How we do Sharetribe Projects

Who We Are

CoFounders

• Matthew Ryan - Director and co-founder of JourneyHorizon. I have been doing software development for over 20 years. You can find out more about me here  https://au.linkedin.com/in/mattyv01 feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Tri Nguyen - Co-Founder of JourneyHorizon. Is our super smart Chief Operating Officer that is a wizard when it comes to making things integrate. A true master of the internet of things and micro-services. All around nice guy!
• Tam Vu – Chief Technology Officer, boy genius. Can talk the leg of an iron pot. Responsible for all things R&D at Journeyhorizon and looking after our core Sharetribe Code IP.

Our Team

Our team is spread around the globe selected from the best minds the world has to offer. Our team are experts in Front-end and Back-end technologies including AI, iOS, Android, Google Flutter, React.js, node.js, Amazon Cloud Services and Google Cloud Services.

HOW YOU GOT HERE and WHAT’s NEXT

So you got here most likely because…

1. You searched the internet for an online marketplace platform
2. Found Sharetribe and determined it was the best platform to build your online marketplace
3. You spoke to the Sharetribe team to confirm your idea fits with the platform.
4. You Sign-up at sharetribe.com
5. You configured your marketplace using the admin console
6. You setup your DNS to point to your marketplace
7. You pushed the big read button and your marketplace went live.
8. You sat back had a well earned cup of tea..and then wrote down a list of 20 new enhancements you need to do to your marketplace.
9. You read the Sharetribe docs and found out that you need to move to self-hosted and engage a Sharetribe Expert to help you extend your new marketplace and add the features you need.
10. You came here to our website and read all about us and what projects we are have done
11. You decided that we are super cool and great at what we do
12. You book a meeting
13. We have a brief meeting to discuss your project at a high level and see if we can work together
14. Sign a service agreement
15. We setup your hosting environment on AWS, Trello for running the project and discord for communications.
16. We setup your testing environment
17. We then create your backlog items in Trello, you fill in the missing details, we estimate each card fixed price, you approve and we deliver
18. We then invoice every 2 weeks based on accepted backlog items.
19. You determine when your new features are ready to go to production
20. We continue working with you supporting and enhancing the site based on your direction

OR

1. Someone like Fiona Burns introduced us; OR
2. An existing customer referred you. OR
3. The good people at Sharetribe referred you to us.

Fees and Charges

We offer two ways to engage with us to help you customise your Sharetribe Marketplace.

• Agency model - you are the product owner defining the requirements, business rules and user experience and we then write and test code to meet those requirements with Sharetribe.
• Education and Coaching model - we set you up for AI based development process. We train you and help you setup your development with AI such as Codex or Claude Code. We then charge you to review your code before you deploy it to production and we provide adhoc coaching support on using AI for development. Of course you can use us at anytime to step in and fix anything the AI has completely messed up.

Agency Model

We have estimated over 150 projects now and we have delivered more than 150 marketplaces from start to finish. We believe in giving you and honest appraisal of what it costs. Based on our experience to date we can safely say your marketplace will start at $3000 USD and go as high as the complexity of your requirements and fit with Sharetribe.

• $3,000 USD we do all the configuration in Sharetribe console with you. We run 4-5 hands on workshops in a question and answer style that gets your marketplace configured and you up to speed with the Sharetribe Admin console.  If you have done 50% of the configuration we will reduce the fee by 50%.
• The fee does not include any customisation of the transaction process or Sharetribe marketplace template that would require self-hosting. It also does not include any graphic design, artwork or UI work, our graphic design and marketing team can help you with that if you need.
• $6,000 - $12,000 USD if you are going to be doing minor customisations to booking panel, checkout, transaction workflows and transaction email notifications. 
• $12,000 USD + if you are going to want to do things not supported by Sharetribe natively, things like security deposits, recurring transactions, shopping cart, multiple bookings in a single booking panel, two or more different transaction types (i.e. Rent and Buy), integration with third-party APIs for Tax, Delivery, GPS tracking, Video integration and Messaging integration.

