TradesOn
Two-sided marketplace for verified home-services trades. AI intake, compliance, escrow.
TradesOn
A production marketplace that connects homeowners, realtors, and property managers with verified tradespeople — and runs the entire job from first photo to final payout.
TradesOn takes a messy, trust-dependent transaction — "find someone reliable to fix the thing" — and turns it into a guided, compliant, end-to-end flow. Post a job, get AI-assisted scoping, compare real quotes, schedule, track the pro to your door, and release payment automatically when the work is done.
What it does
TradesOn manages the full job lifecycle across four distinct user types, each with their own onboarding, dashboard, and permissions:
- Homeowners post jobs, compare quotes, message pros, and pay securely.
- Tradespeople browse a live job board, submit quotes, get verified, and get paid — minus a flat platform fee, no subscriptions.
- Realtors & property managers refer clients, track referrals, and manage repairs across portfolios.
Headline features
| Feature | What the user sees |
|---|---|
| AI-assisted job intake | Describe a problem in plain language; get a structured scope, cost range, and time estimate before a single pro is contacted. |
| Live job board & quoting | Tradespeople see open jobs filtered to their trade and service radius; homeowners compare quotes side by side. |
| Identity & license compliance | Verified IDs, license checks, and insurance validation gate who can quote — with automatic expiry alerts. |
| Real-time GPS tracking | Watch your pro head to your door on a live map — "on my way" to "arrived," updated in real time. |
| Escrow-style payments | Card is collected up front; funds release to the tradesperson automatically on completion, with the platform fee handled invisibly. |
| In-app messaging & push | Sub-second chat plus push notifications for every quote, acceptance, schedule change, and message. |
| Role-aware everything | One account, multiple roles — the entire UI, navigation, and data scope adapt to who you are right now. |
How it was built
TradesOn is a real, deployed system — not a clickable mockup. The interesting work was in the architecture that lets a small team ship a trustworthy, scalable marketplace.
1. The right data in the right store
Rather than forcing one database to do everything, TradesOn splits its data across three purpose-built stores:
- A relational transactional core for users, jobs, quotes, payments, and compliance — strong consistency where money and trust are on the line.
- A real-time layer scoped tightly to the features that genuinely need sub-second updates: messaging and live location.
- An analytics mirror kept decoupled from the hot path, so dashboards never slow down the app.
The discipline here is the product: one source of truth per entity, no dual-writes, no consistency bugs at 2 a.m.
2. "Real-time feel" without the real-time bill
Marketplaces live or die on responsiveness — but naive real-time listeners get expensive fast as users grow. TradesOn delivers the instant feel of bids, acceptances, and status changes through an event-driven push pipeline instead. Every meaningful action emits an event; the right people get notified in ~300–600ms; costs stay flat as the user base climbs toward five figures.
3. Trust and money, handled correctly
Payments use a managed escrow-style flow: cards are collected on onboarding, charged per job, split with a platform fee, and paid out to verified pros automatically on completion. Compliance — identity, licensing, insurance — is enforced server-side, not just hinted at in the UI. Account deletion, authorization checks, and audit logging were built in, not bolted on.
4. Built to scale and to demo
The whole platform is containerized and deploys continuously to a managed cloud runtime. It ships with graceful degradation (the app stays usable even if a backend is briefly unavailable), error boundaries, and a full guided demo mode — so the product can be shown to investors and clients anytime, anywhere, without a live database.
Outcomes
- From zero to a production, multi-role marketplace — auth, payments, compliance, messaging, live tracking, and four onboarding flows, all live.
- Architected for 10,000+ users with a documented, forward-compatible path to analytics and AI without rewrites.
- Cost-aware by design — the expensive parts (real-time, AI, analytics) are scoped so spend tracks value, not vanity.
Why this matters for your project
TradesOn is what I do for clients: take an ambitious, multi-sided product idea and stand up the real thing — secure auth, payments, compliance, real-time UX, and a cloud architecture that won't buckle when you grow.
I make the unglamorous decisions that determine whether a product survives contact with real users: where data lives, how money moves safely, what stays fast under load, and how to ship something demo-ready and production-ready at the same time.
If you're building a marketplace, a multi-role platform, or anything where trust and money change hands — let's talk.