DEV3 Mendfolk – Handyman Tasks Laravel Script with Prepaid Time Blocks, Offers, Timers & Escrow (Flutter Apps)

Mendfolk is a handyman tasks marketplace that you host yourself, built by DEV3 Technologies on Laravel 12 and Filament 4, with two Flutter apps: one for customers and one for fixers. A customer writes down what needs fixing, then either books a named fixer at that fixer's hourly rate or posts the job and compares offers. The money for the estimated time is taken up front as a prepaid block and held. The fixer runs a timer on site, anything beyond the block needs the customer's approval, and the unused part is refunded. The demo business is a fictional harbour town, Brackenhythe, with 1,600 customers, 120 fixers and about six months of task history, priced in New Zealand dollars with 15% GST included.

No live demo: 112 grouped screenshots and a desktop video tour show the marketing site (a photo hero and flat layouts), the public fixer pages, the customer account, the admin panel and both apps. Install it with the demo data to try every role on your own server.

Customers

• A public site with a photo hero, a short explainer of how the prepaid block works, a fixer browse page with category chips and sort buttons, trade cards with rates per skill, tools, portfolio and reviews, a booking wizard, and an account area with the live task, offers, top-ups and the bill.
• A customer app with a Fix List (jobs on ruled paper with an estimate on each line, a photo, a bundle of several jobs booked together), a brief, a fixer list with filters, fixer profiles and portfolios, and a time picker that shows only the hours a fixer is free.
• Two ways to book: pick a person, or post for offers and compare up to five offers side by side (hourly or fixed price, start time and block total) before accepting one.
• A paid block with a labour, fee and GST breakdown, a hold countdown, a start code to give the fixer, a live task with a timer against the block bar, a top-up approval with a reason, a photo and a countdown, and a chat with photos.
• A bill with minutes, labour, receipts and the refund of the unused block, a dispute, a rating and tip, a Mend Promise claim within 14 days, free or fee-bearing cancellation with the exact fee shown first, and a wallet.

Fixers

• A fixer app whose home is a spike of paper tickets, with open tasks that fit the fixer's skills (and how many of the five offer places are taken), a send-offer form with an hourly or fixed price, instant requests with a countdown ring, and a calendar with working hours, time off and a floor-and-ceiling rate per skill.
• Documents (ID, licence, insurance), a portfolio upload, a route to the job that shows the address only after booking, a start code pad with a try limit, and a timer with an 80% warning and unbilled minutes shown plainly.
• Top-up requests for more time or materials, receipts counted against a materials allowance, before-and-after photos, a bill submit step, a no-show wait timer, earnings by week, tier progress with strikes, and a cash-out request.

Admin panel

• A dashboard with six live counters and a flat Work on the bench widget showing timers running now and tasks today for each trade, refreshed every ten seconds.
• A task board by status, timers running now with minutes against the block, open tasks with no offers, task detail (brief, offers, timer events, top-ups, receipts, bill and split, chat transcript), and tabs by status with CSV export.
• Fixer applications, a documents queue for licences and insurance ending within 14 days, portfolio moderation, categories with rate bounds, disputes with a decision dialog, Mend Promise claims, flags (arrival far from the address, runaway timers, receipts without a photo), escrow balance, settlements, payouts and reports.

Time, money and fairness

• The prepaid block is the estimated minutes at the fixer's rate, plus the service fee, plus a materials allowance. Billed minutes round up to the next 15 and are capped at the paid block. A worked example is in the buyer guide.
• A top-up grows the block only after its payment succeeds, and a top-up that the customer does not answer expires. A bill that the customer does not confirm confirms itself after a set time. Defaults for all of these are settings.
• Fixers have tiers (apprentice, journeyman, master) with a commission by tier. Staff can read the chat, decide disputes and refund up to the bill.
• Every deadline is enforced when a record is read, so nothing waits for the scheduler. Card refunds are written in the same transaction as the money, sent after commit and retried. Money is stored as integer cents, and a reconciliation command (mendfolk:check) checks the escrow balance against the open tasks.

What is included

• The Laravel application with Composer packages and compiled assets inside (no Node.js or Composer on the server), both Flutter projects in apps/, the shared DEV3 Flutter package, a web installer and an HTML buyer guide.
• Demo data for the fictional harbour town: 120 fixers, 1,600 customers and thousands of tasks with offers, timers, bills, disputes and claims.

Good to know

• Payments and push are simulated by default. The simulated gateway works out of the box, so booking and paying need no keys. Stripe, Razorpay and PayPal drivers are included but were not run against real accounts. Push notifications are logged, not sent, until you add FCM or APNs keys.
• Nothing is charged without the customer. Block payments and top-ups need the customer to tap and pay; there is no charge to a stored card. Billable time stops at the paid block and anything beyond it is shown as unbilled.
• Stripe refunds have no idempotency key yet. A gateway timeout after Stripe accepted a refund can be retried, so check your Stripe dashboard for duplicates and add a key in the driver before you take real card payments.
• The apps were not tested on physical devices. They build as debug Android packages and run on the iOS simulator. The arrival location check was compiled and run on simulators only, and it flags a far-away start for support but never blocks a job. The fixer sign-up screen was tested only against the app's built-in demo server.
• Updates are polled, not pushed. Chat and job status refresh about every 5 seconds. There is no offline queue for the timer, no customer signature and no barcode scanning.
• Some race paths are not covered by the parallel tests. A payment against a hold expiring, an accept against an offer expiring in the same second, two parallel starts and parallel dispute refunds are not in the MySQL race checks. The order in which rows are locked is covered by a test, but that test proves the order, not MySQL blocking.
• A failed extension has two rough edges. An overlap after a failed extension is flagged on the same task rather than on the next job, and a second top-up after a failed extension does not retry the cells that were missing.
• Rejecting a fixer application suspends the account. There is no separate rejected status. In demo mode some thumbnails (brief photos, Fix List items and receipts) are generated tiles.
• Photos. The website uses two stock photos and the apps' demo mode uses seven more, all taken from Pexels. DEV3 could not open the Pexels pages to confirm the photographer or the licence line of each photo, so check each photo's page, or replace the files in public/images/photos and apps/*/assets/photos, before you launch publicly.
• Use MySQL or MariaDB on a live site. The Pest tests run on SQLite, where row locks do nothing; the concurrency checks that prove the locking run on MySQL 8.
• Demo data takes time to load. About 8,000 tasks take roughly 40 seconds on MySQL and longer on a slow host. If the installer stops part way, raise the request time limit and install again on an empty database, or choose an empty install.
• Name: Mendfolk is a working name checked by a web search only, not a trademark clearance. Check it before you launch under it.
• No hosted demo. Every customer, fixer and record in the screenshots is fictional. Install it with the demo data to try every role on your own server.

Quality checks

Mendfolk 1.0.0 passed the seven release gates of the DEV3 Laravel suite on the final code: static analysis (Larastan level 6, 0 errors), 147 Pest tests with 2,804 assertions, a front-end size budget (8.0 KB of JavaScript and CSS gzipped), migrations and seeding on MySQL 8 and SQLite, a headless-browser pass over 45 admin and home pages including a parallel-request check on the offer limit, an installer test from the zip, and a secret scan. The customer app passed analysis and 124 tests, and the fixer app 66 tests, with debug Android and iOS simulator builds. A review of the money and locking code led to fixes, each with a regression test. Lighthouse scores were not measured.