Rough Estimates for different customisations

Based on our experience to date we have outlined some rough estimates for some of the features that we have built in the past for other client’s.

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Journeyhorizion Plugins for Sharetribe

We are the only Sharetribe partner progressing a plugin framework for Sharetribe. When you work with us you will get our upgraded Sharetribe web template, our integration broker (similar to Zapier), and access to our plugins which are growing by the day. Here is the list of plugin features we currently have and if they are available for Sharetribe web and our Sharetribe Mobile App.

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Event Services fees & charges

Event services is required for some of our plugins to work. Event services is our cheaper more powerful and configurable version of Zapier. If more than one plugin requires Event Services, you only need a single event services subscription.

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Development Backlog Item Fees

We don't charge per hour. We give you a fixed fee for each backlog item. Backlog items are small pieces of functionality that make up your site. You then prioritise your backlog based on the business value of that backlog item. Estimated backlog items include design, development, code review, manual tests and bug fix, but don’t include project management, business analysis, automated testing or regression testing.

Design Backlog Item Fees

Sometimes when you create a backlog card for a feature you are time poor and it ends up being a single line of text for what could be a very complex set of business rules and interactions with existing features. When this happens we will create a design card to cover the cost of the design work associated with this complex feature. We are always happy for you to avoid this design cost by providing the necessary details in the backlog card to allow the team to estimate the development work.

Estimation Fee

Estimating backlog cards involves lots of communication and sometime lots of clarification to ensure that both parties are fully agreeing on what needs to be delivered. To cover the cost of estimating cards we charge 10% of the Backlog cards cost once the estimate is complete.

Project Management Fee

All projects need project management, face-to-face meetings over google hangouts, and lots of communication back and forth. To cover the cost of managing the project we add a project management fee of 10% of completed back-log items. This way you are not paying based on hours, or some flat project management fee, the fee is tied directly to the value of the work delivered to you.

Ongoing Running Costs

You will have a number of ongoing costs, they will vary for each marketplace so you should do your own research and budget, but you should include:

• Sharetribe fees and transaction fees
• Stripe fees
• AWS hosting fees – starting from $25 USD a month
• Intercom.io fees - you will need to support your users so you will need something. We really like intercom.io, but there are other options.
• Extended Warranty - this is optional but guarantees that we are always there to investigate and fix bugs
• Ongoing enhancements to your website - software is never finished, you will have ongoing changes to your site.

Education and Coaching model

Under this model you pay $3000USD for our training and enablement package. This includes

• how to develop with AI
• running Sharetribe locally on your machine
• version control theory and GitHub
• our sharetribe template optimised for AI development

We then charge $40 per hour with a minimum $40 fee to review each code change you want to push to test and production.

For ongoing coaching and advice on AI development our fees are $150 USD p.hour.

You can ask us to write code instead of the AI at anytime and we just revert to the agency model.

FAQ

I really need a quote to get funding approval, can you provide me one?

Yes we can provide you a quote for your project if you really need one. However, to do this properly and for the quote to be anywhere near accurate you will need to provide a detailed requirements document, UX wireframe designs for areas of the Sharetribe Web Template that are different and the transaction flow design. We are more than happy to help you through this design process, but it takes time. Time that we can't spend on paying customers. In our experience so far we spend anywhere between 5 and 20 hours working with you to produce an estimate. This is because we know alot about Sharetribe and you know alot about your business and we need to bring those two things together to form a solid estimate.

We charge a fixed fee of $1200 USD for providing a formal quote you can use for budget approvals from your incubator, venture capital investors or investment office within your company. This fee must be paid 50% up front and 50% on completion of the quotation.

We don't have wireframes or a high resolution design, can you do this for us?

