A marketplace lives or dies on the liquidity of its mobile experience.
We build custom marketplace mobile apps for two-sided platforms — buyer apps, seller apps, and the real-time matching, payments, and trust infrastructure that connects them. Fixed scope, fixed price.
Your web marketplace works. Mobile conversion is 30% of desktop. A mobile-first marketplace where discovery, listing, booking, and payment happen in one fluid native experience changes that ratio.
Two-sided marketplaces have a compound mobile problem. You need two apps — one that makes buyers want to discover and book, and one that makes sellers want to list and manage their inventory. Each side has different goals, different flows, and different reasons to open the app. And both need to be high-quality, or the weaker side is the constraint on your liquidity.
Most early-stage marketplace founders start with a web marketplace because it's faster to build and easier to iterate. That's the right call for pre-product-market fit. But at the point where you're processing enough transactions to know your market works, mobile is the next required investment. The categories where marketplace apps are dominant — home services (TaskRabbit, Handy), freelance (Upwork), rentals (Airbnb), local services — all have mobile as the primary channel. Desktop is secondary.
On the seller side, the mobile app is often the difference between an active seller and a lapsed one. A seller who gets a notification that a buyer is interested and can respond in 30 seconds, approve a booking from their phone, and see their week's earnings in one tap is an engaged seller. A seller who has to log into a web portal to do those things does it less often — and your liquidity suffers.
Native iOS and Android apps for both sides of your marketplace — buyer discovery and booking, seller profile and listings management, real-time messaging, and Stripe Connect payouts — with the app-store presence your category requires.
Buyer discovery app
Search and filter by category, location, price, and reviews. Listing detail with photos, seller profile, availability calendar, and one-tap booking or enquiry. Saved favourites and booking history.
Seller listing management app
Create and edit listings with photo upload, availability calendar management, pricing rules, and listing performance stats. Enquiry inbox with response flow and booking approval.
Real-time messaging between buyer and seller
In-app messaging thread per transaction — pre-booking enquiry and post-booking coordination — with push notifications and message history.
Stripe Connect payments and payouts
Buyer charges held at booking, released to seller on delivery or completion. Seller dashboard with earnings, pending payouts, and payout history. Dispute and refund flows.
Reviews and trust signals
Post-transaction review prompts for both sides, aggregate rating display, and verified badges for sellers who have completed verification steps. Built with Expo and React Native, Convex for real-time messaging and availability, Stripe Connect for the split-pay architecture, and Algolia or Postgres full-text search for discovery.
One honest number to start.
Fixed-scope, fixed-price. The number below is the starting point — final scope is built from your brief.
Native iOS and Android apps for both sides of your marketplace — buyer discovery and booking, seller profile and listings management, real-time messaging, and Stripe Connect payouts — with the app-store presence your category requires.
Three steps, every time.
The same repeatable engagement on every project. No surprises, no mystery, no billable ambiguity.
Brief & discovery.
We send you questions, then get on a call. Output: a written scope with every step, feature, and integration listed.
Build & ship.
Fixed schedule, weekly reviews. No scope creep unless you change the scope — and if you do, we reprice it transparently.
Warranty & retainer.
30-day warranty on every launch. Most clients stay on a monthly retainer for ongoing features and maintenance.
Why Fixed-Price Matters Here
Marketplace startups are managing supply-side and demand-side growth simultaneously. An open-ended development contract is a liability when you're already managing two sides of a market. Fixed scope and fixed price makes the tech build a defined input in your growth plan — you know when it ships, you know what it costs, and you plan your supply acquisition and demand marketing around it.
Related engagements.
Questions, answered.
Most successful marketplaces ship separate buyer and seller apps. The flows are different enough that a combined app creates UX compromises on both sides. We build both under the same codebase (Expo), which keeps total cost well below two separate builds.
Stripe Connect supports payouts in 40+ countries. Sellers complete Stripe's identity verification during onboarding and receive weekly payouts to their local bank account. Cross-border marketplace flows need care around Stripe's country support matrix — we verify your seller geography before committing architecture.
Yes — services (time-based booking) and physical or digital goods (immediate purchase) have different transaction flows that can coexist within one marketplace. Scope the split at the start and we build both.
Buyer and seller apps with real-time messaging, Stripe Connect, search, and reviews typically runs $70k–$140k. Variable factors include category complexity, verification requirements, and whether on-demand dispatch (like Uber) is in scope. Fixed-price.
16 to 20 weeks for both buyer and seller apps with the full trust and payment infrastructure.
Tell Ryel about your project.
Describe what you’re building and what outcome you need. You’ll have a written, fixed-price scope within the week.