Becoming a pro

Becoming a professional on Surrounders is free and takes about 4 steps. You do not need a separate account: open your profile, choose "Switch to Pro", and fill in your pro details - photo, headline, bio, skills, rate, service areas, availability, and the languages you work in. Your profile can be live in minutes.

The steps in order:

1. Switch to pro mode. In the app, go to Profile and tap "Switch to Pro". Your customer account stays intact - one account handles both sides.
2. Build your profile. Add a photo, a headline, a short bio, your skills, and your hourly rate.
3. Set where and when you work. Pick your service areas from 8 Cyprus cities and open your weekly availability so customers can request real slots.
4. Add your languages. List 1 to 3 languages you genuinely speak - customers filter by language.

A first listing is optional at this stage. You can publish your profile now and create listings whenever you are ready, or save a listing as a draft and polish it later.

There is no application, no waiting period, and no fee. Surrounders charges 0% commission, so the price you set is the price you keep. If you already have clients, invite them through the app - they arrive connected to you and can rebook you directly, which is the fastest way to turn your existing work into your first reviews.

Surrounders costs professionals nothing: 0% commission, no listing fees, no subscription, no charge to join. Customers pay you directly - cash, bank transfer, Revolut, or card if you accept it - and you keep 100%. The platform never touches the money, so there is no payout to wait for and nothing deducted.

That covers everything a pro uses today: your profile, unlimited listings, the availability calendar, booking requests, chat with customers, reviews, the dashboard with your earnings overview, and invites for bringing your existing clients over. None of it is a trial. There is no premium tier you are being nudged toward.

The honest part about later: Surrounders plans to offer optional paid tools for professionals at some point. Optional means exactly that - extras you can choose if they earn their keep, not features taken away and sold back. What will not happen is a commission. Taking a percentage of your bookings is off the table, because it would force your prices up and give you a reason to leave.

Why free now? The platform is young and Limassol-first, and it only becomes valuable when enough good pros and customers are on it. Charging you today would work against that. So the real cost of joining early is the few minutes it takes to set up a profile, and the upside is being established before the platform gets crowded.

Commission on bookings is off the table, permanently. Surrounders takes 0% of what your customers pay you, and that is not a launch promotion - it is the business model. What may come later is optional paid tools for pros who want extras. The core platform, profile, listings, calendar, chat, and bookings, stays free.

A skeptical reading of "free forever" is healthy, so here is the reasoning rather than just the promise. Marketplaces that take a percentage push pros into a bad choice: raise prices to cover the cut, or quietly move regulars off the platform. Both outcomes hollow the marketplace out. Surrounders never handles the money at all - customers pay you directly - so there is no mechanism to take a cut from, and no plan to build one.

What "optional paid tools" honestly means: at some point, some professionals may be offered extras worth paying for. Nobody can tell you today exactly what those will be. What is fixed is the shape of the deal - a flat, optional price for something additional, never a percentage of your work, and never moving today's free features behind a paywall.

If that changes your math, the fair summary is: everything you build on Surrounders now, your profile, your reviews, your connected clients, costs you nothing and keeps costing nothing. Any future spending would be your call, made when there is something concrete to judge.

Your availability is a weekly schedule: for each of the 7 weekdays you open the time slots you want to work, and customers can only request times inside them. On top of the weekly pattern you can block specific dates - a holiday, an appointment, a day off - without touching the recurring schedule. All times are Cyprus time.

The weekly slots repeat automatically, so you set them once and adjust as life changes. Tuesday mornings plus weekday evenings, Saturdays but never Sundays, whatever matches your real week. Customers see genuine availability, which means every booking request that reaches you is for a time you already said yes to. That is the point of the calendar: no back-and-forth about "when are you free".

Two behaviors worth knowing before you edit:

• Removing a slot does not cancel anything. Existing confirmed bookings stay exactly as they are; the change only stops new requests for that time. So you can safely tighten your hours without worrying about customers already booked.
• Blocking a date is stronger. If a recurring series has a session on a date you block, that session is cancelled and the customer is notified automatically. The session is skipped, not moved, so if it is a regular you value, a quick message about an alternative time is good practice.

Keep the calendar honest in both directions. Hours you cannot actually work lead to declines, and declining requests hurts the response stats customers see on your profile. Hours you can work but have not opened are invisible - customers cannot request a slot that does not exist.

