Questions

Rbundle is a marketplace for professional services with one difference: the business requesting the work stays anonymous while it shops.

A business fills in one standardised request for the service it needs — think of it like the college common application, filled out once and reusable. That request reaches vetted firms as an anonymised but complete brief. Firms send back sealed, fixed-fee proposals. The business compares them side by side, chooses one, and only that firm learns who it is.

Rbundle connects the two sides and standardises the request. It does not provide the services, advise on them, or recommend any firm — the engagement is between the business and the provider it chooses.

Said the same as Rebundle. We just couldn’t afford another vowel.

It puts finished requests in front of the firm instead of contacts.

What arrives is a business that has already completed a standardised form for the exact service the firm sells — scope, timing, and every attribute that moves a fee. There is no lead to qualify, no callback to chase, and no proposal written to find out whether the job is real. The work is quoting.

And because the fit of a request is visible before any work goes into it, a firm can decline the ones that are not worth an afternoon.

Three today: cost segregation studies, SOC 2 examinations, and R&D tax credit studies.

The catalog maps 96 services across 10 categories — tax, audit and assurance, legal, IT and cyber security, technology and data, accounting and finance operations, deals and M&A, marketing, HR, and specialised operations. The rest are browsable with a waitlist, and either side can ask us to add one. Demand decides what gets built next, and a firm telling us what it sells counts as demand too.

Nothing for the business requesting the work. Free to build a request, free to send it, free to receive and compare proposals, free to engage a provider.

For a firm: free to join, free to get verified, free to propose. No lead fees — a firm is never charged for receiving a request, and never charged for one it does not win.

We intend to earn from the provider who wins the work, once, and not from the business that requested it. We are still setting that fee and would rather say so than publish a number we then have to revise. Firms joining now do so as founding providers, at no cost while we are validating.

For legal providers it is expected to be a flat subscription rather than a percentage of the fee or a charge for winning. That is a constraint rather than a preference — the fee-sharing rules make the other models unavailable in most of the country — and we are happy to walk through it.

Not to browse or to build a request. A business can open a service, fill in the whole thing and see what it may be a fit for without creating anything — it stays in that browser, and while signed out, building a request writes nothing to our servers. An account is only needed to send.

A firm does need one, because a proposal has to come from a named firm with credentials attached to it. Setting it up is free.

One honest exception on the browsing side: joining a waitlist or asking us to add a service does record that request, because there would be no point otherwise.

It means identity-minimising, not zero-knowledge — and we would rather be precise than sound impressive.

It also runs in one direction. We collect as little as we can about the business making a request: we never store its name, company name, address, phone number or EIN. We cannot leak what we do not hold. A login email exists so a person can sign in and be notified, and ordinary server logs exist here like they do everywhere.

Providers are not anonymous. A firm that proposes is named, verified and visible, and that asymmetry is deliberate — the party being asked to trust a stranger is the one who gets to see who they are dealing with. What we do not do is let any provider see who the business is before the business chooses.

Everything needed to price the work, and nothing that identifies the business.

That means the shape of the job — service, scope, timing, deadline — plus company attributes in bands rather than exact figures: size, industry, states of operation, revenue band where it genuinely changes a quote. The request carries a code rather than a name.

A few questions have free-text boxes, and whatever is typed into those is shown to providers. Businesses are told to keep them about the work.

Possibly, and we will not pretend otherwise.

A distinctive combination of attributes can narrow it down. A distinctive description typed into a free-text box can do it outright. Bundling several services together says more than any single request does. And a firm invited by name may simply recognise the job.

We band figures, keep free text constrained, and warn at the moments where the risk rises. What we can promise is that we do not hand identity over — not that a determined reader could never infer it.

We know the email it signs in with. We do not hold identity or contact details anywhere against the account, and our own staff see a number rather than a name — literally, in the admin tools.

The only moment identity exists in the system at all is the moment a business chooses to hand it to a firm.

At one moment, with one firm, because the business decided.

On selecting a proposal, the business types in the contact details needed to start work and they pass straight through to that provider. They are not written to our database, our logs or our analytics. Every other firm that proposed never learns who the business was — only that it chose someone else.

There is one other route, opt-in and off by default: a business sending a request directly to firms it names can choose to identify itself to those firms up front.

By pricing the work rather than the company. The request is identity-blind but attribute-complete: size, industry, jurisdiction, and every complexity driver that actually moves a fee.

It cuts the other way too. Nobody is priced against who the buyer happens to be, and a firm that quotes well on substance does better in a blind comparison, not worse. The firm learns who the business is at selection, before engaging, and runs its own conflict and independence checks then.

No, and the distinction matters.

