Talk for 23 minutes.
Pay for 23 minutes.
Mintellectuals is a marketplace for expert advice where the meter is honest. Book an hour, use what you need, pay for what happened. Your expert is paid before you close the tab, whether they live in Berlin or Lagos.
Mintellectuals
Expert time, sold by the minute
- 5%
- platform fee, not 15%
- <1s
- to settle, any country
- $0
- to join, browse or list
Priya N.
Seed fundraising & GTM
Elapsed
00:00
of 60:00 booked
Due so far
$0.00
$2.00/min · $120.00 held
$120.00 is held, not spent. The meter decides the rest.
An example booking, settling in real time.
Nobody sells you 90 seconds of advice. A 30-cent fee is the reason.
Card processing costs a percentage plus a fixed fee. That fixed part is small until the thing you are selling is small, and then it is everything.
What a card rail costs you
% of revenue
A 90-second answer
$0.50
62%
$0.31 of it disappears before anyone says hello. Economically impossible.
One honest minute
$2.00
18%
$0.36 of it disappears before anyone says hello. Economically absurd.
A 30-minute call
$50.00
3.5%
$1.75 of it disappears before anyone says hello. Economically fine.
Calculated from Stripe’s published US online rate of 2.9% + $0.30. International cards, currency conversion and disputes push most merchants higher.
Then the payout leaks again
The whole promise of these marketplaces is the right person regardless of geography. But moving money across borders costs 6.36% on global average, and 12.66% through a bank. An expert in Manila waits days and eats the spread.
And 15% buys you a middleman
Somebody has to hold the money between booking and delivery, decide what happens on a no-show, and push refunds through. That job is precisely what a double-digit cut pays for. It is not paying for better advice.
So the platforms round up. Fifteen-minute blocks. Hour minimums. A checkout that only makes sense above twenty dollars.
The unit of sale was chosen by the payment rail, not by you.
Four steps, and one of them is just talking.
No subscription, no booking fee, no minimum session length. You pay for advice and nothing else.
- 01
Find someone worth an hour
Search by the thing you actually need solved. You see the rate, genuine open slots, and reviews left only by people who completed a call.
- 02
Book, and see what gets held
Pick a slot. The most the session could possibly cost moves into escrow. Escrowed, not charged, and not ours to spend. The number is on screen before you agree to anything.
- 03
Talk, with the meter in view
Video, voice or chat. The meter runs where you can both see it, counting the same number. No surprise line item afterwards.
- 04
Settle at what you used
You hang up. The expert is paid for the minutes that happened, the remainder is back in your balance, and you get a receipt. In about a second.
The part nobody else does
Cancel late, or get stood up, and there is nothing to claw back. The money was never spent, so a refund is just a smaller number at settlement. No support ticket, and nothing to reverse.
Move the slider. Watch the difference show up.
Set a rate, book a length, then decide how long the call actually ran. Everything below recalculates, including what the same call would have cost you somewhere else.
23/ 60 min
Left earlyRan the full slot
On Mintellectuals
- Held at booking
- $120.00
- You pay
- $46.00
- Returned to you
- $74.00
- Expert receives
- $43.70
- Our 5% fee
- $2.30
Settled in under a second, in full, wherever the expert lives. Dollars land in their balance. No wire, no FX spread, no waiting.
On a 15% platform, card rails
- Charged
- the whole block, whether you used it or not
- $120.00
- Returned to you
- $0.00
- Expert nets
- after a 15% cut and a cross-border payout
- $95.51
You keep $74.00 more.
The expert takes home -$51.81 more.
Same call. Same expert. Different plumbing.
The 15% is Clarity.fm’s published expert fee. The 6.36% is the World Bank’s Q3 2025 global average cost of a cross-border payout to a bank account. Billing the booked block rather than the minutes used is modelled as the common case across paid-booking platforms, not as any one platform’s behaviour. Our column assumes the expert keeps dollars; converting to local currency runs through a partner and costs extra.
One meter. However you want to talk.
The billing engine does not care whether it is a face, a voice, or a paragraph. We start with calls because that is what people already know how to buy. The rest is the same machinery.
The scheduled call
Video, screen share, and a recording if you both want one. The meter runs while you talk and stops when you stop. This is the format we launch with, because it is the one people already understand.
Billable ticks
Grey means you were not charged
Keep 95%. Get paid before you close your laptop.
If you already sell your time, you know exactly where it goes. Fifteen percent to the platform, then a payout that takes a week and shaves a few more percent on the way to your account.
On $1,000 of billings, you take home
Here
$950
A flat 5% and nothing else
A 15% platform
$796
After the commission and a cross-border payout
That is $154 more per $1,000 you bill. On a full-time practice it is a raise you did not have to ask anyone for.
Both figures are before any conversion to local currency. Ours assumes you keep dollars; the comparison assumes a cross-border bank payout at the World Bank’s Q3 2025 global average of 6.36%.
Your rate, your unit
Per minute, per session, per answered message, or a monthly retainer. Charge $1 or $40 a minute. We do not set a floor and we do not round you up to the nearest half hour.
Your calendar stays yours
Two-way sync with Google, Outlook and CalDAV. Buffers, minimum notice, daily caps, blackout dates. Nobody books the hour you were going to spend with your kid.
