A privacy-first marketplace
Trade what you grow with the people near you.
Three jars of your plum preserves for a season of someone's eggs. You two decide what is fair — we just make the introduction.
No price tags on trades. No cut of a trade, ever. No tracking cookies.
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Three things this marketplace will not do
Each of these is a property of the database, not a policy we could quietly change on a Tuesday.
No price tags on trades
A listing describes a good and a quantity. There is no price field on it, and no table in the database that could hold one. You and the other grower settle what is fair between yourselves, and we never take a cut of a trade.
No tracking cookies
No tracking cookies. No cross-site tracking. We never sell your data. There is no analytics script anywhere in Harvestkin — not on this page, not in the app — so there is no profile of you to sell in the first place.
Your pin is a square, not a point
Before any location is stored, the database snaps it to a grid cell roughly a kilometre across. That happens on the way in, so the exact point never lands in a row — not for a listing, and not for the home point that decides which board you see.
What people put on the board
What you grow, what you raise, and what you make out of both.
Seeds and starts
Saved seed garlic, tomato starts
Herbs and flowers
Dried sage, dahlia tubers
Preserves
Plum jam, dill pickles, sauerkraut
Made goods
Elderberry tincture, beeswax salve
Some goods carry handling rules and some are never allowed — live plants, eggs and home preserves each come with their own care. The terms list both, in plain words.
How a trade happens
- 01
List
Post what you have — Black Krim tomatoes, a dozen eggs a week, three jars of plum preserves — and what you would like in return.
- 02
Match
Harvestkin lines your haves up against what neighbours have asked for, and shows you where the two overlap.
- 03
Connect
Offer a trade. The other grower accepts or declines, and a decline costs nobody anything.
- 04
Message
Sort out the details in end-to-end encrypted messages. We hold ciphertext, so nobody here can read them — no administrator has a way in either.
- 05
Trade
Meet and swap. Harvestkin is local pickup, we are not a party to what you agree, and nothing about the swap is recorded as a value.
Trading with someone you have not met
Messages only you two can read
Every message is encrypted in your browser with keys that never leave it. What we can see is that two accounts have been messaging, and when — the content is opaque to us, and there is no administrator path to it.
A rating, not a review to manage
After a trade you each give a number from one to five. There is no comment box, ratings stay hidden from the person rated until the window closes, and nothing shows publicly until at least three people have rated you.
A board someone actually watches
Report a listing or a profile and a moderator reads it. They can take a listing down; they cannot edit what you wrote, and the terms say plainly what is never allowed here.
Guidance on what is a fair swap
Nobody starts out knowing what a kilo of tomatoes is worth in eggs. So when enough people nearby are asking for a similar swap, Harvestkin shows the typical ratio between the two goods — a quantity against a quantity, never a sum of money.
It is built from what people have publicly asked for on the board, never from what anyone actually settled on, and it appears only once at least five separate asks stand behind it. It is advisory market information, never a price, and it seeds nothing: what you ask for stays entirely yours to decide.
Questions people ask
What does it cost?
Harvestkin is free to use today, and we never take a cut of a trade — there is no payment path in the product at all. If we ever charge, it is for the service, never for the trade.
Can I put a price on a listing?
No. A listing carries a good, a quantity and what you would like in return. There is no price field to fill in, and no table that stores what a trade was worth.
How much of my location do you know?
A grid cell about a kilometre across, because the database snaps every point to that grid before storing it. One caveat we would rather tell you than hide: photos are stored exactly as you upload them, so a phone photo can carry its own GPS tag. Turn location off in your camera, or strip it, until we do that for you.
Can you read my messages?
No. Messages are encrypted in your browser and we store only ciphertext, and no administrator has a read path to them. We can see that two accounts are talking and roughly how much, because that is what routing a message requires.
Can I ship what I trade?
No. Harvestkin is a local-pickup marketplace: there is no shipping feature and it is not enabled for anyone. Meeting in person is part of how this works.
How do I join?
Give us your email and we send a six-digit code. There is no password to choose, and none to lose.
Your tomatoes will not list themselves.
Boards start empty and fill up one grower at a time. Be the one your street finds when they look.
No price tags on trades. No cut of a trade, ever. No tracking cookies.