I'm a single father and I have a toddler age child for an extended period of custody. I work remote from home and I'm finding that I'm not able to keep up with my work and I'm also definitely not able to keep up with things that need to be done around my house, particularly with the weather change into spring and summer approaching. So I signed up for care.com today and placed an ad to have someone come and watch my child for 4 hours while I work at home. As a one-time thing to observe the person and also see if the service works out for me or not. I've received a few messages and one of the persons I selected is nearby. Without knowing how care.com works for payment and booking, I was just working out details of what I'm looking for through messaging. The sitters sent me a message saying this is my number when you want to finalize everything. I didn't think anything of it and I was like sure. I'll send you a message in a little bit. This is my number. Then I sent another message saying hey I don't know how it works with payment. Do you take cash or venmo? The response was either works. It was then that I decided to look into it and see that care.com recommends you keep interactions through the website and payments as well.

I used to drive for Uber, and I'm going to presume that care.com is the same way as Uber, and it takes a while for the the sitter to receive payment and probably has to pay a fee through the job. I'm okay with having a direct relationship with a sitter, but as a first-time thing, should I be cautious of this?