Independent Contractor Agreement

INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR AGREEMENT This Independent Contractor Agreement ("Agreement") is entered into between Benyamin Neil Louwrens, a sole proprietor doing business as "3DPrintDash" (registered fictitious business name "3D Print Dash") ("Company," "we," "us"), and the individual accepting this Agreement ("Contractor," "you"). This Agreement is effective on the date you accept it electronically. 1. RELATIONSHIP OF THE PARTIES. You are an independent contractor, not an employee, agent, partner, or joint venturer of the Company. Nothing in this Agreement creates an employment relationship. You control the manner, method, means, sequence, and details of how you perform the services, including which jobs you accept (you may decline, ignore, or not accept any job for any reason and without penalty), when you work, and your own production process and settings. You provide, own or otherwise control, and are responsible for, your own 3D printer(s), materials, tools, workspace, ventilation and filtration, fire detection and protection, and all other equipment (including equipment capable of printing the shipping label the platform provides for each order; any ordinary home or thermal printer is sufficient), and you bear your own operating costs, except that the Company pays all shipping, label, and carrier-pickup costs as described in Section 2. You choose your own methods, processes, settings, and the specific plastics and other materials you use, subject to the order's specifications, the filament and equipment manufacturers' instructions, the platform's prohibited-item rules, and applicable safety law. The Company does not select, inspect, install, service, or maintain your equipment or your premises, and does not direct how you ventilate, enclose, or protect them. That allocation describes who controls what; it is not a disclaimer of the Company's own duties, and Section 12 governs what may and may not be limited. You are free to perform services for others, including competitors, and you are not required to work exclusive hours or any minimum amount. Risks you take on, named rather than implied. Because you own and control the equipment, the materials, and the space they run in (above), you accept the risks that come with running them, and those risks are real enough to name: electrical faults, overloaded circuits and wiring; overheating, thermal runaway and fire, including a printer left running unattended; smoke, ultrafine particles, volatile organic compounds and other emissions from heating plastics; resins, solvents, isopropyl alcohol, adhesives and cleaning agents, and their storage, use and disposal; hot ends, heated beds, moving parts, cutting tools and lasers; and damage to your own home, tools or belongings, and injury to yourself, your household, your guests or your pets. You choose whether to print at all, what to print, where, on what equipment, and with what precautions, and you accept those risks for yourself. Where you print, and whose permission you need. You are responsible for making sure the space you print in is one you are actually allowed to print in: your lease or rental agreement, HOA or building rules, local fire and electrical codes, and any zoning or home-occupation rules that apply to running a business from where you live. You are responsible for reading and following the safety data sheet and the manufacturer's instructions for every material you use, and for the fire detection, extinguishing equipment and ventilation your setup and your materials call for. Nothing about accepting a job through the platform grants you permission you do not otherwise have, and the Company does not inspect your premises or verify any of this. If you are not permitted to print where you are, do not accept jobs. Telling us when something goes wrong. If a fire, smoke or fume event, electrical fault, injury, or property damage happens in connection with printing for the platform, or you receive a recall or safety notice for a printer or material you use for platform work, report it to us through the platform's incident form (Operator dashboard, or contact@slowebdesign.com if you cannot reach it) as soon as you reasonably can, and in any case within seventy-two (72) hours of becoming aware of it. Reporting is not an admission of anything and does not by itself affect your account or your payouts. We ask because a pattern across operators is something only we can see, and because an event nobody wrote down is one nobody can learn from. Emergencies come first: call emergency services before you tell us anything. None of this shifts to you a duty the law puts on the Company itself, and Section 12 governs what may and may not be limited. Shop name. Any shop or display name you choose on the platform is optional and is a label shown to customers and nothing more. It does not create, imply, or evidence a corporation, LLC, partnership, registered business, fictitious business name, DBA, trade name, or trademark, and choosing one does not register anything anywhere or give you any rights in the words. Your LEGAL NAME is what governs this Agreement, your tax reporting and Form 1099, your identity verification, your payout account, and every signature you give us. Where the two differ, the legal name controls. If you do operate through a registered entity, tell us, because the tax and payout records must match it. 2. SERVICES. The Company operates an online marketplace that connects customers seeking 3D-printed parts with