Proposals are sealed and one-shot. A firm submits once. Nobody sees anyone else’s number, and there is no second round in which to undercut it — there is no round two. Proposals are compared on scope, fee, turnaround and credentials together, and nothing on Rbundle ranks them by price.

The point is not the lowest number. It is a fair comparison of firms that fit, quickly.

Each firm submits a structured proposal — scope, fixed fee, timeline, deliverables — with its own PDF alongside it. Because every proposal answers the same questions, they line up next to each other instead of arriving as five differently-shaped documents.

For the firm that means the substance carries the proposal rather than the packaging. For the business it means comparing like with like.

It confirms, shares its details with that firm, and the engagement is between the two of them from there. Rbundle is not a party to it.

The firms that were not selected are told plainly that the work went elsewhere, without learning who the business was or what anyone else quoted.

The provider runs those checks. It is a professional obligation and it stays with the firm — Rbundle does not clear conflicts or offer any independence opinion.

Where independence matters, the request screens on attributes before proposals are written, so an obviously conflicted firm is not routed the work in the first place. Where a check has to happen before anything is revealed, we handle it with the parties directly today rather than pretending it is automated.

No, and we say so before it is sent if we think reach is thin. A service can be live before many firms offer it, and early requests are part of how we recruit them.

If nobody currently covers what is being asked for, that is shown plainly and the request can still be sent. For a newly-listed service, gathering proposals can take longer.

The same honesty applies in the other direction: we do not promise any firm a volume of requests. We would rather a firm join knowing that than find out.

No. What comes back is a preliminary indication — it may be a fit, or it may not look like a fit right now, based on the answers given.

The determination itself is a professional judgement and it belongs to a qualified provider, not to a form. Nothing on Rbundle is tax, legal or accounting advice.

At the firm level rather than the individual. That means manual review, licence lookups against the relevant registries — state accountancy boards, bar directories, the USPTO roster — and proof of professional indemnity cover.

Some services have absolute credential gates: a SOC 2 examination routes only to a licensed CPA firm, a legal matter only to counsel admitted in that jurisdiction.

One thing to be clear about in both directions: verification is a screening gate, not an endorsement. We check that a firm is who and what it says it is. We do not vouch for the quality of its work, and we do not advise or recommend.

To submit to a marketplace request, yes. Verification gates delivery, which is both what protects the business and what makes the panel worth being on.

A firm can see the requests it matches while verification is in progress. And if a business invites a firm by name, that firm can respond before verification finishes; the proposal is simply labelled so the business knows exactly what it is looking at.

The business decides: the marketplace, firms it names itself, or both.

On the marketplace a request reaches firms that offer the service, hold the credentials it requires, and can work where it is needed. Beyond those structural requirements, stated preferences — firm size, positioning, industry experience — affect which firms rank highest, not which are allowed to respond.

Firms cannot browse for other businesses’ requests. A firm sees only what was routed to it. That means less noise on one side and fewer strangers reading the brief on the other.

Several services requested as one item, quoted as one proposal.

A firm sees a bundle only if it can cover every service in it, and it responds with a single proposal for the whole thing. Engaging is all or nothing — that is what makes it one accountable provider rather than three separate procurements.

If no firm currently covers the full set, the business is told before sending, and can still send it.

The unit of competition. A bundle is one engagement covering several services, and only firms that can cover all of it are in the running — so the breadth a firm lists decides whether it sees the request at all.

A firm that lists narrowly will see the single-service requests and not the bundles.

Yes, and we say so at the moment it happens: the more services combined into one bundle, the more a provider eligible for several of them could infer about who is asking.

It is a notice, not a block. Combining services is genuinely useful, so the choice stays with the business — we just make sure it is an informed one.

Yes. Any request or bundle can be exported to CSV or Excel from its page. For a bundle that is one tab per service.

Yes, from account settings, and it takes effect immediately. That applies to both sides.

The login is severed — if it is the last account under that email, the login is deleted outright. Live requests are cancelled so providers cannot respond to them, and any identity revealed to a firm is deleted from our systems. A firm that closes stops being routed requests and can no longer be invited.

Be clear about what closure is not. Requests and answers are retained in anonymised form, with nobody attached to them, so we can understand what the market asks for. Closing an account never stops anyone signing up again later.

No. Nobody can.

Once identity has been revealed to a firm, deleting it from our systems removes it from our custody — it does not reach into theirs. We can guarantee we no longer hold or serve it. We cannot guarantee the firm forgets it.

Every request, bundle and engagement carries a code. Give us the code and we can look it up without either side revealing who they are.

Use the full code exactly as it appears — partial codes deliberately return nothing. General questions do not need a code at all. Nobody has to identify themselves to get help.

Check spam first. Several links requested in quick succession will have hit a rate limit — that is the control working rather than a fault. Wait about thirty minutes and try again.