Messaging

Yes. You can message any professional on Surrounders at any time - before booking, without booking, or long after a job is done. The only requirement is a free account with a verified email address. No booking request, no commitment, no waiting for permission to start a conversation.

This matters most for listings marked "price on request". Those pros quote each job individually, so chat is where the price gets set: describe what you need, attach a photo or two (up to 10MB each), and they come back with a number. Only then do you decide whether to book.

Messaging first is also the natural move when:

• your job has any custom details a listing cannot capture
• you want to check the pro speaks your language comfortably
• you need to confirm they cover your area or can handle your dates

You can chat with several pros in parallel and compare answers before committing to anyone. Nothing obliges you to book the first person who replies.

If you do send a booking request, a conversation with that pro is created automatically, so pre-booking chat and booking coordination end up in the same thread. One place, full history, nothing lost.

Yes. The chat accepts photo attachments in JPEG, PNG, or WebP format, up to 10MB per photo. Images are compressed automatically on upload, so even a full-resolution phone picture sends quickly. No links to external services, no email attachments - the photo lives right in the conversation.

Photos do the explaining that words struggle with. "There is a stain on the sofa" tells a cleaner very little; a photo of the actual stain tells them the fabric, the size, and whether they need special products. The same logic works everywhere:

• the leaking tap for a handyman
• the room that needs painting
• your dog, for the sitter meeting them next week
• the garden corner where you want the photoshoot

For pros who quote per job, a photo is often the difference between "I would have to come see it" and a firm price in the next message.

If a photo refuses to upload, check the format and size first: JPEG, PNG, or WebP, 10MB maximum. Screenshots and phone camera shots are almost always fine; the usual culprit is an unusual format exported from another app.

Everything you send stays in the conversation history, so the pro can scroll back to your photos on the day of the job instead of asking you to resend them.

Yes. Every conversation on Surrounders is strictly one-to-one: the only people who can read it are the 2 of you. There are no group chats, no public threads, and other users cannot see who you talk to or what you say.

Nobody at Surrounders reads your messages as a matter of course. The one exception is reports: if either participant reports a conversation for abuse or a scam, the team reviews that report, which can include looking at the reported content. That is the whole moderation model - review happens when someone asks for it, not by default.

A few related privacy points, since they usually come up together:

• Your phone number is never shown to the other person; chat works without exchanging numbers.
• Your exact address is shared only through a confirmed booking, never just by chatting.
• Deleting a conversation hides it from your own list; it does not erase it for the other person.

Messages you send are included when you download your data from Settings, and they fall under the same GDPR rights as the rest of your account. Data is stored in EU data centers.

The practical takeaway: chat freely, but treat it like any private conversation - the other person can still screenshot it, and rule-breaking content can be reported.

The rule of thumb is short: simple and clearly priced, book directly; anything custom, message first. A standard 2-hour cleaning at a listed hourly rate needs no conversation - pick a slot and send the request. A "can you also do the balcony and the oven" cleaning deserves 2 lines of chat before anyone commits.

Message first when:

• the listing says "price on request" (the quote can only happen in chat)
• your job has custom details: unusual size, special equipment, specific products, a deadline
• you are not sure the pro covers your area or does this exact variant of the service
• the timing is tight or odd and you want to confirm before formally requesting

Book directly when the listing already answers everything: fixed or hourly price, standard duration, your kind of location. Pros publish real availability calendars precisely so that routine jobs do not need a negotiation phase.

Why bother messaging at all, when a request costs nothing? Because a request the pro has to decline helps no one. A pro who learns mid-request that your flat is outside their area declines it; the same fact surfaced in chat takes one message and leaves you free to pick someone else immediately. You can also chat with several pros in parallel, which is exactly how comparing quotes is meant to work.

Neither choice is rude. Pros expect both.

You can, with one honest caveat: deleting a conversation hides it from your list only. The other person keeps their copy, and if they ever write to you again, the conversation reappears in your inbox with its history. Think of it as archiving for tidiness, not erasing the record.

