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Two build engagements per year

Marketplace development

Two-sided marketplace development, with payments and trust built in

I design and build two-sided marketplaces with the hard parts in the first release: split payments, onboarding and verification, search and matching, reviews and moderation.

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From $50,000 · fixed price

Who it's for

  • Funded founders launching a marketplace MVP that has to handle real money from day one.
  • Products adding a second side, such as providers, hosts or sellers, to an existing platform.
  • Operators moving a manual brokerage of calls, spreadsheets and bank transfers onto a platform.
  • Regional marketplaces that need local currencies, languages or payment gateways.

A marketplace is two products sharing one database, plus a payments system that has to be right every time. The difficult work isn't the listing page. It's who gets paid, when, how much the platform keeps, and what happens when a booking is cancelled, a payout fails or a customer disputes a charge.

I've designed and built two marketplaces you can use today: Baytup, a rental marketplace for Algeria with local payment rails, and SkillStreamsConnect, a local-services marketplace with credit-based lead routing. The same foundations go into every marketplace I build.

Scope

What's included in a marketplace build

Stripe Connect split payments
Seller or provider onboarding, platform fees, split payouts, refunds and transfer reversals, with the charge type chosen deliberately for who carries refunds and disputes.
Holding funds and releasing payouts
Delayed capture, delayed payouts or milestone releases where you need escrow-like behavior, designed within what your payment provider actually allows.
Onboarding and verification
Separate flows for each side, identity and business verification through your payment provider, and admin review queues for anything that needs a human.
Search and matching
Filters, location search and ranking for browse-and-book marketplaces, or routing logic that sends each request to the right providers.
Messaging and notifications
Real-time messaging between the two sides, with email and in-app notifications for every state change that matters to either of them.
Reviews, trust and moderation
Two-way reviews, reporting, moderation queues and audit trails, so your team can act on a problem in minutes rather than digging through the database.
Admin console
Disputes, refunds, payouts, user management, listings and platform metrics in one place for the people running the marketplace.
Regional payments and localization
Local currencies and gateways where Stripe Connect isn't available, and right-to-left languages where your market needs them.

Starting with a marketplace MVP

The fastest way to launch is a narrow first version: one transaction type, one market, web first, with some operations handled manually behind the scenes. A marketplace MVP should test whether both sides show up and transact, not whether the platform has every feature on the roadmap.

In the Discovery Sprint I'll help you decide what to cut, what to fake with admin tooling for the first months, and what has to be right from the first transaction. Payments and trust almost always land in that last group.

Process

How it works

  1. Discover

    Both sides mapped: who they are, how they find each other, how money moves, and what can go wrong. The Sprint ends with a payments design, an architecture and a fixed-price proposal.

  2. Design

    Onboarding, listing, booking or request flows and the admin console are designed together, because operations is a third user of every marketplace.

  3. Build

    Milestones with a staging release every week, and payments working in test mode from the early milestones rather than wired in at the end.

  4. Ship

    Live payments, monitoring, and a launch plan for your first market, with every account and key in your name.

  5. Care

    After launch, the Care Plan covers monitoring, updates, fixes and the steady stream of improvements a live marketplace needs.

Case study

An example I built

Baytup

Marketplace

Airbnb + Turo, localized for Algeria.

Problem
Rentals in Algeria were scattered across classifieds, social groups and offline agencies, with no trust layer and no digital booking. International platforms had thin local inventory and no local payment methods or full Arabic and French support.
Outcome
One marketplace for property stays and vehicle rentals, in English, French and Arabic, priced in DZD or EUR, with verified hosts, real-time messaging, SlickPay payments and an admin moderation console.
Languages (EN / FR / AR)
3
Currencies (DZD / EUR)
2
Notification event types
40+

Next.js · Express · MongoDB · Socket.IO · SlickPay

Read the case study

Pricing

From $50,000

Marketplace builds start at $50,000. The price is fixed before the build begins, based on the scope agreed in the Discovery Sprint, and paid in milestones.

I take on two build engagements a year so each one gets my full attention.

Not ready for a full build? Start with a Discovery Sprint: a fixed-fee engagement whose fee is credited toward the build.

Questions

Do you work with Stripe Connect?

Yes. I recommend the account type and charge type based on who should be the merchant of record and who carries refunds and disputes. Where Connect isn't available, I integrate regional gateways instead.

Can a marketplace hold funds in escrow?

Not as a legal escrow service through Stripe alone. Most marketplaces approximate it with delayed capture, delayed payouts, or separate charges and transfers. I'll walk through the trade-offs and the limits that apply in your country during the Discovery Sprint.

Can you help with the chicken-and-egg problem?

It's a go-to-market problem more than an engineering one, but the product can help: tools for seeding supply, manual matching from the admin console, and a launch scoped to one market.

Web or mobile?

Web first in most cases. When the platform needs a mobile app, I build it in React Native as part of the engagement, sharing the API with the web product.

What does a marketplace MVP cost?

Engagements start at $50,000, and the fixed price comes out of the Discovery Sprint. The biggest cost drivers are payments, verification and how many roles the platform has.

Further reading

Start a conversation

Tell me what you're building. I reply personally within one business day.

Start a conversation or email adil@vertexstack.io

Engagements from $50,000 · Two builds per year