ASK A LIBRARIAN
A neighborhood lending library, but for stuff. Ladders, stand mixers, bar clamps, board games — the things we all own and rarely use. Your neighborhood forms a library, members put items on the shelves (the items stay in their garages; the shelves are the app), and neighbors borrow and return them. Like a book library: things go out, things come back, everyone can see the checkout card.
No. Nothing on StuffLibrary is rented. No fees, no deposits, no money changing hands in the app at all. The lending is neighbor-to-neighbor generosity with good bookkeeping. Using StuffLibrary is free right now; if it someday grows big enough that hosting costs matter, we'll figure out community funding together (think library dues, not subscription tiers). What will never change: no ads, and nothing here is for sale.
We love Buy Nothing groups (and Freecycle, and swap meets — see our field guide to that whole world). The main difference: in gifting and swap groups, stuff changes hands permanently. StuffLibrary is about lending and returning — a persistent pool of shared things that stays in the neighborhood, gets used dozens of times, and belongs to the same people it always did. Overlapping spirit, different verb.
Nextdoor is social-first: conversations, recommendations, occasionally arguments about fireworks. StuffLibrary is stuff-first. There's no feed to win, no comments section — just a catalog of things, checkout cards, and quiet reciprocity. We think stuff is a better icebreaker than opinions.
It's a library for stuff. That's it, that's the name. But the choice of library is doing real work: the public library is the best idea civilization has had about sharing — a commons with rules gentle enough to feel like trust and firm enough to work. We borrowed the whole aesthetic on purpose — cards, stamps, due dates — as a reminder that this isn't a marketplace. It's a library where the books are ladders.
No hard rule. But joining a library is a visible, reciprocal act — your member card quietly shows what you share. Most people find that after a borrow or two, they start eyeing their own garage differently.
Yes. You decide what to share, and you set the bar per item — a one-tap request might be fine for a $15 hand tool, while your $400 camera can require a video handshake and established trust. You can always decline a request. Lending should never feel like exposure.
Almost anything with a handle, a plug, or a box: tools, ladders, kitchen gear, camping equipment, board games, puzzles, garden stuff. The platform automatically screens out what doesn't belong on a neighborhood shelf — weapons, alcohol, tobacco, and anything unsafe or age-restricted — so you don't have to memorize a rulebook.
No — and that's on purpose. StuffLibrary is a library, not a rental marketplace; no money changes hands here, in either direction. If you want to rent things out commercially, other platforms do that. Here, the return on lending is a neighborhood where you can borrow too.
You two work it out directly, like neighbors do. When an owner approves a request, their reply includes pickup details — most handoffs are a porch pickup or a doorstep exchange. Returns work the same way, with the app keeping the record (who has what, when it's due) while you keep it human.
You propose a return date with your request, and the owner can adjust it when they approve — a ladder might be a weekend, a jigsaw puzzle might be a month. The due date goes on the checkout card for both of you, and if you need longer, ask; owners are neighbors, not late-fee machines.
Say so! Use the feedback button (bottom-right corner, on every page) and tell us what you were hoping to find — it helps your library learn what's worth putting on the shelves. And mention it to your neighbors: "does anyone have a tile cutter?" is exactly the conversation this whole thing exists to start.
It happens; we designed for it instead of pretending otherwise. Items get condition photos at checkout and check-in, so there's a shared record instead of a memory contest. Outcomes are logged plainly (returned clean / returned with damage / lost), there's a lightweight dispute record if the two of you see it differently, and consequences flow through reputation — a dent in the borrower's trust score — rather than through money. And lenders always have the simplest protection: don't lend your most precious things to people who haven't earned trust yet.
Your library card carries a quiet record of care: borrows, returns, on-time stamps. Good history accumulates slowly; slip-ups count against you more sharply but fade with time — a late return fades in weeks, and even losing an item fades after about a year of good behavior. Trust here is hard to earn, easy to dent, and always possible to repair. There's no public shaming, no star ratings, no leaderboard.
For items where the owner wants it, a borrow request includes a short video — a hello, not a hoop. It turns an app notification into a human asking a neighbor for a ladder, which is what's actually happening. It's also a gentle accountability signal: real faces borrow more carefully than usernames do. Videos are visible only within your library, never public.
Because "neighborhood library" only means something if everyone in it is actually a neighbor. Address verification (GPS match, license OCR, or a mailed postcard with a code) is how the boundary of the commons stays real. Verification is tiered — you can browse after a minimal signup, and the heavier checks only kick in before your first borrow.
Members of your library. Nothing is public or indexed — no search engine sees your garage. Identity data, photos, and videos stay within the library you share them with.
No, and no — not now, not ever. StuffLibrary exists to be a non-commercial space: no ads, no data brokerage, and the platform itself is never for sale. If it ever gets big enough that running it costs real money, the answer will be community funding — neighbors chipping in like Friends of the Library — not monetization.
We don't have an enforceable age gate, so we don't pretend to have one. What we do instead: the platform automatically screens out categories that minors can't legally borrow — firearms, alcohol, tobacco — so the shelves stay appropriate for everyone in the household.
Three reasons, in increasing order of importance. They're pretty. They make the whole thing more fun to use. And — the real reason — they normalize everyone's stuff. A watercolor of your torque wrench shares the torque wrench without sharing your messy garage; nobody's private space leaks into public view, and nobody's browsing the catalog judging photography or backdrops. It also deliberately fuzzes condition — the illustration is not documentation, so nobody's arguing from a photo about a scratch. The condition record happens properly, at checkout and check-in. The watercolor just says: here's all our stuff.
It's not a company. StuffLibrary is an open-source civic project built by Marc Cull — a neighbor in Berkeley who wanted this to exist for his own neighborhood, and figured other neighborhoods might want it too. (Day jobs, for the trust-but-verify crowd: CTO of FreeWorld, a nonprofit helping justice-impacted Americans launch living-wage trucking careers, and principal of Next Horizon Collective, a design/build agency helping nonprofits do more with thoughtful, ethical tech.) The code is AGPL-licensed and the long-term plan is for the project to be community-governed and community-funded — see the rest of this FAQ.
Yes — the whole platform, under AGPLv3. That license means anyone can inspect, run, or improve the code, and nobody — including a company, including us — can take it private, wrap it in ads, and sell it back to you. The code is part of the commons too. (Longer version: see "Why We Chose AGPLv3" in the repo.)
StuffLibrary is a web app that installs to your phone like a native one (a PWA) — no app store required. A store-bought native app may come later if the web version ever falls short where it counts.
Just start. The beta is live everywhere — sign up, start your neighborhood's library, add a few things from your own garage, and invite the neighbors you know (postcard invites exist for the ones you don't). It's beta software built by a small team of approximately one, so expect rough edges and tell us about them — early libraries are shaping what this becomes.
Fair question — and we didn't answer it with optimism. The platform is deliberately built around Elinor Ostrom's Nobel-winning research on what makes real-world commons endure: clear membership, local rules, visible checkouts, gentle graduated consequences, and quick low-drama dispute handling. Communities have run shared resources this way for centuries. We just wrote it into software. (Full story: see The Tragedy of the Commons Is Optional.)