Yes. Every listing has a location type, and one of the 4 options is remote - alongside "at my place", "I travel to the customer", and flexible. Set a listing to remote and it works for customers anywhere in Cyprus, because nobody needs to be in the same city for an online lesson.

Remote fits some categories naturally: tutoring and music lessons translate well to video calls, and parts of personal training, yoga, and cooking instruction do too. It obviously does not fit cleaning or beauty work, which is why location type is set per listing - a guitar teacher can offer in-person lessons at their studio and a separate remote listing for online students, each with its own price and description.

Why remote is worth considering on a Limassol-first platform: most of the marketplace's activity is in Limassol today, but a remote listing is not limited by that geography. A tutor in Nicosia or Paphos with a remote listing is bookable by Limassol customers right now, without travelling. For pros outside Limassol, remote listings are the practical way to reach where the customers currently are.

Practical notes for a remote listing:

• Say in the description how the session happens - which video tool you use, what the student needs ready. Surrounders gives you booking, chat, and reminders; the call itself runs on whatever platform you and the customer agree.
• All times on Surrounders are Cyprus time, which keeps scheduling simple across the island.
• Payment works the same as any booking: agreed directly between you and the customer, with bank transfer or Revolut being the natural fit when nobody meets in person. Surrounders takes 0%.

A listing is one service you offer, described completely: title, description, category, pricing type, price, duration range, location type, cancellation policy, tags, languages, and up to 10 photos. Fill those in from your pro dashboard and either publish immediately or save it as a draft to finish later.

Working through the fields:

• Title and description - say what the customer gets, in plain words. "Deep cleaning for apartments" beats something vague.
• Category - one of the 10 service categories, from home cleaning to cooking classes. This is how browsers find you.
• Pricing type and price - hourly, fixed, or price on request. Whatever you list is the whole price; Surrounders adds nothing on top and takes nothing off.
• Duration range - how long a session typically runs, so customers book realistic slots.
• Location type - at your place, you travel to the customer, remote, or flexible. If you work at your own space, your exact address stays hidden until a booking is confirmed.
• Cancellation policy - flexible, moderate, or strict. This sets the notice you expect from customers.
• Tags and languages - the search terms and languages that help the right customers find this specific service.
• Photos - up to 10, JPEG, PNG, or WebP. Real photos of your actual work outperform stock images, and customers can tell the difference.

Drafts are useful: create the listing in one sitting, sleep on the wording, publish tomorrow. Once published, you can pause it anytime, for holidays or a full calendar, and unpause when you are back. One caution: archiving a listing is permanent, so pause when in doubt.

Surrounders gives you 3 pricing types: hourly, fixed, and price on request. Pick hourly when your work is genuinely time-based, fixed when the job is predictable enough to promise a total, and price on request when you cannot quote honestly without details. Whichever you choose, the listed price is the whole price and you keep 100% of it.

Hourly suits training sessions, tutoring, music lessons, and cleaning by the hour - work where the customer is buying your time and more time costs more. It is the easiest price for customers to compare, which cuts both ways: it is transparent, but it invites comparison shopping, so make sure the rest of your listing shows why your hour is worth yours.

Fixed suits jobs with a known scope: a standard manicure, a photo session package, a one-bedroom apartment clean. Customers like certainty, and a fixed price removes the "what will this actually cost me" hesitation that stops bookings. If you can predict the job within reason, fixed usually converts better than hourly for the same work.

Price on request suits genuinely variable work - a handyman job you have not seen, an event shoot with unknown scope. You quote in chat once you know the details. Use it sparingly: every "on request" adds a step before the customer knows if they can afford you, and some will not take that step. If most of your jobs cluster around a typical price, consider listing that as fixed or hourly and handling outliers in chat.

You can use different pricing types on different listings, so split your services rather than forcing one model to cover everything.

Customers see your public profile: photo, headline, bio, and skills; your published listings with prices and up to 10 photos each; your reviews with the average rating and count; your response rate and typical response time; the languages you work in; and your general service area. What they do not see is your exact address - that is shared only after a booking is confirmed.

Worth understanding is which parts you write and which parts the platform computes:

• You control the photo, headline, bio, skills, listings, prices, photos, languages, and service areas. Edit them anytime.
• Your history writes the reviews (from completed bookings, and you can post one public reply to each), the rating, and the response stats. These cannot be edited, which is exactly why customers trust them - they reflect how you actually work, especially how fast you answer requests.

