Run your own co-op marketplace

Deliveries, rides and repairs — booked through a platform the co-op owns, instead of renting one that takes a cut of every job. The code, the deployment guide, and the rules for running it as a co-op.

Every small co-op that tries to take bookings online runs into the same wall. A commercial marketplace wants 15-30% of every job, keeps the customer relationships, and gets to change its terms whenever it likes. Hand over your members' earnings and your customer list, and what is left is not really a co-op any more — it is a franchise.

This is the alternative: a small self-hosted booking platform you install on your own server. Members see the jobs, offer to do them, and the money is split by a rule the membership votes on. Nobody takes a commission for owning the software, because nobody owns it.

1. What is in the download

2. Three trades, ready to go

The kit ships with the intake forms and job states for the three things small co-ops actually run:

Adding cleaning, gardening, tutoring or a meals round is one small addition to a single file. Nothing else in the system changes.

3. What makes it a co-op platform and not a commission app

1. The split is a rule the members vote on, not a fee an owner charges. The defaults are 85% to the member who did the work, 10% to the co-op's fund, 5% to a reserve for hosting and insurance. Any member can propose different numbers; it passes on a majority with a quorum. The software refuses to let an administrator quietly edit the split — that route is closed on purpose.
2. One member, one vote. Enforced in the database: you cannot vote twice, and a handful of people cannot pass something for everyone because the quorum has to be met.
3. The books are open. Every member sees every line: who was paid what, what went to the fund, what went to the reserve. There is no hidden take rate to discover later.
4. Members choose their work. Offers come from members and are awarded by the requester or a dispatcher. There is no surge pricing, no acceptance-rate score punishing people for saying no, and no algorithm deciding who deserves the next job.
5. The money stays in the co-op's own bank account. The platform records who is owed what; the treasurer pays out by transfer. No third party sits between a member and their earnings.

4. What it deliberately does not do

Worth knowing before you download it, because a co-op that expects these features and does not find them will be disappointed — and one that adds them without thinking will recreate the platform it was trying to escape.

• It does not take payments. No card processing, no payouts. Card money in transit is a regulated activity and a payment provider between a member and their wages is the middleman this kit exists to remove. Payouts are bank transfers made by the treasurer from the ledger, and there is a one-page procedure for it.
• It does not track anyone. No analytics, no advertising pixels, no third-party scripts, no tracking cookies. That is both a privacy feature and a legal one.
• It does not rate or score workers. No stars, no acceptance rates, no location monitoring. Those systems are how commission platforms discipline their workforce.
• It is not multi-tenant. One co-op, one database, one domain. Ten co-ops run ten copies. Shared infrastructure is how a co-op quietly ends up with a vendor again.
• It does not do live driver tracking or route optimisation. If your co-op genuinely needs that, it is a separate and much larger build, and it needs a deliberate conversation about tracking members' phones.

5. What you need

6. Installing it, in short

The deployment guide has the full version, including the security settings and the backup schedule. The short version:

python3 run.py init --db coopmarket.db \
    --coop-name "Riverside Deliveries Co-op" \
    --admin-email chair@example.org \
    --admin-password 'a-long-passphrase'

python3 run.py serve --db coopmarket.db --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8080

Then a service file so it starts with the server, and a web server in front of it for HTTPS. Both are provided and configured for you; Caddy gets the certificate automatically and renews it. The guide also covers the firewall, the backup, and — the step people skip — actually testing a restore once, before it matters.

7. Running it as a co-op, not just as software

The download includes a plain-English operating guide covering the things that decide whether this works as a co-op:

• Payouts. How to run a payout from the ledger to the co-op's bank account, and why you should do one on paper before any real money moves.
• Agreeing the split. What the three parts are for, and why changing the numbers weekly destroys trust in the platform.
• Dispatchers. Rotating the role, awarding on fit rather than on price, and what to say when a member asks why they did not get a job.
• Disputes. A four-step process to agree at a meeting, before you need it — and when to stop and go outside the co-op instead.
• Onboarding a member. Why an officer must never create an account with a password they chose, and how to show a new member where their money appears in the books.
• Deleting customer details. A retention period and an actual delete path, for data-protection reasons and for the more ordinary reason that it is not the co-op's business any longer.

8. Licence and support

The code is AGPL-3.0-or-later; the written guides are CC BY-SA 4.0. Use it, change it, run it for as many co-ops as you like, put your co-op's name on it, fork it. The one condition worth knowing: if you run a modified version as a network service, publish your changes, so the next co-op gets them. That is the software equivalent of the argument on our commons licences page — improvements to a shared tool belong back in the commons.

There is no paid tier and no support subscription. No sign-up, no email capture, no "pro" licence. The deployment guide is the support, the tests are how you verify a change, and the code is small enough to read in an evening on purpose — a co-op should not need a vendor to understand its own booking system. If someone offers to do your setup as paid work, that is a fair arrangement between you; the software itself is not the thing being sold.

9. Before you rely on this

How to check this page is honest: the download is a SHA-256 hash above, the tests are in the download and run offline, and there is no tracking on this site. Nothing here phones home.

Free to copy, adapt and pass on.