Building a marketplace means building trust on both sides of the transaction.
We build custom marketplace web applications — two-sided platforms, trust and safety infrastructure, Stripe Connect payouts, and the operator tooling you need to run it at scale. Fixed scope, fixed price.
Your marketplace MVP got you to first transactions. Now you need matching algorithms, review systems, dispute workflows, fraud prevention, and a back-office that doesn't require an engineer to operate.
Marketplaces are the hardest product category to build because every edge case has a dollar amount attached to it. A buyer pays. A seller performs. Something goes wrong. Who gets the money? Your dispute resolution workflow, your payout timing, your fraud signals, and your review system either build trust or erode it — and trust is the only moat that matters in a two-sided market.
Most marketplace MVPs are built quickly to prove the concept, and that's right. But the MVP leaves out the things that make a marketplace actually safe to use at scale: signed webhooks and idempotent payment flows so a retry doesn't double-charge; escrow-style payout timing so sellers can't take money without delivering; KYC on both sides so you're not the platform that processed payments for fraud; a review system with enough anti-gaming logic that it reflects reality; and an operator back-office with dispute resolution, manual payout override, and user flagging so your ops team can intervene without an engineer.
The Sharetribe or Bubble MVP got you to proof-of-concept. The limitations are real now. Matching logic you can't customise. Payment flows you can't control. Analytics that don't answer the questions your investors are asking. A back-office you can barely operate. The next stage requires a real platform.
A marketplace that handles the hard parts — trust, payouts, disputes, and supply-demand balance — so you can focus on growth instead of ops.
Supply and demand matching
Search and discovery tuned to your supply type — availability filtering, geo-filtering, preference matching, featured placement, and ranking signals your team can tune.
Stripe Connect with proper payout logic
Escrow-style timing, split payouts for multi-seller carts, dispute-aware holds, and seller onboarding with KYC (Stripe Identity or Persona) built into the signup flow.
Trust and safety infrastructure
Identity verification on both sides, review and rating systems with anti-manipulation logic, flagging and moderation queues, and ban and reinstatement workflows.
Operator back-office
User management, payout overrides and investigations, dispute resolution with transaction timeline view, listing approval, and cohort analytics for supply and demand health.
Notifications and engagement layer
Transactional emails and SMS at every step of the buyer-seller interaction, re-engagement nudges for inactive supply, and NPS collection after transactions. Built on Next.js, Convex for real-time messaging and state, Stripe Connect, Clerk, and — when the native mobile experience matters for your market — React Native with a shared backend.
One honest number to start.
Fixed-scope, fixed-price. The number below is the starting point — final scope is built from your brief.
A marketplace that handles the hard parts — trust, payouts, disputes, and supply-demand balance — so you can focus on growth instead of ops.
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 founders are managing two-sided growth, investor expectations, and a technology build simultaneously. A time-and-materials development engagement adds a third variable to a model that already has thin early margins and high coordination cost. Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed ship date. One fewer thing to worry about.
Related engagements.
A rental marketplace lives or dies on trust, availability, and payout logic. We build all three.
Read more02Build a two-sided marketplace — supply and demand platform with transaction infrastructure.
Read more03A marketplace without trust infrastructure isn't a marketplace. It's a directory.
Read moreQuestions, answered.
Primarily the trust and payments layer. A marketplace needs escrowed payments, payout workflows that account for disputes, review systems that can't be gamed, and two-sided user management. Those add weeks and complexity over a single-sided SaaS. We plan for them in the spec, not the change-order.
Most marketplaces can handle real transactions through Stripe Connect within 8 to 10 weeks. Full trust and safety, dispute workflows, and operator back-office ship at 12 to 14 weeks.
It depends on your transaction type and risk level. For service marketplaces and high-value transactions, KYC on sellers (identity, bank account) is important. For lower-risk goods marketplaces, seller bank verification through Stripe is usually enough. We scope the right level for your market and regulatory context.
A full two-sided marketplace with search, matching, payments, trust and safety, and ops back-office typically runs $60k–$120k. Scope varies significantly by vertical complexity and mobile requirements. Every engagement is fixed-price.
We build admin tools to manually seed supply, promote listings, and run targeted outreach campaigns. But this is a business problem, not a software problem — we can discuss strategy, but the platform can only enable what your go-to-market does.
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.