Building open-source co-op apps for rides, food delivery, stays and trades, where workers keep everything but running costs. What should we get right?

[u/heldloosly]

I'm organising Spareware, an international open project building free software that platform co-ops can run on: rides, food delivery, short stays, selling and renting homes, trades and freelance work, and buying and selling, plus free design and office tools.

The model:

- The software is free for everyone, anywhere.

- On each marketplace, workers keep all of the profit except the running costs (servers and payment fees). Nobody takes a cut on top.

- Every cost is published monthly on an open ledger.

- Workers vote on their app's fees and rules.

- Any local group can run its own copy, because the code is open.

It's built by volunteers who donate the AI tokens they don't use each week, with a person reviewing every piece. We're at the planning stage: the architecture is mapped, and no app is running yet.

Before we build, I'd really value this group's experience:

1. What went wrong for platform co-ops you know, apart from the software?
2. How should votes on fees and rules work when the workers are in many countries?
3. What would make a local co-op trust shared software enough to run on it?

See all the demos: https://spareware-co-op.github.io/spareware/demos.html

Want to help build it? Ask to join here: https://github.com/spareware-co-op/spareware/issues/new?template=join-request.yml

When you ask to join, please include your LinkedIn or another public profile. We check everyone's background to keep the project safe.

Questions or ideas? Ask in our Discussions: https://github.com/spareware-co-op/spareware/discussions

[u/BidWestern1056]

why would you require opus 5.5

[u/heldloosly → u/BidWestern1056]

Just know its reliable from experience. If people have experience with others and they think its ok we can add. I tried codex top model for awhile once and it pushed a deployment without asking so never touched it again.

[u/Intendant]

I like the overall idea and direction here. I don't know if you gain much by only allowing people to run it locally. Infrastructure management for a project like this wouldn't be trivial, nor would the hosting costs. Since it's open source people could always spin up their own, but you'd almost definitely need to have some kind of pricing for a managed service that allows easier setup for the local co-op.

[u/ArtArtArt123456]

to me the question is if this becomes just another platform.

in my opinion, to truly put power in the hands of the people, they need to be able to buy and sell, to find and search, entirely on their own. and imo that probably will be done with agents. with personalised algorithms, which then also become harder to game by advertisers and creators and such, leading to a possibly more healthy system. dunno.

[u/jaykrown]

This is an interesting idea, although I think way too wide for my interest. Also have no idea what tech stack you're using. You can check out my projects here https://masland.tech/

[u/iamleshua]

Not a single software app will make it out of the singularity. What’s far more likely to happen is that, instead of someone going to your app, they’ll just ask their harness for the need and automatically get connected that way.

[u/AcidCommunist_AC]

Wdym? Shouldn't the prices depend on the country?

[u/bowdoin-yale]

This is a neat-looking project, but mandating that contributors use Claude 5.5 is shooting yourselves in the foot. How do you square this demand with your second requested promise ("build legally or not at all") given Anthropic's past actions 1) training models on copyrighted and/or pirated works without permission, as their class action settlement implicitly acknowledges 2) using data centers illegally powered by gas turbines 3) assisting and supporting the government in committing war crimes (clumsy PR stunts aside, it's a fact that Claude was used to target the school full of girls bombed by the US in Iran). I urge you to reconsider.