you are in. Both are optional and both are skippable - tap skip and you go straight to the full marketplace with nothing locked away. Answering simply helps relevant services surface sooner instead of you filtering the whole catalog yourself.

What each answer does for you:

• Interest categories. Picking, say, personal training and tutoring tells Surrounders where to point you first among the 10 categories. You can always browse every category regardless of what you picked.
• City. Cyprus is small, but not that small - a cleaner in Paphos is not much use to you in Limassol. Naming your city anchors what you see to where you are.

Skipping is a perfectly fine choice. Plenty of people prefer to just look around, and search with filters (category, price, duration, location type, language) gets anyone to the right pro without any onboarding answers. Every category and every search stays fully available either way.

Changed your mind, or moved cities? Your answers are not a commitment - your profile and settings stay editable, and what you actually search for and book matters more over time than what you tapped in the first minute.

One account, two modes. Customer mode is where you find and book services; pro mode is where you offer them. The same login works for both, you switch whenever you like, and each mode has its own home screen built around what you are doing there - so a yoga teacher who also books a cleaner never juggles two accounts.

In customer mode, home is your calendar: everything you have booked in agenda, week, and month views, plus search, favorites, and your chats with pros.

In pro mode, home is your dashboard: earnings from completed bookings, session counts, your rating and response rate, plus your listings, availability calendar, and customer list. Same person, different job to do, different tools on top.

Switching takes one tap: in customer mode, open your profile and choose "Switch to Pro"; in pro mode, the menu has "Switch to Customer". Nothing is lost in between - your bookings, messages, and reviews all belong to the one account.

Everyone starts as a customer. Pro mode unlocks when you complete the free pro setup, about 4 steps: profile with photo and skills, your rate, service areas, availability, and languages. A profile can be live in minutes. There is no fee and no commission in either direction - being both a customer and a pro on Surrounders costs nothing.