GearUp Market
Rent, buy and sell creative gear.
A peer-to-peer marketplace for African creators to rent, buy and sell gear — Next.js frontend, role-based store and admin dashboards, real-time chat and order updates, and the Node APIs behind them.
- role
- Full-stack engineer
- year
- 2024 — 2025
- platform
- Web
- live
- gearup.market ↗
- stack
- Next.jsTypeScriptExpressSocket.IOStellarRedis/Bull
$ ls ./screens
2 screens · scroll →The problem
African creators spend a lot on gear they use a few days a month, while gear owners have equipment sitting idle. GearUp is the peer-to-peer marketplace in between: rent, buy and sell creative gear, book studio space, find courses and gigs.
What I built
Full-stack, as a contractor:
- The Next.js + TypeScript frontend — listings, search and categories, booking flows, checkout.
- Role-based dashboards for store owners and admins: inventory, orders, payouts, disputes.
- Real-time chat and order updates over Socket.IO, so a renter and an owner can agree on dates without leaving the order, and both see status changes as they happen.
- The Node.js + Express APIs behind it, integrating Stellar and Flutterwave for payments and Redis/Bull for background jobs — reminders, escrow release and expiring holds.
The hard part
Rentals have more states than purchases: requested, held, paid into escrow, picked up, returned, inspected, released. Each transition can come from a user, a payment webhook or a scheduled job. Putting those transitions behind queued jobs — instead of request handlers — meant a slow payment provider couldn't leave an order half-updated.
Outcome
- Live at gearup.market.
- Owners and renters negotiate in real time inside the order, not over WhatsApp.