About
Neighbours have traded surplus for as long as there have been gardens.
The part that got hard was finding each other. That is the only problem Harvestkin sets out to solve.
Why build it this way
A glut of runner beans is a small, happy problem with an obvious answer: somebody two streets over has too many plums and not enough beans. The answer stopped working when the only way to find that person was to post to the whole internet.
So the board is local and the pins are rough. You see what is growing near you without telling anyone where you sleep, and without a marketplace watching to work out what you are worth.
We think the swap itself should stay between the two people making it. Not because anything is being hidden, but because it is theirs. What is fair between two gardeners is a conversation those two gardeners are having, and it is not our business to price it, record it, or take a share of it.
Four things we cannot do to you
Not four things we promise not to do. Four things the software has no way of doing.
No record of what a trade was worth
No column stores the value of a swap, and no table joins a value to a person. This is not a setting. It is the shape of the schema, and changing it would be a visible migration rather than a quiet toggle.
Nothing that moves value
There are no points to collect, no app money, and no account you can top up. Harvestkin introduces two people and gets out of the way; it never sits in the middle holding anything of yours.
No exact location, ever stored
Points are rounded to a grid cell by the database before they are written. There is no precise coordinate to lose, because there is never one to keep.
No audience to sell
No tracking cookies, no cross-site tracking, and we never sell your data. There is no analytics script in the product, so there is no behavioural profile of you sitting anywhere.
How this gets paid for
Harvestkin is free to use today. There is no payment path in the product at all — no way to pay us, and no way for money to move between members.
If we ever charge, it is for the service and never for the trade. A cut of a trade would require knowing what a trade was worth, and that is the one thing this marketplace is built never to know.
Where it is going
Canada first, because that is where the boards are being seeded and where the privacy rules we hold ourselves to are written. Boards fill one grower at a time, so early members are doing the real work of making a board worth checking.
If something here is wrong, or you want a board started where you live, tell us. We read everything.
Start with one surplus.
No price tags on trades. No cut of a trade, ever. No tracking cookies.