Accepting a contract means installing someone else’s software on your machine. On hourly work one of those tools decides whether your time is paid at all, so it is worth knowing what each does before you agree to it.
The stack below is the common one. Projects vary, and a client can bring its own tools, so treat this as what to expect rather than a fixed list.
The usual stack
Slack for communication. Project channels, announcements, and the place questions get answered. Both micro1 and Mercor run on it.
Deel for contracts and payroll. You sign through it and, on many projects, get paid through it. micro1 also uses Stripe on some projects.
Feather for the work itself. This is where tasks are delivered and completed, and it is not tied to one platform: contractors encounter the same Feather interface on micro1, on Ethos and elsewhere. It has its own exams, so passing a platform’s screening does not always mean you are finished with tests.
A time tracker, and which one depends on the platform. micro1 uses Hubstaff. Mercor uses Insightful, formerly called Workpuls.
What the time trackers record
People are uneasy about this, reasonably. The fear and the reality differ in ways that matter, so the detail is worth getting right.
Hubstaff can record randomised screenshots at roughly ten minute intervals. An organisation can configure between one and three per ten minute period, blur them, or switch them off entirely. It logs which applications and URLs you use while the timer runs, along with idle time.
Its activity percentage is the part most often misunderstood. Hubstaff measures activity from keyboard and mouse input in binary, marking each second active or inactive. It does not log your keystrokes and it does not record actual mouse movement. A low activity score means the input was sparse, not that anyone read what you typed.
Insightful records time against applications and websites and sorts them into productive, neutral and unproductive categories, with screenshots, configurable idle timeouts and real-time activity views.
In both cases the vendor decides what the software can do and the organisation decides what is switched on. Neither tool has one universal configuration, which is why two contractors on different projects can describe the same tool very differently.
Where this stops being a privacy question and starts being a pay question
Mercor’s documentation is direct: hours not captured through the tracker are not eligible for payment. Work done with the timer off is unpaid work, whatever you produced.
Hours can also be reduced after the fact. One contractor described disputing a deduction that took 4.43 logged hours down to 0.18 after being accused of using AI on the task, which they attributed to having an AI coding tool open in another window while waiting for work to load. Whether that reading was correct is not something this site can settle, but the shape of the risk is clear enough: what the tracker sees on your screen can be used to reassess time you have already logged.
The practical consequences are narrow.
- Start the timer before you start working, and stop it when you stop
- Close anything you would not want interpreted as doing the task for you, especially AI assistants, even if they are idle in another window
- Keep your own record of hours, so a disputed deduction is a conversation about evidence rather than memory
- Do not work around a tracker, because untracked time is unpaid time and tampering is a termination risk
What contractors dispute
Contractors on Mercor have argued publicly that screenshot collection is not clearly set out in the terms they signed, and that a monitoring tool recording a personal machine goes further than the contract describes.
That dispute is unresolved and this site cannot settle it. What is clear is that the tools are capable of screen capture, that platforms configure them, and that reading the terms of work before signing is the only way to know what you have agreed to on a given project.
If that trade is not one you want to make, it rules out hourly work on both of the largest platforms here. Session and task-based work is generally paid on an approved deliverable instead of on monitored time, which is a different bargain: see how you actually get paid for which roles work that way.
Before you install anything
- Check which tracker the project uses and what the platform has enabled
- Read the terms of work on monitoring specifically, not just pay
- Decide whether you are willing to run it on your own machine before you sign, since the decision is much harder once a contract has started
Browse the open roles to see which pay hourly and which pay per session or task, since that decides whether a tracker is involved at all.