Boro

Peer-to-peer marketplace for borrowing and lending everyday things from people nearby, taken from a university UX project to a full-stack Next.js app.

→ Don't buy it. Boro it.

— 1 / Brief

Most of us own a garage full of things we use twice a year: the kayak, the mitre saw, the tent, the good camera. Boro is a marketplace for borrowing and lending them from people nearby, launching first in Cape Town. Cheaper than buying, better than landfill, and a reason to meet the neighbours. It started as a UX/UI university project (Figma prototype, v1 to v2), became a Rails app at Le Wagon, and this is v3: a ground-up rebuild as a production web app.

— 2 / Approach

I kept the original brand guide (Outback orange, Cosmos blue, Daintree green, Eureka yellow, set in Archivo) and the v2 item line-icons, then designed the product around the full borrow loop rather than just the listings. Browse without an account, with Postgres full-text search, categories, curated collections and suburb and price filters. Lenders list an item with multi-photo upload (resized client-side, stored in Vercel Blob), a daily price, a bond and a minimum hire.

Borrowing is a request, not a checkout: dates are checked for clashes, the lender accepts or declines, marks the item returned, and both sides leave a review. Every item has its own chat thread, with booking events posted straight into the conversation and unread badges in the nav. Built on Next.js 16 with Server Actions, Drizzle on Postgres and Better Auth, with Claude Code as a pair programmer under my spec and direction.

— 3 / Outcome

A working marketplace with search, listings, bookings, chat, reviews, profiles and saved items, mobile-first with a bottom tab bar and installable as a PWA. Payments are arranged between members for now; Stripe Connect is next on the roadmap.