That makes delete the right tool for exactly one job: clearing out old threads you are done with. The cleaner you stopped using last year, the 3 pros you got quotes from before picking one - delete them and your message list stays short and current.

It is the wrong tool for two other jobs people sometimes reach for it to do:

• Stopping someone from contacting you. Deleting does nothing here - their next message brings the thread back. Blocking is the tool for that: it is silent, immediate, and stops messages, bookings, and friend requests in both directions.
• Removing something from existence. Messages you sent still exist on the other person's side, just like a sent email. If a conversation contains something that breaks the rules, report it rather than deleting it, so the team can actually see it.

We say this plainly because the alternative - letting you believe a deleted conversation is gone for both sides - would be worse than the mild disappointment of the truth.

Yes, freely. A conversation does not close when a booking completes - it stays open for good, with the full history of messages, photos, and booking events intact. Write to your pro a week later or 6 months later; nothing needs to be reopened or re-requested.

This is deliberate, because the best outcome of a first booking is a second one. The whole regulars pattern runs through that open chat:

• Rebooking is a message away. "Same as last time, next Friday?" plus the "Book again" button on the past booking, and you are done. No re-explaining the job - the pro can scroll up to your original photos and details.
• Going regular. If the arrangement settles into a rhythm, a recurring weekly booking replaces the monthly back-and-forth entirely. Discuss it in chat first, then set it up.
• Loose ends. Left your keys, found one missed spot, want product recommendations - post-completion chat is where the small stuff gets handled without ceremony.

Pros can message you first too, so do not be surprised by a "how did the paint hold up?" a few weeks on. Good pros keep in touch; it is how they keep customers.

One thing that does have a time limit: reviews. You have 90 days after completion to leave one, so if the chat reminds you that you never reviewed a great pro, do it before the window closes.

No, not yet - there is no search box for your message history. We would rather tell you that plainly than let you hunt for a feature that is not there. What you can do is open the conversation with the person in question and scroll; the full history is always kept, it just is not searchable by keyword.

In practice this stings less than it sounds, for two reasons.

First, conversations on Surrounders are 1 per person, not 1 per topic. Everything you and your cleaner ever discussed lives in a single thread, and the automatic system messages for booking events (requested, accepted, rescheduled) act as visual landmarks while you scroll. "It was around the time we moved the Tuesday session" gets you close fast.

Second, the details that matter most should not live only in chat anyway. The booking itself carries the service, the time, the address, and its status timeline, and every booking has a copyable ID on its detail page. When you agree something important in chat - final price for a quoted job, expected duration for hourly work - the reliable habit is to restate it in one clean message near the booking request, so it sits next to the relevant system messages rather than 3 weeks up in the scroll.

Your messages are also included in the data export from Settings, which downloads everything you sent as a file - a workable last resort for finding something old.

Yes. Chat has built-in location sharing, so you can send an exact spot on the map instead of typing out directions. Sharing takes 1 tap, the other person gets a pin they can open, and everyone is spared the "no, the OTHER entrance" exchange that plain text tends to produce.

Location sharing shines for meetups that are not at a saved address:

• the corner of the park where you want to meet your trainer
• the beach spot for a photoshoot
• a cafe for a first chat with a tutor before committing to lessons
• "I am parked here" on the day of the job

It is worth knowing how this differs from your home address, because the two are handled separately. For at-home bookings you pick a saved address during booking, and the pro sees the exact address only after they confirm - until then they see just the general area. That protection is automatic and applies in both directions, since pros' own addresses are equally hidden.

Sharing a location in chat, by contrast, is always your explicit choice, message by message. Nothing is shared unless you send it, and there is no live tracking - a shared location is a pin, not a feed of where you are.

Practical habit: for the booking itself, use a saved address so the address protection works for you. Use chat location pins for everything ad hoc around it.

