OUR COUSINS
StuffLibrary is one small room in a much bigger house. Millions of people already share with their neighbors every day through gifting groups, freecycling networks, repair cafés, timebanks, and toy libraries — most of them older than us, many of them wiser. If one of these fits your neighborhood better than we do, use it, with our blessing. Better yet, use several; they stack.
The honest summary of the landscape: almost all of it is gifting — stuff changes hands permanently. StuffLibrary's corner is lending and returning: a persistent pool of neighborhood stuff that stays owned by your neighbors and gets used again and again. Overlapping spirit, different verb. Here's the whole family, with how to find your local branch of each.
(Snapshot researched July 2026. These networks change; tell us if a link has gone stale.)
The largest gift-economy network in the world, founded in July 2013 on Bainbridge Island, WA by Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller as hyperlocal Facebook groups where neighbors give, ask, and lend freely — no money, no barter, no strings. Now a Public Benefit Corporation claiming 14+ million members in 50+ countries across 8,000+ registered Facebook groups plus its own app (relaunched as "Buy Nothing 3.0" in January 2026); independent reporting in early 2025 put roughly 12.4M people in the Facebook groups vs. about 1.4M on the app. Its recent history is turbulent — an app pivot beginning in 2021, monetization via a ~$55/year premium tier, and trademark enforcement that led Facebook to remove hundreds of unaffiliated "Buy Nothing"-named groups in October 2025 (many simply renamed and carried on). The organization publicly recommitted in November 2025 to supporting Facebook groups indefinitely. Exchange model: gift. Find yours: https://buynothingproject.org/facebookgroups (the official group directory requires a free Buy Nothing account).
The elder statesman of online gifting: founded May 2003 in Tucson, AZ, a genuine 501(c)(3) nonprofit built around local "Town" groups where everything posted must be free. Reports 11+ million members in over 5,000 town groups worldwide, hosted on its own website. Still steadily active in 2026, if a little dated next to app-based rivals. The third-party app trash nothing (https://trashnothing.com) is a popular modern front-end. Exchange model: gift. Find yours: https://www.freecycle.org — search by town, no account needed to browse.
Split from Freecycle in 2009 after governance disputes and became a UK charity run on volunteer energy and open-source software. Very healthy — offers post minutes apart across the UK — and, unusually, its listings are browsable by anyone without an account. Exchange model: gift. UK only. Find yours: https://www.ilovefreegle.org — enter a postcode.
A London-founded (2015) app for sharing surplus food and household items with neighbors, heavily venture-backed. It hasn't shut down, but it has pivoted: by its own account it's now predominantly a B2B surplus-food redistribution service for supermarkets, with the consumer app (8.5–9M users, roughly half in the UK) riding alongside — and the app now lets users sell items, a notable retreat from pure free sharing. Exchange model: gift, plus food rescue and low-value selling. Find yours: https://olioapp.com — location-based app.
The closest philosophical cousin to a commons platform: free, open-source software "for grassroots initiatives... on a local, autonomous and voluntary basis," grown out of the European foodsaving movement. Groups self-govern with built-in agreements, trust karma, and scheduling; karrot.world hosts roughly 700 groups. Volunteer/donation-funded, self-hostable, no commercial model at all. Exchange model: gifting/foodsaving coordination, flexible enough for lending. Find yours: https://karrot.world — browse public groups or start one.
The big venture-built, publicly traded neighborhood network. Its "For Sale & Free" section has a Free filter that functions as a de facto gifting channel with enormous reach — in many suburbs it's the busiest free-stuff venue after Facebook. Address verification makes it genuinely local, but listings are invisible to outsiders, and there's no persistent commons or community norms around gifting. Exchange model: sell and gift, item by item. Find yours: https://nextdoor.com → For Sale & Free → Free.
Raw volume champions. Marketplace's "Free Stuff" category has unmatched scale (https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/category/free, account required); Craigslist's free section is the lowest-friction option anywhere — no account even to browse, curb-alert culture built in (e.g. https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/zip). Both are transactional and anonymous: no membership, no norms, notable flakiness. Exchange model: gift, one-shot.
Not a platform but a recurring in-person event from the early-2000s anticapitalist movement: a temporary market where everything is free, anyone can bring or take, and nobody owns the idea. Deliberately no central directory — that's both the charm and the findability problem. Exchange model: gift, event-based. Commons by construction. Find yours: search "Really Really Free Market" + your city on Instagram or Facebook Events.
The 2021 app pivot and the 2025 trademark crackdown pushed real energy into unaffiliated groups — mostly renamed Facebook groups ("Buy Not a Thing No Rules San Francisco," "Buy Absolutely Nothing," "Gifting in [Place]"). Grassroots and unowned, which is exactly why they're hard to link to durably. Exchange model: gift. Find yours: search Facebook Groups for "gifting," "free," or "buy absolutely nothing" plus your town.
The rare platform whose core verb is borrow: a Dutch company (founded 2012) connecting neighbors to borrow and rent occasional-use things. About half a million users, active in the Netherlands and Belgium and expanding in some US cities, with listings from free loans to small rental fees. The closest commercial analogue to neighborhood lending — items return to their owners — but each item stays a private listing rather than joining a commons, and rental fees change the vibe. Exchange model: lend/rent. Find yours: https://www.peerby.com
The workhorses behind much of the physical tool-library world. myTurn (a US public benefit corporation) powers inventory, memberships, and loans for hundreds of tool libraries and Libraries of Things; Lend Engine (UK) serves tool, toy, and nappy libraries with a free tier for small ones. You don't join these — you join a local lending library that runs on them. Exchange model: lend/return, via institutions. Find a library near you: https://localtools.org/find — or see our state-by-state directory of lending libraries.
The physical kin, and arguably the most legible neighborhood-sharing infrastructure on Earth: 150,000+ registered book boxes in 115 countries with a public world map (Little Free Library, a 501(c)(3)), and the mini-pantry movement's crowdsourced map of thousands of food/hygiene boxes. No login, no app, open 24/7. Exchange model: gift, anonymous. Find yours: https://littlefreelibrary.org/map/ and https://mapping.littlefreepantry.org
Founded in Amsterdam in 2009 and stewarded by the nonprofit Repair Café International Foundation: free community events where volunteers help you fix electronics, clothing, bikes, and toys. Over 2,500 cafés worldwide drawing ~1.5 million visitors a year, with a public map and an inexpensive starter kit for new organizers. Exchange model: neither gift nor lend — shared skills and tools; the object stays yours. Find yours: https://www.repaircafe.org/en/visit/
Timebanking — Edgar Cahn's idea that everyone's hour is worth one credit — is the services counterpart to stuff-sharing. TimeBanks.org maintains a public directory; hOurworld (a Maine-based cooperative) counts ~28,000 members in 326 communities with 3.88 million service hours exchanged. Decades old, nonprofit, stable. Exchange model: mutual credit for time. Find yours: https://timebanks.org and https://hourworld.org
The oldest institutional lending commons of all — dating to the 1930s — and still quietly thriving: Toy Libraries Australia federates 290+ nonprofit toy libraries with a public finder; the USA Toy Library Association lists US ones; the International Toy Library Association connects ~60 countries. True lend-and-return commons, and the closest existing kin to StuffLibrary's model, just specialized to toys. Exchange model: lend/return. Find yours: https://toylibraries.org.au (AU), https://usatla.org (US), https://itla-toylibraries.org (international).
We're not trying to replace any of the above. Here's the honest positioning: