Care.com: Hire Caregivers

The app and website are glitchy. Signing up was an ordeal—Care.com happily took my money (I paid for a monthly subscription and paid for a premium subscription to have piece of mind in terms of background checks for contractors) but after that I had the hardest time setting up my request (signing up for a dog walker to come to my brother’s house twice a day, morning and afternoon). Every time I signed in to Care.com, a message comes up, saying “Someone already has this account associated with this email address”. Yeah. It’s me! It is ME who is trying to sign in after I just created an account. I had to resubmit my family information and a photo over and over and it STILL got rejected, even though I didn’t violate any of their guidelines. Then when I tried to re-book the dog walker that has ALREADY done the task I had to resubmit the information for the task over and over for the search engine to say, “There is no one available”. The dog walker herself was awesome. This is no shade on the actual employee/contractor; just the dang website and the app. I bypassed all of the nonsense and had the dog walker call me and we stayed in contact off the app. I know it is not the “correct” thing to do, but I couldn’t figure out how to do the app. I consider myself a smart and patient person but this experience made me feel dumb and impatient. Absolutely the worst app experience I have ever had. As soon as the dog walking services were no longer needed (brother returned home) I cancelled my subscription immediately. There was something that said that I cancelled only the Premium subscription. You have to go through additional steps to COMPLETELY cancel the subscription—otherwise you will be charged for the basic subscription at whatever frequency of payment you selected. Read the fine print so you don’t get screwed.

Wow, I hate to be this woman. However, as a marketing leader in the family space, let me say my disappointment in the app, service model, and, most importantly, customer service didn't meet any need or minimum amount of aid. We paid for the year membership with a significant discount. We got our account running and thought we were good to go. We got to booking our first babysitter, and everything was going great. The sitter ended up a no call no show, and then the messaging portion kept giving us an error message to “try again later.” when we reached support, we were passed around and told we didn't know why we couldn't get or message your sitter and told To cancel the booking with no other options for advice or help. When we discussed why and how we could fix the issue, I was told I'd already been given an answer and was then disconnected from support. We couldn't send messages, but the app could send a message to let the sitter know we were canceling. Also, we are unable to find the sitter profile. Did the app let someone book and confirm a job and then delete her account in less than 24 hours? Without notifying us? We’ve been denied a refund for the app and premium membership. Everything about our experience with care.com has been bad, off, or outright wrong. Working in the pediatric and family space, this was frustrating, worrying, and disappointing. Please consider not using this service.

I’m paying for the 3 month subscription. If I dare scroll through some profiles and hit “contact” to chat with candidates I like suddenly I’m getting random “so and so” has accepted your job. I never even saw this person’s profile or reached out to them. So why does this app keep doing that. It’s embarrassing and frustrating. I can only respond that’s it’s a technical error. I hate paying for something that’s barely working properly. Update from Care customer service Thank you for letting us know you are experiencing an issue. Our Technical team is aware of the issue and is working diligently to resolve it. We greatly appreciate your patience and assistance in this matter! ?I would like to tell you that as a tip you can write the numbers with an asterisk, while we find a solution. Like I said this is a rubbish app. You can’t charge for a product that can only work with “tricks”. There’s no trick in taking $80 from my bank account.

Paid for two months, got nothing. Will stick to local contacts. Time and money put here. Seeking care in the Hill Country/North East San Antonio/west and South Austin

I have found care.com to be very helpful in finding, and maintaining care for my loved ones. The filters are very nice once you understand how to use them, otherwise that can be a bit of a stumbling block to having access to possible workers…my advice is to chat with the business office if this happens and they can help. I have used this service over the years and recommend it. What would be nice is if there were an easier path to find the contact information for the business office or to “chat” with them, That is not easy to navigate to, but is a good place to go to broaden your search capabilities/access to more caregivers.

I have lost sitters and more bc of the app crashing. No refund or help.

I'm using this app as a caregiver. I have yet to get my profile completed as the app repeatedly crashes with each step I the set up process. This is extra frustrating as I've already purchased a subscription.

Takes forever to load. Keeps crashing. Terrible app.

This company will close you account and not refund you - and even worse won’t even tell you why but will tell you that they refuse to pay you your money back. A nanny I hired was crazy, crystals, moon current, Jupiter ascending theory type of crazy. I was super nice to her but it didn’t work out when she had to keep the kids directed to their tasks which she thought kids should lead themselves. Anyways this girl reports me and care.com closes your account without any notice. They didn’t even tell me, they just kept the app saying it wasn’t working. I had to waste an hour waiting for customer service (also shows how bad this company is). Just for them to refuse to tell me why the account was closed, then finally telling me. It’s crazy to think someone can report you and they close your account without any form of defending yourself off the word of someone random online. They refused to refund me saying that I never had a paid account nor did I ever pay. I said it was ridiculous to say this when they are looking at my account details. I finally take the time to show them the charge and then they say take it up with the credit card company to get a refund… WHAT!!! So they scam me, steal money, will close your account based on any ticked off caregiver, will not refund your account and will not even tell you that they closed it but will make it seem like the app is not working. Besides them being a complete scam and I have also read the internet and heard from people after this incident that they do this all the time. But besides that their app is slow, it takes forever to respond and sittercity is way better. Go to sitter city, they are a way better app.

The Care.com app is a simple enough and easy to use. I gave it four stars because it is a little bit slow while loading up or searching. And something that would make this service better is if we could search keywords, when we’re searching for tutors or sitters, which is not available on the app or the website. and even if this doesn’t change for we, the people looking to hire someone. I should hope that the people looking for work are able to use keywords at least on their end. But I do like that there’s less of an AI vibe, care.com doesn’t show me how well and personal they know me like my other apps and browsers do and that’s comforting. 😂