Gigs: how freelance riders choose their own hours
Freelance riders on Laayo book the hours they want to work, in the area they want to ride. Here is how gigs work, why online time is tied to a booking, and what we fixed along the way.
Some of the people who deliver for Laayo ride on a salary. Others ride when it suits them: a student between classes, a shopkeeper with a free evening, someone who wants extra income at the weekend. For that second group, the question we kept hearing was simple. “When should I go online, and will it be worth it?”
Gigs are our answer. A gig is a slot of time, in a part of town, that a freelance rider books ahead. When the slot starts, the rider goes online. When it ends, they go offline. Everything else in this post is about making that simple promise hold up on real roads.
Booking a gig#
In the rider app, freelancers get a Gigs tab. It shows the coming days as a calendar of slots: the lunch rush, the evening, late night, early morning. A rider taps the slots they want and books them, several at once if they like. Slots have a limited number of places, so the town is not flooded with riders at noon and empty at ten.
Each rider also sets a work area: a point on the map and a radius around it. Someone who lives near the bus park does not want to be pulled to the far side of town at the start of a shift, and we would rather dispatch them close to home too. When a rider goes online, the app checks that they are inside that area.
Salaried riders never see any of this. Their shifts are set with them directly, and the Gigs tab simply does not appear.
Online means on a gig#
Early on we found a gap. The app sent freelancers through the gig flow when they tapped “Go online”, but the server behind the plain online switch did not check for a booking. A rider who found another way to flip the switch could stay online all day with no gig at all, and an idle rider could stay online after their gig had ended.
We closed it from both sides:
- The switch now asks the gig system first. If a freelancer is inside a gig they booked, going online simply starts or resumes that gig. If they have no gig right now, the app tells them to book one.
- Gigs end on time. A background check runs all day. When a gig’s end time passes and the rider is not carrying an order, they go offline straight away. If they are holding an order, the gig stretches until it is delivered, so nobody is cut off halfway to a customer’s gate.
- A sweep catches the rest. Anyone left online with no gig and no order, from an old session or a phone that lost track, is taken offline.
The rule is boring on purpose. A rider’s online time is always attached to a booking, so the schedule we plan from and the map we dispatch from tell the same story.
The daily selfie#
Before the first gig of the day, freelancers take a quick selfie in the app. The camera waits until it sees a face inside the frame, then captures it on its own. It takes a moment, and it means the person on the road is the person whose documents we checked when they joined. Our team can review the selfies later without stopping a rider mid-shift.
Medals, quests and breaks#
Booking hours is only half of it. We also wanted reliable riders to get something for being reliable.
- Medals. Each freelancer has a medal that reflects their recent weeks: deliveries, how often they accept, how often they are on time, customer ratings and time online, with cancellations and no-shows counting against them. Better medals open bookings for the best slots earlier. If a medal is about to slip, the app warns the rider in advance instead of surprising them.
- Quests. Some days come with small goals, such as a number of deliveries in a slot. Finishing a quest earns a reward the rider can claim in the app.
- Breaks. A rider can pause a gig for a short break instead of going offline and losing their place.
- Busy-time boosts. When a zone gets busy, the app shows that pay is boosted for that window, so riders can see why it is worth staying on.
Taking gigs seriously, both ways#
A booking is a promise from both sides. We promise the slot will be there and the pay will match what the app shows. The rider promises to turn up.
So a rider who books a gig and never goes online counts as a no-show, and one who goes online and leaves almost straight away counts as an early leave. Both weigh on the medal, the same way cancellations do. Riders get a small number of waivers for real emergencies, so one bad morning does not undo weeks of good work.
On our side, we found and fixed cases where the system was unfair to riders. A rider who went offline and back online could have their login time counted twice, which looked generous and was simply wrong. A rider who cancelled a slot and then wanted it back could not rebook it. A rider sitting inside a booked gig after a break could tap “Go online” and be told to book a gig they already had. Each of those is fixed. Each was found because riders told us something felt off.
Incentives that add up the same way everywhere#
The hardest bug was in incentives. The new-order card showed one number, the progress bar showed another, and the money credited at the end of the day was a third. Different parts of the system were counting the day’s trips differently.
Now one count is used everywhere: the preview on the order card, the progress during the day and the credit after delivery. Milestone bonuses are also spread across the deliveries that lead up to them, so a rider earns a share on every order instead of hoping to land on one exact trip. The earnings screen is gaining a line for the bonus a rider has qualified for but not yet unlocked, so they can see exactly what is waiting.
What’s next#
We want booking to feel as easy as ordering lunch. Next we are looking at suggesting slots based on when each rider usually works, and showing more clearly where in town riders are needed tomorrow. As always, if something in the Gigs tab does not match what you earned, tell us in the app. That is how most of these fixes started.