If you don't have a graphic designer around to do your high resolution designs for Desktop and Mobile don't stress. You can save yourself a lot of money if you spend a little time learning Figma (it is a free design tool) and taking the templates provided by the Sharetribe team to produce your high resolution clickable prototype. Don't stress if you are struggling with the design elements, just get the flows right and your business rules. 

We have designers on staff and can do the design work with you, you should budget at least $3000USD to produce wireframes and user interface specs for key pages such as the home page, search results and view listing pages. Total design fees are driven by the number of pages in your marketplace design.

Finally we also recommend working with Fiona Burns out of the UK www.fionaburns.co she is awesome and has worked with us hand in glove on a number of projects.

We already have a Sharetribe marketplace, our last developer was rubbish, can you help us?

Absolutely, our process is the same. However, we do charge $400 USD to look at the code base and provide you with some basic advice about the condition your project is in. This will give you and us an idea of what we are getting into.

End 2 End Testing Fees

Our estimates don't include automated unit test, regression testing or full end-to-end (E2E) functional testing. You are responsible for E2E testing in the test environment and giving approval to release the test version of your code into production. We do have E2E testing staff and we can build test plans, test scripts and conduct E2E testing each release if you wish. Again we charge E2E testing as a fixed fee and it would be based on each release to production. Most clients do the E2E testing themselves during the development phase, then once in production may ask us to do E2E testing depending on how busy they get and their attitude to risk.

Do you use AI to write my code?

Yes we use AI to write and test code.

What is my IP position for AI written code?

All of our team is on Copilot Business Subscription. As part of Microsoft’s CoPilot Business Subscription Journeyhorizon owns all Copywrite to any software written with the assitance of AI. You are provided a royalty free license to that code as per the Services Agreement. The GitHub Copilot Business plan includes significant intellectual property (IP) protections designed for organizational use. Under this plan, Journeyhorizon retains ownership of the code produced by Copilot, and GitHub/Microsoft provide IP indemnification to protect against copyright claims, provided specific, optional security filters are enabled. Copilot Business, GitHub does not use our prompts or the code suggested to JH to train their models. This ensures that JH proprietary code is not leaked into the public model.

Can I write code with AI and you just review my pull requests?

Yes. We now offer a coaching service. We charge the same setup fees of $3000USD but what is included is a fully coaching and implementation session to get your local repository setup, show you have to do changes, commit those changes and push them to the repository for review by our developers. We charge $40 USD per hour to review pull-requests. No warranty or extended warranty can be provided under this model. You will also need to be happy with any IP issues that result from your chosen tool use.

Mobile App Template for Sharetribe Marketplaces

We offer a Sharetribe template for mobile apps. This app template is equivalent to the Sharetribe web template and will allow you to launch a no-code iOS and Android native mobile app version of your marketplace. Our mobile template is built using Google Flutter and Dart programming language. Our mobile template includes the Delete Account feature required by iOS store to publish your app and comply with their publishing guidelines.

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If you'd like to explore how it works, we have a demo app called Sharetribe Horizon. Simply download and install it on your phone to experience its seamless connection to our demo marketplace.

• Android: Download on Google Play
• iOS: Download on the App Store

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Some example screen shots

Features in the mobile app

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No Code Mobile App Fees

There is a one time setup fee of $199 USD to build and deploy your mobile app (if you are no-code hosted by sharetribe).

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Monthly Subscription fee of $249 USD (no commitment) OR $199 USD p.mth (paid annually)

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Deployment of the Mobile app will require you to upgrade to the Sharetribe Extend plan as the mobile app makes use of the integration API.

Custom Mobile App Fees

$199 USD Setup Fee + Customisation Fees + $349 p.mth USD subscription fee

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The Mobile code can be extended and customised just like your Sharetribe Web Template. These fees are separate to your Sharetribe Web customisations. Depending on what version of Sharetribe Web Template you are on and what customisations you have made will determine the cost and feasibility of this. 

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If customisations are planned well, the server code should be reused between both web and mobile.

