Leestly

Booking a cleaner usually means a phone call, a vague quote, and finding out the real price afterwards. Leestly replaces that with a marketplace: choose what needs doing, see the price upfront, and book a trusted local cleaner in about a minute.

Leestly and Leestly Pro are live on the App Store and on Google Play — one app for people booking a clean, one for the cleaners doing the work. Starting in London, then city by city.

Not an app — a system with four parts

The app is the part you see. Behind it are three more, and all four are running:

• The client app — booking, tracking, chat, reviews.
• The cleaner app — offers, schedule, navigation, earnings.
• An operations console — around twenty sections where a real person can see and fix anything: orders, cleaners, finance and payouts, failed transfers, refunds, problem reports, subscriptions, reviews, support conversations, an audit log of every admin action.
• An AI connector — the same booking flow, reachable from inside a chat assistant.

The console matters more than it sounds. A marketplace works when something goes wrong at three in the afternoon and someone can actually intervene — reassign a job, refund a payment, look at why a transfer failed. That's the difference between a platform and a demo.

What the system actually runs

The order lifecycle. Nine live states from created to completed, with a real-time timer: searching, confirmed, on the way, in progress, done. Both sides see the same state at the same time.

Dispatch. When an order is placed the system looks for cleaners who work that area and are free at that time, then sends a live offer with a countdown. Rating decides the order of the queue rather than who's in it: a cleaner on probation goes to the back, not out — a hard cut-off is a one-way trip, because you need jobs to earn the reviews that lift you back. If nobody takes it the offer goes to another round — seven for a scheduled clean, fifteen for an urgent one — and then the order expires and nothing is charged.

Money. The card is authorised at booking and captured after the clean is finished, never before. Payouts to cleaners run through Stripe after a hold period. Around that sits the unglamorous half: idempotency so a retry can't double-charge, a price-integrity check so the quote on the card and the quote at checkout cannot diverge, reconciliation that compares our ledger against Stripe's, and a queue for transfers that failed.

Pricing. One engine on the server, one source of truth. Standard and deep are priced differently because they take different amounts of time — a deep clean runs at about 1.6 times a regular one, room for room. Recurring bookings — weekly, fortnightly, monthly — carry a discount and generate their own orders on schedule.

Trust. Cleaners complete identity verification before taking jobs. There is a per-room checklist the client can watch progress against. If something goes wrong there's a seven-day window after the clean to report it in the app, with photos, and a real queue on the other side. Documents, claim photos, chat images and voice notes are private by default — served through short-lived links, never a public URL.

Everything else that makes it survivable. Real-time chat with delivery and read receipts. Push notifications that deep-link to the right screen. Feature flags, distributed locks, rate limiting, an audit trail, error monitoring and a public status page.

Book it from a chat

You can book a cleaning from inside Claude or ChatGPT without opening the app. Nine tools — three of which work without an account, so you can ask what a clean costs before you've signed up for anything.

Payment still happens in Stripe's own checkout, on the same terms as the app: authorised now, taken after the clean. An order placed in a conversation is a first-class order — the system records where it came from and it goes through the same dispatch as any other.

Priced against a market we measured first

Setting prices that work for both sides meant finding out what the market already does — what cleaners are paid according to official wage data, what clients pay according to the companies' own guides, and what the platforms in between take.

→ What UK cleaning pays, and what it charges

It also turned up a gap nobody had filled. An hourly rate means nothing without hours, and as far as we can establish, no one has ever published how long it takes to clean a room — not the standards bodies, not the national time-use surveys, and not the platforms sitting on the data.

→ Nobody has measured how long it takes to clean a room

Get the apps

Leestly for booking a clean. Leestly Pro for doing the work. Leestly has its own site, terms and privacy policy at leestly.com.