Marketplace for freelance sound engineers
Gigwell pays 18,000 sound engineers every Friday, in seconds.
How a freelance marketplace replaced three payment providers and a Monday spreadsheet with one ledger and instant payouts.
- Headquarters
- Manchester
- Freelancers
- 18,000
- Countries paid
- 14
- Rails
- RTP, Faster Payments, SEPA Instant
- freelancers paid every Friday
- 18,000
- median payout on instant rails
- 1.6 s
- weekly reconciliation, down from 11 hours
- 40 min
The problem
Payday was a three-day wait and a Monday spreadsheet.
Gigwell matches studios, venues, and touring acts with freelance sound engineers. Clients pay when a booking is confirmed; engineers are paid once the job is signed off.
Before Ledgerline, that money passed through three providers. Payouts took three to five days, failed transfers surfaced a week later, and the finance team spent every Monday reconciling exports by hand. Engineers noticed. Faster-paying platforms were winning their calendars.
How they use Ledgerline
One balance per engineer, one payout run per week.
Gigwell now gives every engineer a Ledgerline account. Client payments land in Gigwell’s operating balance and move to the engineer’s balance the moment a job is approved, so engineers can see what they have earned before it is paid.
- 01
Friday payout run
A single scheduled job creates 18,000 payouts with idempotency keys, so a retry never pays anyone twice.
- 02
Instant where it exists
Ledgerline picks RTP, Faster Payments, or SEPA Instant for each bank account and falls back to SWIFT elsewhere.
- 03
Webhooks into the app
Signed payout.settled events update the engineer’s earnings screen without polling.
Payout run · Friday 7 November
18,000 payouts · $6,214,880.00
- Maya Okafor$1,250.00RTPSettled: 1.4 s
- Tomás Reyes€860.00SEPA InstantSettled: 1.7 s
- Ines Kowalczyk€2,140.00SEPA InstantSettled: 1.8 s
- Callum Shaw£715.50Faster PaymentsSettled: 1.2 s
- Aiko Tanaka¥186,000SWIFTSettled: Next day
Friday used to be the day our support queue filled up. Now engineers see the money before they’ve packed up the desk.