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After 36 continuous months, we will provide you with a royalty free commercial license for the mobile app code base. This means no ongoing subscription fees for your customised mobile app.

How do I pay you?

Invoicing

We invoice every 2 weeks based on backlog cards that have been tested and accepted or have been in test for 2 weeks. Your invoice will have the following line items.

1. Estimation Fees for backlog cards that have completed estimates.
2. Backlog Card fees.
3. Project Management Fees for backlog cards that have been delivered.

All customers start of post-paid invoices with 14 day payment terms. If you are late paying an invoice you will be moved to the Pay2Paid.com service where you will pay for cards when they are moved to IN PROGRESS by you, the funds will be held in escrow and then released to us when you have accepted the work.

Payment

Great question!

We accept the following forms of payment:

• All forms of cryptocurrency – transfers of BUSD via Binance are free and the exchange rates are excellent. We particularly like bitcoin.
• Stripe/Airwallex  – convenient for credit cards payments however there is a payment fee for you and us.
• WISE – create a free account, load some funds and transfer to our WISE account fee free.
• Local Bank Accounts - We have bank accounts in the USA (USD), EUROPE (EURO), Canada (CAD), Singapore (SNG) and England (GBP) that will accept funds transfer in those currencies. We use transferwise to then move our currency around back to Australia.
• WIRE/SWIFT - International Bank Transfer to our nominated account in Australia (USD or AUD). A very expensive option with poor bank FX rates (not recommended).

Pre-Payment

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We have an optional pre-payment arrangement that allows you to get extra value based on the amount pre-paid. It's a simple way to streamline your workflow and reduce overall costs over time.

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Pre-Payment Options

• Pre-pay $20,000 → receive 15% additional value (equivalent to $23,530 in cards)
• Pre-pay $10,000 → receive 10% additional value (equivalent to $11,765 in cards)
• Pre-pay $5,000 → receive 5% additional value (equivalent to $5,883 in cards)

All invoices must be paid within 14 days.

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If you cannot pay in that timeframe please let us know and we can make payment arrangements.

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Getting Started

Step 1. Setting up development operations.

1. We create a discord server OR Slack for all of us to talk
2. We create a Trello project to manage backlog and the agile development process. See our “How we use Trello” for more information.
3. If you are migrating from ST GO, give Admin access to your ST Go marketplace.
4. Create a dropbox or Google Drive to share files.

Step 2. Move your marketplace to partner-hosted

1. We create your AWS environments.
2. We will deploy the ST Web Template to AWS and connect to you Admin Console.
3. We update your Environment Variables file
4. We get you to update your DNS so that your test.yourmarketplace.com goes to your test instance
5. We get you to update your DNS so that your www.yourmarketplace.com goes to your production instance
6. ta da...you have successfully moved from Sharetribe hosted marketplace to Hosted by Journeyhorizon

Step 3. Your Design

1. Define your user journeys
2. Sketch out your site-map
3. Define your user interface for Web and Mobile formats. You can use Figma for this, it is free and creates clickable prototypes. Get the Figma files from ST, import into Figma and go nuts... https://www.sharetribe.com/docs/design-toolkit/design-files/. 
4. Please be aware that there are minor variances between the design files and the Sharetribe Web Template, the Sharetribe team do their best to keep them in-sync but sometimes there will be small variances, where there are differences, the Sharetribe Web Template wins.
5. Create a Google Document to hold your requirements
6. a. Define the fields for User Profiles
7. b. Define the fields for Listing Profiles
8. c. Define the fields to be included on a Transaction if needed
9. Identify gaps between the base template and what you want to achieve
10. Create your imagery, colours and fonts
11. Acquire any licenses to your images and fonts
12. Define what country(s) you want to operate in
13. Define what currency you want displayed
14. Define what language you want the marketplace in
15. Define what you want to sell?
16. a. Rentals by night (nightly availability) 
17. b. Rentals by day (daily availability) 
18. c. Purchase products (purchase transaction) 
19. d. Hourly availability (hourly availability)
20. Define any additional fees and charges you want to apply during the checkout?
21. Define your buyer and seller commission structures? These are the commission the buyer pays to you or the seller pays to you from the transaction.
22. Design your transaction processes, see this document https://www.sharetribe.com/docs/background/transaction-process/ . We recommend using Draw.io to produce your transaction process. We can provide you with a Draw.io base template if you like.

