I was wondering if there was any way to develop a marketplace without the 30 days trial, much like with shopify partners where you can create a store for a client, without incurring in any expense for as much time as you like. The goal would be to test if sharetribe fits my business idea (zillow-like real estate listing platform).
Thanks!
Hey @bencarafa!
Right now, we don’t offer such a free plan, no.
With the hosted version of Sharetribe Go, you can start building your marketplace for free, for up to 30 days (we’ll be happy to add another week or two if that really helps, just contact our Team via the chat widget in your Admin panel). Nearly all features are available in the free trial, allowing you to onboard members and host live transactions already from day one.
I think, and this is our experience, that this 30-day period allows to test if the tool fits your needs. Once you onboard customers and host transactions, I think it’s fair to consider investing some money into the tool that is core to your business: we do our best to offer prices that allow as many people as possible to try out their idea for even just a few months without an upfront investment of many thousands of $ to build a solution from scratch.
With Flex, the approach is a bit different: right now, there is no time limit on the development environment: you can test and build everything however this is limited to test transactions. When you’re ready to onboard real members and host transactions with real money, only then moving to a live (paid) environment is needed.
Finally, if cost is an issue, you can of course use the Community Edition of Sharetribe Go on your own servers. We give all our work for free however that requires some technical knowledge and you’ll have to take care of hosting, maintenance and updates, and will rely on support from the community rather than from the Sharetribe team.
Hopefully, this clarifies things!