independent operators. When you accept a job through the platform, you agree to deliver the RESULT the order specifies: a part that conforms to the order's specifications, packaged so that it arrives undamaged, sent on the carrier service the customer purchased, by the agreed date, with a photograph of the finished part recorded for quality verification. How you get to that result (your printer, slicer, settings, process, sequence, hours, and workspace) is yours to decide (Section 1). Shipping requirements, and why each one exists. These are requirements of the carrier or of what the customer bought, not Company preferences about how you work: (a) The customer buys a specific carrier service and the Company pays for it, so each order ships on the prepaid label the platform provides for that order. You print that label and affix it. You do not buy your own postage for an order, because the customer already paid for a specific service and a different one would not be what they bought. (b) Where the carrier service the customer purchased requires that carrier's own packaging, you must use it. USPS Priority Mail is the common case: USPS requires official Priority packaging for that service and supplies it free, delivered to your address. Where the carrier does not require particular packaging, the standard is the outcome: packaging sufficient to protect the part in transit and free of any other carrier's branding or markings that would confuse handling. Beyond that, the choice of materials is yours. (c) The Company arranges and pays for a carrier pickup at your address where the carrier offers one, so that you are not required to travel. Using it is optional and is offered for your convenience: you may hand the package to the carrier yourself at any location or time you choose, and doing so does not change your payout, is not reported against you, and is entirely your decision as an independent contractor (see Section 12). (d) Manual postage is a narrow exception, not an alternative. If the platform cannot issue a prepaid label for an order (the label purchase fails in the operator dashboard, or the Company tells you it cannot provide one), you may buy postage for that order yourself. (i) What to buy, and what to keep. Buy the carrier service the customer purchased or, if it is unavailable, the closest equivalent service. Keep an itemized receipt showing the carrier, the service, and the amount. (ii) What the Company pays. Consistent with Section 1's allocation that the Company pays all shipping and label costs, the Company reimburses the benchmark cost of that shipment: what the same carrier service cost, for the same weight, dimensions, origin, destination and delivery commitment, at the time you bought it. The benchmark is the carrier's own rate for that shipment, not the Company's internal estimate of what it should have cost. Where your documented cost is at or below the benchmark, the Company reimburses it in full. Where it exceeds the benchmark, the Company reimburses the benchmark and you carry the excess, unless the Company agreed to the difference beforehand, or the service you bought was the least expensive option that could still meet the delivery commitment for that shipment. (iii) What the Company does not pay. The Company may decline reimbursement for a shipment where no postage was in fact purchased, or where the cost is undocumented. Buying your own postage while a prepaid label is available for the order is outside this exception and is not reimbursable. (iv) How it is paid. Reimbursement is paid to you as reimbursement. It is not set off against, deducted from, or withheld out of any payout owed to you for work you have performed. (v) Verification. Where a documented manual-postage cost exceeds the benchmark for that shipment, either party may ask the other in writing to verify or explain it, identifying the order, the amount, and the benchmark. While such a request is open, the Company may pause further manual-postage purchases on your account. That pause does not affect job offers, accepting jobs, work already in progress, or payment for work you have done. It ends when you provide the receipt and the carrier's rate for that shipment, or fourteen (14) days after the request, whichever comes first. You may make the same request of the Company about a reimbursement it has declined, on the same terms and with the same time limit. (vi) Repeated use after notice. Continuing to buy your own postage after the Company has asked you in writing to use the provided labels is a material breach of this Agreement. An order shipped on a service other than the one the customer purchased may be treated as a non-conforming delivery under Section 6. Because labels are delivered electronically and carrier locations cannot be relied on to print them, the ability to print a shipping label with your own equipment (Section 1) is a practical requirement of providing the services. An order that does not arrive as specified, or that ships on a service other than the one purchased, may be treated as a non-conforming delivery under Section 6. 3. NO EMPLOYEE BENEFITS. You are not entitled to any employee benefits, including but not limited to health insurance, paid leave, retirement, workers' compensation, unemployment insurance, or disability insurance, from the Company. 4. TAXES (1099). You are solely responsible for all federal, state, and local taxes on amounts you earn, including self-employment tax. The Company will not withhold taxes. Where required, the Company may issue an IRS Form 1099. You agree to provide accurate taxpayer information (e.g., via the platform's payments provider). 