Yes, fair-use limits on sending speed exist, and no, you will never meet them in normal use. They are anti-spam plumbing, not a constraint on conversation. Typing fast, sending 5 messages in a row, firing off photos one after another while describing a job - all of that is ordinary chat and passes without friction.

What the limits are for: the accounts that blast identical promotions into dozens of conversations, or scripts hammering the platform. Spam is against the rules here anyway, so the speed limits are just the automated first line in front of that rule. The people they stop are not having conversations.

We deliberately do not publish the thresholds. Posting exact numbers would help exactly one audience - spammers calibrating how far they can push - while giving legitimate users nothing, since normal messaging sits nowhere near the line.

If you ever do hit a limit (rapid-fire copy-paste to many pros at once is the realistic way a real person gets there), nothing dramatic happens: sending pauses briefly. Wait a moment and continue. Nothing is lost and your account is fine. If you are messaging many pros because you genuinely need quotes from several, that is completely legitimate - just write each message as itself rather than pasting one block everywhere, which also happens to get you better answers.

Those are system messages: automatic entries the platform drops into your 1:1 conversation whenever something happens with a booking between you and the other person. Request sent, request accepted, time rescheduled, booking cancelled, session completed - each event leaves a line in the chat, so the thread doubles as a plain-language log of the whole booking.

Neither of you writes these. They exist so nobody has to. Without them, every booking would need a manual "ok I accepted your request" message, and every reschedule a "did you see I proposed Tuesday?" follow-up. The system message is the receipt, sitting exactly where you were already talking.

Two details worth knowing:

• They arrive in your language. You see system messages in the language your interface is set to, and the other person sees them in theirs. A Russian-speaking customer and an English-speaking pro each get a readable log of the same events.
• They keep the story straight later. If you ever wonder when a booking was rescheduled or who cancelled, scroll the conversation - the sequence is right there between your normal messages, in order.

System messages are separate from notifications. Notifications ping you on the bell, by push, or by email depending on your Settings; system messages are the permanent trace inside the conversation itself. You cannot turn system messages off, and you would not want to - they are the part of the chat that remembers.

The checkmarks are read receipts. 2 checkmarks together under your message mean the other person has opened and read it. Until the second check appears, they have not seen it yet - so if a pro has not replied, one glance tells you whether they are ignoring you or simply have not looked at their phone.

Chat gives you a few more live signals alongside the checkmarks:

• Typing indicator. When the other person is writing, you see it in real time. Useful mid-negotiation: they are composing that quote right now.
• Online presence. You can see when someone is currently online, which helps you judge whether to expect a quick answer or check back later.
• Emoji reactions. Double-tap a message (or hover on desktop) to react with an emoji. A thumbs-up on "see you at 10 then?" confirms without another message.

One honest caveat about read receipts everywhere, this platform included: "read" means the message was opened, not that it was acted on. A pro who reads your request between two jobs may reply hours later. Pros' typical response times are shown on their profiles, so that is the better predictor of when an answer arrives.

If messages seem stuck without any checkmark at all, reload the page or pull to refresh - a dropped connection is the usual cause.

2 causes explain almost every case. First, messaging requires a verified email address - if you signed up but never clicked the link in the verification email, chat stays locked until you do. Second, if one of you has blocked the other, messages simply will not go through in either direction.

Check your email verification first. It is the common one, especially for new accounts. Look for the verification email in your inbox and spam folder; you can request a fresh one from the app if it never arrived. Once verified, messaging unlocks immediately, along with booking and reviews.

If verification is not the issue, it may be that a block exists between you and the other person. Blocking on Surrounders is deliberately quiet - the app does not announce it to either side - so there is no banner telling you what happened. If someone you could previously message is no longer reachable, and you have not blocked them yourself in Settings, it is kinder to take the hint and approach a different pro than to look for a way around it. There are plenty of professionals in every category.

The mundane third option: a connection hiccup or stale page. Reload, check your internet, try again. If none of the three fits and the problem persists, write to [email protected] with what you tried and a screenshot.