Paid before the tab closes
Settlement lands in about a second, in full, whether you are in Toronto or Nairobi. Dollars, straight into your balance, with no invoice to chase and no seven-day pending state. Cash out to a local bank through a partner whenever you want to.
No-shows are already handled
The money is confirmed before you join the room. If they never turn up, your cancellation policy pays you and it happens automatically. You do not open a support ticket.
Open to anyone. Mark yourself as an expert and tell us what you advise on.
The list of things we took out.
Most of what makes booking an expert annoying has nothing to do with the expert. It is everything wrapped around them.
No subscription
You pay for advice. There is no monthly fee for the privilege of being allowed to pay for advice.
No booking fee
The amount held at booking is the absolute maximum you can be charged. Nothing appears at checkout that was not on screen already.
No minimums
No fifteen-minute blocks. No hour minimums. If the answer takes four minutes, buy four minutes.
No processing week
Settlement is immediate and complete, in dollars, in any country. Your expert is not quietly financing your call for seven days.
No refund arguments
Unused time was never charged in the first place, so there is nothing to dispute and nobody to email about it.
No wallet, no seed phrase
Sign in with your face. Nothing to install, nothing to connect, nothing to remember. You top up a dollar balance once, and after that booking is one tap.
There is a serious amount of payments engineering underneath all of this. You are never going to have to look at it, which is rather the point. If you are curious anyway, it is in the FAQ.
Soon, your software can hire them too.
AI assistants keep walking into walls that need a person. A jurisdiction-specific tax rule. A clinical judgement call. A quiet does this look right to you on something expensive.
Today the assistant stops and asks you to go find somebody. Because our pricing works at fifty cents, it will be able to buy eight minutes of a real expert instead, and carry on. Every expert here is also, quietly, an endpoint.
Not in the first release. Designed for from day one.
session trace
- 01assistant: drafting cross-border contractor policy
- 02blocked: needs a human with Portugal + US tax scope
- 03found: Priya N. · $2.00/min · available in 4 min
- 04booked: 8 minutes · $16.00 held
- 05settled: 6 min used · $12.00 charged · $4.00 returned
- 06assistant: resuming with reviewed policy
The things you were about to ask.
Is it live yet?
Not yet, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We are building. The early access list decides who gets in first and it genuinely shapes which vertical we open with, so the note you leave gets read.
How does the money actually work?
You fund a balance in dollars, once. At booking, the maximum the session could possibly cost moves into escrow that neither we nor the expert can spend on our own — releasing any of it takes a signed meter reading from your device. When the call ends it settles in one step: the expert receives 95% of the minutes you used, we take 5%, and everything unused returns to you immediately.
How do dollars get in, and how does an expert get them out?
You top up with a card or a bank transfer through a licensed partner, which involves a one-time identity check, the same as any payment app. Your balance is held in dollar-denominated stablecoins, so every number you ever see is a dollar. Experts can hold that balance, spend it, or cash out to a local bank through the same partner network. That last step is the one part of the flow that is neither instant nor free, and it is not something we control.
So what is under the hood?
Instant settlement rails built specifically for dollar payments rather than adapted from something else. Moving money on them costs a fraction of a cent, which is the only reason a 90-second answer is economically possible, and why an expert in Lagos is paid the same way and at the same speed as one in Berlin. You will never interact with it, there is nothing to install or connect, and every number you see is denominated in dollars. If you want the engineering detail we are happy to talk, but you should not need it to book a call.
What happens to escrowed money if you go down mid-call?
The escrow sits on the settlement layer, not in our bank account, so you can reclaim it yourself without us. There is a built-in delay on that path, deliberately, so an expert cannot be cut off mid-sentence by a buyer walking away. The point is that the money is never ours to lose.
What if the expert does not show up?
You are made whole automatically. The settlement is zero, and because nothing was ever charged there is no reversal to wait for and no ticket to open.
What if I need to cancel?
The expert sets their own policy and you see it before you book. Whatever it says, it is applied as a smaller settlement rather than a charge followed by a refund, so the outcome is immediate either way.
Are calls recorded?
Only when both people agree, and it is off by default. Consent is captured in the room, retention is limited, and you can get the transcript without keeping the video.
Who can list as an expert?
Anyone. There is no application queue, no velvet rope and nobody deciding whether you are worth listing. If people will pay for your time, set a rate and put it up. Standing comes from the record instead of a gatekeeper: reviews can only be left by someone who actually completed and paid for a call, so a profile earns its reputation rather than being handed one on the way in.
Why 5%? What is the catch?
There is not one, it is just arithmetic. A platform on card rails spends 3.5% to 4.5% on processing every single transaction, so it cannot charge you 5% and survive. Our settlement cost is a fraction of a cent, which means our fee pays for discovery, trust and safety, dispute handling and the scheduling layer rather than paying a card network. Topping up your balance by card does touch card rails once, which is exactly why we would rather you topped up in larger amounts than paid per booking.
Be there when the meter starts running.
The list is open to everyone, whichever side you are on. Tell us what you would use it for and it genuinely decides what we build first, and which vertical we open with.