Juggle Street vs AusBabysitters

Juggle Street has been running since 2014, started in Sydney, and is the platform most Inner West parents name first. It is a closed marketplace: you join, you get verified, you post a job, helpers apply, and the money runs through the app. We are an introduction service. You browse public profiles, message a babysitter or nanny, and arrange the job between yourselves. Those are different shapes, and the price difference follows from the shape.

What a year costs

On Juggle Street a family pays $120 a year or $60 a month. A helper pays $50 a year or $25 a quarter, plus a one-off $5 fee for the identity check. Then there is the per-job fee: 5% added to the family's payment and 5% deducted from the helper's, on one-off jobs. Recurring jobs carry no fee. Take a family that books a babysitter one Saturday night a fortnight, four hours at $35. That is $140 a night in wages, plus $7 in fees on each booking, plus the membership. Over a year, about 26 nights, it comes to roughly $300 on top of the babysitting, and the babysitter gives up about $240 of theirs between the membership, the identity fee and the per-job cut.

Here the same family pays the babysitter $140 a night and nothing else. The babysitter keeps all of it. We do not take a membership, we do not take a commission, and we never see the money. That is not a launch offer: the site is free for babysitters and nannies permanently, and our pricing page says so in full.

Recurring jobs are worth a separate sentence, because Juggle Street is fairer there than the headline suggests. A regular weekly arrangement carries no per-job fee once it is set up. If you hire one nanny for one ongoing role, the 5% stops mattering and the membership is the whole cost.

What each one checks

This is where the honest comparison gets closer than our pricing page would have you believe.

Juggle Street puts every new user, parent or helper, through a biometric identity check with Stripe Identity, and requires a verified WWCC before any helper aged 18 or over can apply for work. A family there can assume that every adult helper has been through both, and a helper can assume the family has been through the first.

We check the same two things, and we check them properly: a government ID with a matching selfie, and the WWCC confirmed by a person here with the NSW Office of the Children's Guardian, not a box a babysitter ticks. A profile that has passed both carries a badge with the month. A profile that has not says "not checked" beside each track, in plain words. What the badge means has the whole procedure.

The difference is that ours is optional. A babysitter can list here without any check, because a privately arranged babysitter in NSW is not legally required to hold a WWCC, and pretending otherwise would shut out exactly the people the law leaves room for. So you will see unverified profiles here, clearly labelled, and you decide what to do with them. On Juggle Street you will not, for adults.

Where Juggle Street is better

Size, first. They quote a community of 180,000 or more across Australia and New Zealand. We are new, and we started in eight Inner West suburbs. Our number is in the table above and it updates as people join, but it is not 180,000 and will not be for a long time.

Money handling, second. Payment runs through their app, and paying parent members get public liability cover, arranged through Aon and QBE, on jobs awarded through the platform. If you want that done for you, they do it and we do not. Here you pay the babysitter directly and the arrangement is yours, the same as hiring someone a friend recommended.

Behavioural signals, third. A Juggle Street helper profile shows a response-rate star rating and a cancellation counter, things a helper cannot type in. We show one such thing, "usually replies within a day", and only once a babysitter has had enough conversations for it to mean anything. We cannot show jobs completed because we do not know when a job happens.

Where we are better

Price, obviously. Free for both sides, no commission, and babysitters keep every dollar. Against their numbers that is worth about $300 a year to a regular family and $240 or more to a working babysitter.

Browsing, second, and this one matters more than it sounds. Every profile here is public. You can open a suburb page, read the whole profile of everyone listed there, see rates, availability, languages and who is verified, all before you have an account. Messaging takes an account, and that is free too. On Juggle Street parent profiles are always private, and a helper aged 18 or over chooses whether theirs is public at all. We think you should be able to see who is there before you decide whether to sign up.

Reviews, third. Both sides review each other here, and both reviews are published where the other side's next match can read them. On Juggle Street, parents rate and review their helper. Their reviews are tied to a job the platform saw completed, which is the stronger proof that a job happened; ours open once two people have written to each other, which is the most a site that never sees the booking can require.

And the rate. Here the babysitter sets their own range on their profile and a family's ad can suggest a figure but never sets one. On Juggle Street the family names the hourly rate when posting the job. For a babysitter with experience, that is a real difference in who holds the pen.

If you are a family in Sydney

Start here, because it costs nothing to look. If your suburb has babysitters you like, message them. If it does not yet, the page will say so plainly, and Juggle Street's size is a genuine reason to go there instead. Looking here costs nothing, so there is no reason to pay for the answer first.

If you specifically want the payment, the insurance and the address handling done inside an app, Juggle Street is built for that and we are not.

If you are a babysitter or nanny

If you work regularly, the maths is simple: $50 a year plus 5% of every one-off job there, against nothing here. A babysitter earning $400 a month on one-off jobs gives up close to $300 a year on Juggle Street between the membership and the fee. Keep both profiles if you want the reach, but there is no reason to not be listed here, and getting verified here costs you nothing either.

One thing to weigh in their favour: every family you meet there has passed an identity check. Here it is optional for families, though a verified babysitter can ask a family to do one from the conversation.