Independent professionals & their clients — no platform required
CC the court: dispute protection inside your inbox
Most service work never touches a platform — it's a Gmail thread between a client and a freelancer. CC Recourse on the thread and the venue travels with the conversation: terms witnessed, log preserved, ruling available if it ever goes wrong.
The Upwork dispute queue at least exists. The bigger market is the work that happens with no platform at all: a designer and a founder, an agency and a client, negotiated in an email thread, paid by bank transfer. When that goes wrong today, the options are awkward calls, bad reviews, or small-claims court over $1,400.
The email-witness flow: at engagement start, either party adds witness@recourse.so to the thread and the other confirms — that confirmation is the venue agreement. From then on the thread is the interaction log: the quoted scope becomes the terms, deliveries and feedback accumulate as evidence, timestamps come from the headers. If a dispute opens, either party emails dispute@recourse.so from the same thread; the bundle assembles itself and the ruling arrives as a reply-all, reasoning attached.
Worked example — the rejected logo
A $600 logo engagement agreed in-thread: spec, one revision round, ten days. The designer delivers a day late, to spec; the client rejects on taste — "not what I imagined" — and refuses the offered revision round.
Ruling: client 75% / designer 25%. The deliverable met the written spec — taste is not breach (MC-2); rejecting without giving the offered cure a chance weighs against the client (MC-5); one day's delay earns the designer a modest deduction (MC-3). 75% of the fee is owed to the designer; the refunded portion carries no right to use the marks (SD-5).
Without escrow, the ruling is the leverage: a reasoned decision from a named venue both parties agreed to, in writing, before the work began. It settles most arguments on arrival — and where the parties did use an escrow or payment hold, the standard instruction webhook executes it.
How the machinery works
1. Either party cc's witness@recourse.so → thread "requested"
2. The other party replies, witness still cc'd → thread "witnessed"
(that reply is the venue agreement — both parties get a confirmation)
3. Either party emails dispute@recourse.so in-thread,
stating the breach and optionally "Amount: 700 EUR"
→ bundle assembled from the thread:
opening exchange = terms · messages = log ·
attachments = deliveries · no amount = declaratory
4. Ruling replies to both parties in minutes → escalated cases go to the Recourse bench,
final ruling follows in the same threadStatus — early access
The witness engine ships with the venue today: thread lifecycle, venue-agreement detection, bundle assembly from the correspondence, adjudication, and the ruling reply are all live (transport is ESP-agnostic — inbound mail is delivered to the venue by webhook). Mailbox routing for the @recourse.so addresses is being enabled with a small design-partner cohort of agencies and freelancer collectives. Join the design-partner cohort — or use the API directly today by posting the thread as the log yourself.