@walark thanks a lot, that's a great question! Sharetribe Go (which was hunted earlier here https://www.producthunt.com/post... )remains the easiest way for anyone to set up an online marketplace website quickly and without technical skills. It's a great tool for building your Minimum Viable Platform and start validating your concept immediately. Meanwhile, with Sharetribe Flex, you can build your ideal sharing economy platform (whether web or mobile) for approximately 5-10% of cost in terms of time and money, compared to building your platform from scratch. Also, it's not built with just the launch in mind, but for the entire lifecycle of your business: it will help you build the first version quickly but also scales with you as you grow your business and revenue to millions. This is a marketplace solution you will never grow out of. As its name states, Flex is extremely flexible: it offers the standard marketplace features out of the box so you don't need to reinvent the wheel, but it also allows you to build your "secret sauce", the featurs unique to your particular concept, on top of it. You can do this yourself, if you're a developer, or alternatively hire developers to do it. There's no limit to how much you can extend your platform by tapping into our APIs.

@luke_h great to hear you're considering coming back to try out Sharetribe Flex! If you didn't already, I definitely recommend you to sign up for early access on Flex's website, and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. You don't need a Sharetribe certified developer, but there's also not that much point-and-click. All customization will be done by touching the code directly. How it works is that we host the backend that handles all the essential marketplace functionality (storing data on listings and users, search, messaging, bookings, payments, commissions, reviews, notifications, etc). Also, there's the admin console, which we offers as a SaaS service: that's what you use to manage your users, listings and transactions. Finally, there are template apps. For now, we have one web template built with Javascript (React and Node). It's a single page application that already works as a fully functional marketplace when you deploy it. Your developer has direct access to its code, and can change it any way they wish. The backend is extremely flexible, allowing you to store pretty much any type of data related to listings and users, and have any kind of booking flow you want. So, the amount of development you will need depends on how happy you are with the codebase of the template app. You can also ditch it and build your own (for instance, if you want to build a mobile app, as we don't have a template for that yet). Our goal is that in most cases, at the point when you launch the platform to first users, you've only spent 5-10% of the time & money compared to what you had if developing the same quality from scratch, without making any compromises on the user experience. If you use our template app (which of course is a big time saver), your developer needs to know only Javascript (React & Node experience of course help). So pretty much any developer can work with your codebase. The important thing here is also that if, at some point, you would feel that the backend we provide cannot meet all your needs, you could build your own backend on the side, and have it do some of the things you need. This backend could be built on any technology your developers prefer. Does this sound clear? Let me know if you have further questions, I'm happy to provide more info.

@kusti thank you for the details, that definitely helps. I sent a request for early access but also followed up with an email to set up a time to discuss. Looking forward to it!

@pierreatvinty thanks a lot!

@_wub thanks a lot! The pricing will be a bit higher than the for Sharetribe Go, as Sharetribe Flex is targeted to a bit more advanced audience, and some custom development is required per customer.

@cyberne we are, but unfortunately right now we're a bit overwhelmed, as we got more than 1000 early access requests! Right now the process is still a bit manual from our side, so we need to hand-pick the projects for now and only allow a very limited number of projects in. However, we hope to get as soon as possible to a point where we can make Flex accessible to anyone, with a fully automated onboarding. It'll still take us a while to get there though. Thanks for your patience!

@kusti Can you provide a link to your "Terms of Service" ("terms and conditions") for the use of Flex Platform?

@kusti Also, could you point me to any website that's currently using FLEX platform?

@cyberne sure! The terms of use are the same for both Go and Flex. You can find them here: https://www.sharetribe.com/terms... Here are three examples of our customers using Flex today: - Studiotime, "Airbnb for record studios" https://www.studiotime.io/ (US – try searching for Los Angeles) - Kinspiring, "Airbnb for strollers and other baby gear" https://www.kinspiring.com/ (Finland – try searching for "Helsinki") - Swimmy, "Airbnb for swimming pools" https://www.swimmy.fr/ (France, try searching for "France")