5. PAYMENT. Customers pay the Company through the platform. The Company pays you the disclosed operator payout for completed orders, in full, through the platform's payments provider (Stripe Connect), subject to payout timing, any applicable review or dispute window, and applicable law. The platform's own fee is part of the customer's price and is never deducted from your disclosed payout. Payout amounts and the factors that determine them are disclosed in the platform before you accept or queue a job. Operator's-choice color and filament is the standard, base configuration: for those jobs the customer has not selected a specific color, finish, or filament brand, and you may select a suitable in-stock option consistent with the order's specifications and the platform's policies, which remains conforming regardless of which in-stock color you use. If a customer selects a specific color, finish, filament, or other customization, the order may include an optional customization charge shown to the customer before checkout; where such a charge applies, it is reflected in the payout offered to you for that job. The payout for a job reflects automated estimates of the work involved, including an automated estimate of support material, which is not a full slicer simulation and may occasionally over- or under-state the supports a print actually requires; you may review each job (including its estimated support needs) before accepting, and the disclosed payout is final and is not adjusted for ordinary differences between estimated and actual support work. By accepting or queuing a job you accept its disclosed payout, subject to rights that cannot be waived under applicable law. 6. QUALITY, FAILURES, AND REPRINTS. Print failures are a normal part of 3D printing. You acknowledge that the platform's pricing takes the ordinary incidence of failed prints into account. If a print fails or a part does not meet the order, you agree to reprint and deliver a conforming part at no additional charge to the customer, or to release the job for re-routing. WHAT IS AND IS NOT MEASURED. Only work you actually accepted is measured, and only on its outcome: did the delivered part conform, and did it ship by the agreed date. Repeated non-conforming parts, repeated late shipments, or repeated upheld disputes on accepted work may reduce your standing, limit job offers, or result in removal from the platform. If the platform lets you queue or claim jobs in advance, each queued job is a commitment you chose to make, and letting queued jobs lapse counts the same way as any other accepted job. DECLINING COSTS YOU NOTHING. You may decline, ignore, or simply not accept any offered job, for any reason or none, as often as you like. Declining is not a performance event. A decline is noted so that the same offer does not keep coming back to you, and it is never used against you: it never reduces your standing, never reduces the offers you receive, and is never a ground for removal. There is no minimum acceptance rate, no required response time to an offer, no required availability, and no required hours. We do not schedule you, assign you shifts, set your working hours, direct your route or travel, supervise your work in real time, or require you to complete Company training. If your standing is reduced, we will tell you why, and you may ask us to review the decision through the platform. 7. INDEPENDENT JUDGMENT; COMPLIANCE. You will perform the services in a professional, workmanlike manner and in compliance with all applicable laws, including product-safety, consumer-protection, export-control, and intellectual-property laws. You represent and warrant that you will not knowingly produce, and will not accept any job to produce, an item that is illegal, that infringes or misappropriates a third party's intellectual-property or other rights, that is a firearm or firearm component or other weapon or weapon part, or that is otherwise prohibited by the platform's policies (including the Prohibited Items section of the Terms). If you become aware that a job involves such an item, you will decline or stop it and notify the Company. YOU ARE NOT THE COMPANY'S COPYRIGHT REVIEWER. Nothing in this Agreement asks you to search for, investigate, or make a judgement about whether a design infringes anyone's rights, and no consequence follows from your not spotting one. The Company, not you, is responsible for responding to rights complaints, and operates the notice-and-takedown process described in its DMCA Policy. Your obligation is the narrow one stated above: do not knowingly produce a prohibited item, and if something looks wrong to you, you may decline it or report it. Declining or reporting for this reason costs you nothing and is never used against you. You will not represent, market, label, or advertise any printed part as food-safe, food-grade, FDA-compliant, or otherwise safe for food, beverage, or potable-water contact or for ingestion, and you will not accept any job calling for such a use. When printing, you will use ventilation, enclosures, and filtration appropriate TO THE SPECIFIC MATERIAL AND PRINTER you are using, and follow the filament and equipment manufacturers' safety instructions, because heating filament during printing releases ultrafine particles and volatile organic compounds and the right control differs by material: a particulate filter captures particles and does not capture a gas, so it is not a substitute for