Step 4. Create your backlog

1. Create your backlog in Trello this is your wish list of all the features you want
2. Lets have our first sprint planning meeting
3. Move backlog items to in development

Step 5. Usual Week

1. Sprint planning monday (includes any bugs from last test and new features)
2. Monday - Friday Lunchtime - Work on assigned items
3. Thursday - Internal team QA
4. Thursday PM - released to test environment for you to test.
5. Friday AM - last time we will release to production that week, allowing us time to conduct production verification testing and fix any issues.
6. Sat / Sun - you test the release, raise any bugs in Trello move cards as appropriate
7. Monday AM - sprint planning and clearance for release to production of test
8. Monday PM - release last weeks features to production
9. Monday PM - you test that production is working fine.
10. Rinse and repeat

Step 6. Support and ongoing enhancements

1. Part 1 - monitoring. We monitor your site using sentry.io, this tells us if there are any production issues or outages. We check any sentry.io logs during normal Vietnam business hours. If you require more active support a more responsive paid arrangement can be put in place.
2. Part 2  - Warranty - On your first release to production, you receive 30 days warranty where we will fix any production bugs you missed during your testing at no cost. At the end of the free warranty period, extended warranty cover must be paid. Extended Warranty is like insurance, it allows you to sleep easy at night knowing that even though you tested your production release thoroughly, you might have missed something. If any bug or incident occurs in product such as a DDOS attack or change to a third-party API integration that breaks your marketplace, we will fix it at no additional cost during normal Vietnam business hours. Extended Warranty is calculated as 1% of total project investment per month. For example if your current investment is $10,000 than your monthly warranty payment will be $100. Extended Warranty must be paid each month irrespective of how actively you are investing in your marketplace. These funds are used to ensure we maintain monitoring infrastructure and ongoing continuity of knowledge around your marketplace implementation.
3. Part 3 - Ongoing enhancement - Continue as we do now, fixed price per card, and we fix bugs related to cards found in the test environment. Any bugs found in production fall under Part Two. We introduce a new label call “PRODUCTION BUG” so that we can all manage the difference between them.‍
4. Part 4 - Extended Support - We provide free support to all customers during normal vietnam business hours. As your marketplace gets busier and starts to grow with more significant revenue, you may need additional support out of hours. We can accomodate out of ours support to ensure that any production incident is resolved as soon as possible.

Other Useful Stuff

Demo Sites

• A working demo showcasing our plugin integrations in action:
  https://stdemo.jhorizon.io
• Live eCommerce demo sites built with our standard template:
  https://aerohaven-demo.jhorizon.io/
  https://wheelworks-demo.jhorizon.io/
  https://hydraseal-demo.jhorizon.io/

Test Data

You will need some test data for stripe, the following links provide the details for test accounts and test credit cards

• Bank Accounts https://stripe.com/docs/connect/testing 
• Credit Cards - https://stripe.com/docs/testing

Sharetribe Documentation

• Sharetribe Documents - https://www.sharetribe.com/docs/
• Sharetribe Roadmap - https://www.sharetribe.com/flex/roadmap
• Sharetribe API - https://www.sharetribe.com/api-reference/
• Sketch Files - https://www.sharetribe.com/docs/design-toolkit/design-files/

Not Supported Yet

• Check roadmap for latest features in the works.
• Creating Listings through the Sharetribe Admin Console
• Transferring listing to another user
• Editing photos of a listing in admin console