Care.comReviews 12,031

I was a member of care.com last year and we hired a great caretaker for our children. Yesterday, I rejoined Care as we are again looking for a sitter in our area. They "updated" their terms of use and apparently, can now "fire" you from using their services if you have any offenses that they don't like. I had a minor misdemeanor from 17 years ago, that my career at a Level 1 Trauma Center doesn't even blink at. This literally happened 1/2 of my life ago. Yesterday, received notification that care.com had run a background check on me and they were cancelling my account due to said ticket.

This is a scam and I'll be damned if I'm going to let some B. S. corporation determine that I am not "worthy" to use their services. I will happily take my money elsewhere and care.com can literally kiss it.

I'm a CBI & caregiver for children with special needs. I've used Care.com for several years now and found some pretty great positions through the site. I like how you can search for and state all your criteria in the search so you're not wasting your time speaking with a family that's not the right fit for your schedule and minimum pay rate. I don't believe I've ever had a premium membership and never needed one to get the best jobs on the site. (My resume probably speaks for itself.) I have only a couple complaints, which is why I give 4 stars and not 5:

1.) The cost of background search is $80 to the care provider. This is about 4X more expensive than just walking into a police station and getting one done for $20. I swear it used to be cheaper for us.

2.) They allow families to pay caregivers well below minimum wage. I think if a family is publically stating they plan to hire a care provider for 3 children at $6.00/hr they should just be removed from the page. It looks tacky.

3.) Families are able to state their "pay range" to make it appear they're willing to pay up to a certain amount. I've found that 9/10 times they're only willing to pay the bottom number in the range. This can screw up search criteria. For example, the minimum I accept is $18/hr. Someone can say they'll pay "$15-20/hr" so those jobs show up in my search. In reality, the employer only plans to pay $15/hr. In this case, it's a waste of my time to even send them a cover letter. This may be out of Care.com's control to some extent, but it's frustrating for the caregiver.

As a care provider, I do like the site overall and have been mostly happy with my experience. As long as you have excellent references and use basic common sense, care.com can be a great tool! I would recommend it for most care providers.

I wish I had never joined. I hired a nanny for 2 weeks. Payed her about $800 but had to pay over $600 for that one time payment. $200 for the first quarter for using them to deduct taxes, then $209 more because payment did not go through the following quarter, in addition $100 for the initial start of using them to deduct taxes, and now $100 for closing of taxes this year. REALLY? How is is possible to rip people off like this and get away with it? So pissed I even joined this damn site. D

Important note! If you downloaded a care.com "app" you MUST close your account within the app. Care.com makes NO effort to tell you this on their website, I believe that is intentional. If you are having problems getting care.com to close your auto-rebill membership this IS why!

After an injury I subscribed to Care.com. I hired two "caretakers." One was awful (put 4 load of laundry into the washing machine--all at once). The second one was quite good. So only one-star? Yes, Care.com double billed me. The 1st person said: "I take cash only I do not participate in care.com collecting for me. So I paid her $60 and Care.com then billed me for $66. Upon contesting the charge with Bank America Care.com reversed the charge.

However, to get out of auto-billing I wrote *******@care.com a few days before the auto-charge date. I also (as care.com's site told me to) called to close the account. Calling was a joke! You cannot reach a human if you spent a year on hold. Then after the auto-charge date passed care wrote me saying: "Oh you have to close your account through the Apple app." I'm sorry if I buy a product and a 3rd party bills for it, I still deal with you to close the account. And care.com did not respond immediately, which they could have (c'mon it's done automatically).

In short I believe that they pawn billing of intentionally knowing many will not be able to figure out how to get out of automatic billing.

Good concept but dangerous. I too believe that something was stolen from my house, though I cannot prove it. How do you vet someone? Pay care.com a big $ for a Corey report? Sorry, though one of my caretakers was good I say:

BEWARE

I joined care.com years ago and it was very simple. Sign up, apply, message client, do job. Now, you have to pay a monthly just to be able to contact people. So, you can fill out all the questions, write a bio, apply, and it doesn't matter if you haven't paid. It's disgusting. This site it supposed to be for people who need to make money and families who are just trying to hire some help. Then if you want to change your bio, it has to be reviewed. Ha! So now you can't even put an email in your bio to contact families without paying the premium. It's turned into a greedy money grabbing company and I refuse to use it.

I recently retired from my state job working with elderly mentally disabled patients and was looking for a part time job doing similar job or working with animals. I filled out a lot of info and then they wanted my picture, and reviews, then my credit card info. I saw some jobs that I applied for, but after a day or more I wondered why no-one responded to me. Turns out that if you don't pay for premium service that nobody can contact each other. After reading the reviews, I realized that I wasn't the only one disillusioned by Care.com. I thought they sounded perfect, even on their tv commercial. I guess I should just post on Facebook, it's just as risky.

I wanted to browse care.com to see if it would be worth joining. The site makes you set up a profile which automatically turns into a job posting. But I didn't pay for the membership so there is no way to contact caregivers. Several caregivers contacted me about the job I "posted" without me actually understanding a profile turned into a job listing... I felt bad because I couldn't contact these poor people without paying money to do so. So I quickly deleted my profile. WASTE OF TIME.

Wrote an ad for a person to do laundry at my motel and got 12 responses all telling me they were interested in home housekeeping positions and either they were to lazy to actually read my ad or they paid to be pushed to every posting. I got zero people who asked about the job I actually posted. I tried to post for a pet sitter and I was getting erroneous error messages so I started again and had to rewrite the!@$%#@ ad only to get "we couldn't post your ad at this time. Try again later and my information was wiped again! Tried to call-cannot locate any way to speak to a human. Tech support opened a link to nowhere. Sent email and got response: "we'll try to get back to you in 24 but because we are experiencing high holiday volume (on January 5th? Must be a holiday I've never heard of) and it may take longer to get back to you. Need someone in 2 days so, like my title said - worthless

I used care.com to find childcare, and after getting few responses I found some one who I thought was good. After a month of working for us, she stole checks from us and used them to withdraw over $7,000 from our bank account. I reported her to care.com and was thoroughly disgusted with their response. I also know another person in my neighborhood who had a similar thing happen to her with someone she hired on care.com. Beware!

I was on care for over ten years and had multiple 5-star reviews. I got harassed by a parent on the site--wasn't able to block or report him. For some reason, care took down my profile and terminated me. I live on a chain of islands... There's maybe only one or two sitters available on the site within 20 miles of me. You'd think that they'd honor their long term, 5-star employees, especially when we are almost the only person for a few towns... They have also raised prices and now charge for every single service.
I know of someone personally who works for families found on care---they passed every background check. Thing is, they shouldn't have passed any bg checks due to criminal and mental history.

I was looking for a babysitter and there were only 3 in my area. When none of them could fit my schedule I was done with the site. But care.com refused to refund the $30 I spent less than 7 hours earlier. They stole from me. If I chose to spend MY money and chose to return the services I should have gotten it back. It's not like I permanently distorted what they offered like it was food or something that couldn't be returned. I will never use them again and I will never recommend this site.