How 1:1 bookings actually work on Avatok
A walk through the entire booking lifecycle — from a viewer hitting Book to the wallet credit landing — including the parts most platforms hide.
Most marketplaces show you a glossy "book a session" button and hope you don't think too hard about what happens next. Avatok's 1:1 bookings are deliberately the opposite. We want both sides — the creator selling time and the viewer paying for it — to know exactly what the platform is doing at every step. This post is the long-form version of that explanation.
1. The product: what a 1:1 booking is
A 1:1 booking on Avatok is a paid, scheduled video call between one creator and one paying viewer. The creator sets up a session offering with a price (per-minute, per-hour, or fixed), a duration, and an availability window. Viewers see the offering on the marketplace, pick a slot, pay, and show up at the meeting URL when it's time.
Behind that simple flow are about five subsystems working in concert. Here's what each of them does and why it matters.
2. The payment capture
When a viewer hits the final Book button, Stripe captures the full amount on their card and routes it to a platform-side balance. Nothing moves to the creator yet. The reason is simple: until the session actually happens, the money isn't earned.
Avatok supports two fee-bearer modes per offering:
- User-pays. The fee is added on top of your listed price at checkout. Viewer sees one combined total. Your bank deposit is the full listed amount.
- Creator-pays. The viewer pays the listed price exactly. The fee is deducted from your earnings on settlement. Your bank deposit is the listed amount minus the fee.
Both modes are mathematically equivalent from Avatok's side. The difference is purely UX: which number the buyer sees. There's no scenario in which one mode pays the creator more than the other.
3. The hold on the creator wallet
For creator-pays bookings there's an additional step. At confirmation time, the platform places a hold on the creator's wallet equal to the platform fee. We do this so the creator can't accidentally double-spend money that hasn't actually been earned yet. If the call ends cleanly, the hold is released. If the call no-shows or refunds, the hold is debited appropriately. If reconciliation gets stuck (very rare), the hold auto-expires forty-eight hours past the scheduled end so the creator's balance is never indefinitely shadowed.
Everything that happens to a hold lands as a row inmarketplace_transactions with a clear audit trail. If you want to see what changed, the transaction log is queryable from the wallet UI and exportable as CSV.
4. The meeting itself
At the appointed time, both parties join the meeting URL. The creator's side is authenticated through their Avatok account; the viewer's side is either authenticated or joins anonymously through a unique invite token. The platform records the start and end timestamps for billing and reconciliation purposes; we do not record the call itself unless the creator explicitly turns recording on.
If the call gets disconnected and rejoined inside the booked window, that's fine — the billing window is the slot, not the connection. If neither party shows, the no-show policy fires (see below).
5. End-of-call disposition
Within seconds of the call ending, our reconciler decides the outcome. There are five named dispositions, each with a fixed money consequence:
- Full release. Session ran for at least the booked duration. Funds move from escrow to the creator's wallet, minus the platform fee in creator-pays mode.
- Short-call release. The call ended early but the creator was present and started the work. Same release as a full run; we don't penalize creators for short calls the viewer chose to end.
- Viewer no-show. Creator was present; viewer never joined. Creator gets the full price minus the platform fee. (The viewer's no-show policy is in their pre-checkout disclosure.)
- Host no-show. Viewer was present; creator never joined. The viewer is fully refunded. Repeated host no-shows put the creator into a review queue.
- Mutual no-show. Neither side joined. Viewer is refunded, creator earns nothing, no penalty.
These dispositions are not negotiable post-hoc; they're a machine-readable contract the booking flow agreed to up front. If something exceptional happened — connectivity, a verified emergency, a misunderstanding — you can file a manual review with support@avatok.ai.
6. The payout
Funds released to your wallet are immediately part of your available balance. Once daily, Stripe sweeps your available balance to your connected bank account. There is no minimum balance and no waiting-period delay imposed by Avatok — the only delay is whatever Stripe's ACH or international wire takes to land.
You can change the payout cadence (daily, weekly, monthly) from the wallet UI or trigger a manual payout if you need money to land faster than the next sweep.
What we're still working on
Two parts of the booking system are not yet where we want them. First, reschedules from the viewer side still go through a basic accept-or-decline flow rather than a back-and-forth proposal mechanism — if you reject a reschedule we currently fall back to cancellation. Second, dispute resolution for the in-between cases (the call partially ran, one side felt unheard) is human-mediated rather than rule-mediated; we're building a clearer self-serve path for that, with the rules published in the help center before it ships.
If you want to see the exact code paths the dispositions take, the reconciler is documented in the help center. If you want a payout that didn't settle the way you expected re-examined by a human, write to support@avatok.ai with the booking id and we'll look at the full lifecycle log.