About
Why it works this way
Rbundle is new, and it is built on a small number of decisions that are easier to explain than to guess at. Here they are.
What Rbundle is
One request, sealed proposals, and the business stays unnamed until it chooses.
A business fills in one standardised request for the service it needs. That request goes out as a complete brief with the business's identity removed, to firms verified before they reach a business on the marketplace — and marked if a firm the business invited has not been. Firms send back sealed proposals. The business compares them, chooses one, and only that firm learns who it is.
Rbundle connects the two sides and standardises the request. It does not perform any of the services, and it does not give professional advice.
Why it is built this way
The ordinary way of buying professional services costs the buyer their position.
To get comparable quotes for professional work today, a business has to describe itself several times to several firms, each of which now knows the business is shopping, what it needs, and who else it might be talking to. The business has given away its position before it has learned anything.
The standardised request is the answer to the first half of that: describe the work once, in a form built for the service, and send the same brief to everyone. Anonymity is the answer to the second half. A firm reading a request knows the work and what that service's form asked about it. It does not know who is asking, so there is nothing to price against except the work.
What “anonymous” means here, exactly
Identity-minimising, not zero-knowledge. The difference matters.
Rbundle collects as little as it can, and does not store a Buyer's name, company name, address, phone number or EIN. There is a login email, because there has to be a way to sign in, and it is never shared with a firm. Ordinary server logs exist, as they do everywhere.
So this is not a claim that nobody could ever work out who you are. It is a claim about what is held: identity is entered at one moment — when you choose a proposal — passed to the one firm you chose, and not kept for that purpose afterwards.
The honest limit is worth stating plainly. A request describes a business in enough detail for a firm to price the work, and a business that describes itself distinctively enough can be recognised from the description. Where a request asks for a longer written answer, the form says so at the field.
How firms are vetted
A person checks, against the registers, at the firm level.
Verification is manual while the marketplace is small. It is a check of the firm rather than of an individual: licence lookups against the state accountancy boards, the bar directories and the USPTO roster as the service requires, and proof of professional indemnity cover.
An unverified firm can see requests it is eligible for and cannot send a proposal to the marketplace. Seeing and sending are separate gates, and only one of them is closed while a firm waits. The one exception is a firm a business invites by name: it may respond before verification finishes, and its proposal is labelled so the business knows exactly what it is looking at.
Verification is a screening gate. It is not an endorsement, a recommendation, or a warranty of anyone's work.
What is deliberately not here
Most of the design is things that were left out.
No ratings and no reviews, anywhere, for anyone. Businesses told us in interviews they would not trust them on a marketplace this size, and a rating system on a small marketplace mostly measures who arrived first.
No auction. Proposals are sealed and one-shot. Nothing ranks them by price, no firm sees another firm's number, and there is no second round in which someone is invited to go lower. A firm quotes what the work is worth once.
No browsing for work. A firm sees a request because it matched what the firm offers or because a business invited it by name. There is no list of open requests to trawl.
No lead fees. A firm is not charged for receiving a request and is not charged for a request it does not win.
No editing of your words. Where a request has free text, firms read what you wrote, as you wrote it.
What it costs
Nothing today, and the part that is not settled is said rather than implied.
Rbundle is free for a business: free to build a request, to send it, to receive and compare proposals, and to engage a firm.
For a firm, joining, verification and submitting a proposal are free. The intention is to charge the firm that wins the work. That fee is not set and nothing is being charged today. For legal services, Rbundle is free during validation. We are working out the right model for legal services; any fee will be introduced on thirty days' notice.
Where this is, honestly
Early, and the parts that are not built are named.
Rbundle is new. The marketplace is small, verification is done by a person rather than a system, and several things described elsewhere on this site as designed are not yet built — each of those pages says so where it applies rather than leaving you to find out.
If something here turns out not to match what the product does, that is a defect and we want to know. Tell us at info@rbundle.com.