On privacy, the protection runs in your favor too. If you work from home, customers browsing see only your approximate location, enough to judge distance, never the street and door. The exact address goes only to a customer whose booking you have confirmed. Your phone number is never shown to anyone on the platform; conversations happen in chat until you choose otherwise.

The reverse view, what you see about customers: once someone books you, you get their name and email in your Customers tab, along with their booking history with you and space for private notes only you can read.

If you want to check the impression your profile makes, look at it the way a stranger would: does the photo show a person, does the bio say anything real, and would you book someone with your response time?

To create your pro profile you need 8 things: a photo, a headline, a short bio, your skills, an hourly rate, your service areas, your weekly availability, and 1 to 3 languages you work in. That is the whole checklist. A first listing is optional - you can add services later.

None of these require preparation beyond what you already know about your own work, but each one earns its place:

• Photo - a clear picture of you. Customers are choosing a person, not a logo.
• Headline - one line saying what you do, for example "Personal trainer, strength and weight loss".
• Bio - a few honest sentences about your experience and how you work.
• Skills - the specifics customers search for.
• Hourly rate - your baseline price in EUR. Individual listings can price differently.
• Service areas - pick from 8 Cyprus cities where you actually work; some pros cover more than one.
• Availability - your weekly working hours, so booking requests land in slots you can really take.
• Languages - 1 to 3 you genuinely speak. Customers filter by language, so this directly affects who finds you.

Complete profiles do better than sparse ones - customers who can see who you are, what you charge, and when you are free have no reason to hesitate. A profile with an empty bio or missing photo asks customers to take a chance a complete one does not.

Once the profile is live, your next step is a listing: the specific service, its price, and its details. Publish it right away or keep it as a draft until it reads right.

Each listing carries one of 3 cancellation policies: flexible means short-notice cancellations are OK, moderate asks customers to cancel at least 24 hours ahead, strict asks for at least 48 hours. These are notice expectations you set, not fees - Surrounders never charges anyone. Choose based on how costly a lost slot actually is for you.

The question to ask yourself: if a customer cancels 2 hours before, what does it cost me? Your answer picks the policy.

Flexible fits work where a freed slot is easy to absorb - you were home anyway, you can fill the time, or your schedule is not fully booked yet. It is also a genuine selling point: customers, especially new ones, book more readily when backing out will not be awkward. Many pros start flexible while building their first reviews.

Moderate (24 hours notice) is the sensible middle for most established schedules. A day's warning usually lets you offer the slot to someone else or rearrange your route.

Strict (48 hours notice) fits slots that are hard to refill: you travel far to the customer, you prepare materials in advance, or your calendar books out and a late cancellation means real lost income. Be aware of the trade: strict signals professionalism to serious customers but adds friction for casual ones.

Two honest caveats. First, the policy is an expectation, not an enforcement - what happens after a late cancel is between you and the customer, so a polite chat message does more than the label. Second, you can set different policies on different listings, and change them anytime as your calendar fills up.

List the 1 to 3 languages you genuinely speak well enough to work in. Customers filter search results by language, so every language on your profile opens a pool of customers who might otherwise never see you - and every language you cannot actually hold a conversation in sets up a booking that starts badly.

Limassol makes this concrete. The city has a large Russian-speaking community, English is spoken widely across locals and expats, and Greek is the language many Cypriot households prefer for someone coming into their home. These are three substantially different customer pools, and the language filter is how each of them finds pros. A cleaner listing Russian and English is discoverable to two of them; adding real Greek opens the third.

How to decide what counts as "genuinely speak":

• Can you understand the customer's request, agree on details, and handle a complaint in that language? List it.
• Can you manage greetings and not much else? Leave it off. The customer filtered by that language precisely because they want to communicate in it, and discovering mid-session that you cannot is how disappointed reviews happen.

There is no strategic reason to pad the list. One honestly-listed language with great service beats three shaky ones, and the platform caps you at 3 anyway - a constraint that keeps everyone's listings believable.

Note that languages appear in two places: on your profile and on each listing. Keep them consistent, and if you serve different audiences with different services, say Russian-language tutoring and English-language tutoring as separate listings, the per-listing languages let you target each one precisely.