What your reservation status means
Your job moves through a short list of states between booking and a clean car. Each one is shown on your job in plain language, and each one tells you something about your money as well as your appointment.
The stages
Finding your detailer. Right after you book, your card is authorized for the total — held, not charged — and the job is offered to vetted detailers near you. This is the stage most jobs spend the longest in, because it depends on who is available, not on anything you do.
Detailer confirmed. Someone has accepted the job and it's on their calendar. Your card is still only holding the total.
On the way. Your detailer is travelling to your address.
Being detailed. Work has started. The card is still only holding the total — nothing is charged yet.
Wrapping up. The work is done and your detailer is uploading the required before-and-after photos. Your card is charged once that full photo set is in, not before. Photos are the proof the job happened the way it was supposed to, so completion and payment both wait on them.
Done. Finished, photographed, and charged.
How dispatch actually works
"Finding your detailer" is not a queue with a visible position. Dripbase offers your job to a small group of nearby vetted detailers at a time — currently three — and gives them a window to respond, currently 20 minutes, before offering it to the next group. That can repeat a few times if nobody in a group takes it, currently up to four rounds. Those numbers are platform settings, not promises, so treat them as roughly how it works rather than a countdown you can rely on to the minute.
If nobody takes it
This is the outcome that's easy to leave out of an article like this, so we won't. Sometimes nobody accepts before your appointment window runs out. When that happens, the job is withdrawn, the hold on your card is released untouched, and you are not charged anything. You'll see this as "Nobody was available" on the job. It's not a rejection of your car or your address — it usually means there wasn't a vetted detailer free at that time, in that area. If it happens, you can book again for a different time; a different window often has different detailers available.
Two states you might see less often
Cancelled — the booking was called off, by you or by us, and the hold was released. See the article on cancellations for what you can call off and when.
Support is on it — a problem with a finished job has been escalated to Dripbase's team, and someone will contact you directly. See the article on issues with your reservation for what's actually available today if something goes wrong.
Written against how Dripbase works today. Rules like pricing, timing, and what we require of a detailer are settings we can change, so this describes the current behaviour rather than a permanent guarantee.