ventilation where the material emits one. You will not use a printer that the manufacturer or a safety regulator has recalled, or that is subject to an open safety notice you have not carried out, and you will tell us if a printer you have listed becomes subject to one. CUSTOMER RATINGS: YOU MAY NOT INFLUENCE THEM. A customer rating of 4 or 5 stars can release your payout earlier than the ordinary shipping and dispute-window schedule would. Because that gives you a financial interest in the rating, you must never act on it. You may not ask a customer to leave a rating at all, ask for a particular star level, offer or hint at anything in exchange for a rating, ask a customer to change or remove a rating, discourage or delay a negative one, or contact a customer about a rating for any reason. You may not retaliate against a customer who rates you poorly. Your payout is never at risk from a low rating in the sense that matters here: the ordinary schedule still pays you on the normal timetable, so waiting is always an option and pressure never is. Any solicitation or pressure will be investigated and may result in immediate removal from the platform, and we will act on customer reports of it. 8. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (COMPANY AND CUSTOMER). The platform, including its software, source code, design, user interface, workflows, branding, and content, is the exclusive property of the Company or its licensors and is protected by intellectual-property and trade-secret law. You receive no license to it other than to use the platform as intended to perform jobs. You will not copy, reproduce, reverse-engineer, scrape, adapt, reuse, or create derivative or competing works from the platform's code, design, or content. Customer-uploaded models and files are the property of the customer or its licensors. You receive a limited license to use them solely to fulfill the specific order, and you must not copy, retain after fulfillment, reproduce, distribute, sell, or use them for any other purpose. 9. CONFIDENTIALITY, TRADE SECRETS & NON-SOLICITATION. You may compete with the Company and perform services for anyone, including competitors (Section 1), and nothing in this Agreement restricts your right to earn a living. The limits below protect the Company's property only; they do not restrict your right to compete. The Company's confidential information and trade secrets include its source code, designs, pricing and matching methods, and its customer and operator lists and their contact information (the "Confidential Information"). You will keep the Confidential Information confidential, use it only to perform jobs on the platform, and not disclose, copy, retain after termination, or use it for any other purpose, including to build, operate, or assist a competing business. You will not use the Company's Confidential Information to solicit, divert, recruit, or transact off-platform with the customers or operators you learned of through the platform, you will not contact platform customers off-platform, and you will not include marketing or personal contact information in or with shipments. Nothing here prevents you from doing business with people or operators you already knew, or can reach through public means, independent of the Confidential Information. These obligations survive termination. CUSTOMER DATA: HOW YOU MUST HANDLE IT. To print an order you receive a customer's model file and their shipping address. That is their personal information and their design, not yours, and these rules apply to it for every job: (a) Use it only to produce and ship that order. Nothing else: not another customer's job, not your own products, not a portfolio, not training any model, not testing. (b) Do not give it to anyone else. You may not subcontract a job, hand the file to another printer, post it anywhere, or disclose the customer's address, except where the law compels you and you have told us first if you are permitted to. (c) Delete it when the job is done. Remove the customer's file and address from your computer, your slicer, your printer, its SD card, and any cloud or network folder within thirty (30) days of shipping, unless we ask you in writing to keep something for a live dispute. Keep only what your own tax records require, which does not include the model file. (d) Keep it to yourself while you have it. Store it on equipment you control, do not leave it on shared or public machines, and do not include personal contact information, marketing, or anything else beyond the order in the package. (e) Tell us fast if it gets out. If a customer's file or address is lost, stolen, accessed by someone else, or exposed (including by a lost laptop, a compromised account, or ransomware), notify us at contact@slowebdesign.com within seventy-two (72) hours of becoming aware, with what happened and what was affected. We may have legal notification deadlines that we cannot meet if you wait. Your ship-from address appears as the return address on packages and is therefore visible to customers. If you would rather not use your home address, you may use a business address or PO box that the carrier accepts. Defend Trade Secrets Act notice (18 U.S.C. § 1833(b)): You will not be held criminally or civilly liable under any federal or state trade-secret law for disclosing a trade secret that is made (i) in confidence to a federal, state, or local government official, directly or indirectly, or to an attorney, solely for the purpose of reporting or investigating a suspected violation of law, or (ii) in a complaint or other document filed under seal in a lawsuit or other proceeding. If you sue the Company for retaliation for reporting a suspected violation of law, you may disclose the Company's trade secret to your attorney and use it in the proceeding if you file any document containing the trade secret under seal and do not disclose it except pursuant to court order. 