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You launched on Sharetribe, hit product-market fit, and now the platform's edges are showing. Here's the field-tested playbook for migrating off Sharetribe to a custom Rails marketplace — when to do it, when not to, the migration sequence we use, and the real cost in time, money, and risk.
The wrong pricing model is the most expensive mistake you'll make on a marketplace — and it locks in for years. Here's how take rate, subscription, listing fees, lead fees, and hybrids actually compare, with the benchmarks we've seen at production scale and a decision framework for picking one.
Most marketplace metric guides list 20+ KPIs and leave you to figure out which ones matter. Here are the 5 that predict whether your marketplace survives — in priority order, with the real numbers from a vacation rental marketplace at $40k/month GMV.
Sharetribe Flex's three customization tiers — config, template, Integration API — each have a sweet spot and a wall you'll hit. Here are the patterns we've shipped on a vacation rental marketplace, plus the customizations that look easy and turn into 4-month migrations.
Stripe Connect's KYC happy path is the US. Outside it — India, Brazil, Mexico — the verification fields are different, the timelines are longer, and Custom accounts are sometimes invite-only. Here's the per-country implementation guide we wish we'd had on day one of three international marketplace launches.
The chicken-and-egg trap kills more two-sided marketplaces than bad code. Here's the supply-seeding, niche-narrowing, concierge-onboarding playbook we use to take a marketplace from launch day to atomic density in 8-12 weeks.
Most cost articles wave around "$50K to $400K" with no detail. Useless. Here's the actual line-item breakdown — discovery hours, dev hours, infrastructure, payment fees, the Google Maps tax, and ongoing costs at 1K, 10K, and 100K monthly active users.
Most Sharetribe-vs-custom comparisons are biased — written by Sharetribe, by agencies that hate it, or by founders who only tried one path. We've shipped both. Here's the 8-question framework that tells you which path actually fits your marketplace, with real numbers.
The Stripe Connect happy path is well documented. The production gotchas are not. Here are the 12 marketplace failures we've seen up close — KYC freezes, payout holds, refund black holes, webhook idempotency bugs — and how to avoid each one before launch day.
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