A hyperlocal marketplace for jobs, services and everyday help. Built solo,
from first commit to production, in eight months.
Lokali connects people who need something with people who can do it, directly
in their region. A private person posts what they need, from moving help to
tutoring, and locals respond. Self-employed professionals and small businesses
build a public company profile, collect reviews and get found by customers
nearby. Companies post job listings and manage applicants through a built-in
ATS. Five listing types cover the entire local work economy on one platform.
I started building Lokali in November 2025 because I had lived the problem
myself. As a self-employed IT technician I had no idea where to register, how
to get discovered or how to win my first customers. There was no central place
for any of it in Austria. So I built one, including a guide hub that answers the
tax and registration questions every new freelancer runs into.
Today Lokali is live on iOS, Android and Web, usable in Austria and most of
Central Europe including Germany, Switzerland and Poland, fully localized in
nine languages.
The technical side
Lokali is a monorepo built with pnpm workspaces and Turborepo, running four
independent apps on four domains: the main platform, a dedicated SSO auth
service modeled after willhaben, an internal admin console and the API. The
stack is Next.js 16 with React 19 on the web, Express and MongoDB on the
backend, and React Native with Expo SDK 55 for both mobile apps.
Everything is self-hosted on a Hetzner server in Germany, orchestrated with
Coolify. No managed cloud, full control over performance and cost from day one.
The result is measurable: a PageSpeed score of 99 performance, 97 accessibility,
100 best practices and 100 SEO.
Under the hood: 32 data models, real-time chat over Socket.io, a two-track
ranking algorithm that serves organic and promoted listings without letting one
cannibalize the other, geo search with 2dsphere indexes for radius queries down
to the meter, and a fully custom email system delivering transactional and
notification mails in all nine languages. Localization is enforced by a parity
gate in the build, so no string ships in fewer than nine languages.
The bigger picture
Every search, listing and application on Lokali produces a structured market
signal. Aggregated and anonymized, this becomes a real-time map of local supply
and demand that does not exist anywhere today: which services are needed where,
where demand outpaces supply, where businesses search for staff and cannot find
any. Official statistics arrive yearly at state level. Lokali sees it per city,
per category, per week. That data layer, built privacy-first and GDPR-compliant
on EU servers, is the long-term vision behind the marketplace.
Lokali is the kind of product that usually takes a team of ten to launch. I
built it alone, and it is growing daily without a marketing budget.