10. WARRANTIES. You represent and warrant that you are at least 18 years old, legally able to enter this Agreement, the owner or authorized user of the equipment you use, that your equipment is safe and properly maintained, and that you are able to print shipping labels with your own equipment and to ship orders to the packaging and shipping standard in Section 2. If you provide a filament and color inventory through the platform, you represent and warrant that it is accurate and that you keep it current; an accurate inventory is required to receive color-specific jobs, and you are responsible for producing each part in the filament and color the order specifies. 11. INDEMNIFICATION. You will indemnify, defend, and hold harmless the Company and its owner from and against any claims, damages, losses, liabilities, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or relating to your services, your equipment, your acts or omissions, your breach of this Agreement, or your violation of any law or third-party right. 12. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Company's total liability to you arising out of or relating to this Agreement will not exceed the total payouts the Company paid you in the three (3) months before the event giving rise to the claim. The Company will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or lost profits. Nothing in this Agreement limits or disclaims liability for fraud, willful injury, or a violation of law, whether willful OR NEGLIGENT (California Civil Code § 1668), nor for gross negligence; nothing here caps or waives any liability or right that cannot be limited or waived under applicable law; and nothing here waives any right under labor, employment, wage-and-hour, expense-reimbursement, workers'-compensation, unemployment, or tax law that cannot be waived. Section 1 describes which party controls the equipment and the premises. It does not exempt the Company from any duty the law puts on the Company itself. 13. TERM & TERMINATION. This Agreement continues until terminated. Either party may terminate it at any time, with or without cause, by ceasing to use the platform or by notice through the platform. Sections that by their nature should survive (including 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, and 15) survive termination. 14. DISPUTE RESOLUTION: BINDING ARBITRATION; CLASS-ACTION WAIVER. PLEASE READ THIS SECTION CAREFULLY. IT AFFECTS YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS. You and the Company agree that any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to this Agreement or the services will be resolved by final and binding individual arbitration administered by JAMS under its applicable rules (or, if JAMS is unavailable, by the American Arbitration Association under its applicable rules), before a single arbitrator, seated in California. The Federal Arbitration Act governs the interpretation and enforcement of this Section. CLASS-ACTION WAIVER: Disputes will be arbitrated only on an individual basis. You and the Company waive any right to bring or participate in a class, collective, consolidated, or representative action. If this class-action waiver is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim (and only that claim) will proceed in court, and the rest of this Section remains in effect. Nothing here prevents either party from seeking relief in small-claims court for qualifying claims, or from seeking injunctive relief to protect intellectual property or confidential information. Nothing in this Section waives any right or remedy that cannot be waived as a matter of law, including any non-waivable representative claim under the California Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA); to the extent any claim or remedy cannot lawfully be arbitrated or waived, it may proceed in the appropriate forum. 15. GENERAL. Governing Law & Venue: This Agreement is governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules; subject to Section 14, the exclusive venue for any permitted court action is the state or federal courts located in California. Entire Agreement: This Agreement, together with the platform's posted policies, is the entire agreement between the parties and supersedes prior understandings. Severability: If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest remains in effect. No Waiver: A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver. Assignment: You may not assign this Agreement without the Company's consent; the Company may assign it. Modification: The Company may update this Agreement; an updated version takes effect for you when you accept it through the platform, and the platform will ask you to review and accept it before you take on new work under it. Work you accepted, and any proposal you sent to a customer, before the updated version continues under the version you agreed to at that time, including if the customer accepts that proposal afterward. 16. ELECTRONIC SIGNATURE. By checking the acceptance box and typing your full legal name, you agree that doing so is your electronic signature, that you have read and understood this Agreement, and that you intend to be legally bound by it.