Can I trust that Flex scales to my needs?

Scaling is an important question when thinking about the long term future of your marketplace. You'll want a platform that not only has the features that you need, but one that also smoothly grows with you as your platform becomes more popular and successful. Sharetribe Flex offers the infrastructure, performance, and tools to create your custom marketplace fast and scale it as far as you can.

Technical scalability

Flex is built to scale with your marketplace's growing technical demands. As you build, launch, and grow your marketplace, your technical needs will evolve: You will need to store more and more data, make sure that data is always secure and available, and continue to build out your platform's user experience. Flex's software architecture and backend services are built to help you meet these challenges.

Frontend flexibility

The power of Sharetribe Flex comes from the combination of a flexible frontend powered by a pre-built backend, implemented as a headless software solution. You can read more about these technical concepts in this article.

With Flex, you build, own, and host the front end code of the marketplace. This gives you significant control over how your marketplace looks and works while taking advantage of Sharetribe-provided functionalities and services. This is a key component of how Flex can be made to scale: because you can change the code directly, you can always develop customizations necessary for your marketplace.

The number of options is vast. Need more advanced shipping options for your international sneaker marketplace? Find a third party solution that suits your needs, and integrate it to your marketplace! Need file sharing services for your vendors who are selling digital art? Sure thing! Want to give an easy way for your marketplace users to communicate with you via a chat widget? You bet it's possible. One marketplace running on Flex, the car sharing marketplace Drive Lah, even integrated a tool for being able to unlock cars remotely. You can read more about Flex integration tools along with some examples over here.

The frontend of your marketplace is powered by the backend, which is operated by the Sharetribe team. We keep your marketplace secure and available at any scale.

Backend security and performance

Sharetribe's primary service is to create, store, secure, and make available at scale your Flex marketplace data. Flex backends run on server infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), so your data is stored on high grade security data centers. Within Sharetribe, access to the data is limited to only systems or personnel that need to access it for their work, and with the least privileges principle. This means that access to data is denied by default and given only to those for whom it is required. If you would like to learn more about our data security infrastructure and practices, please contact us for our Data Security Overview.

With regard to performance, it is important that your marketplace is reliably available whenever your users want to use it. We have backup systems and internal processes to ensure that Flex stays online no matter the situation, which has resulted in a historical uptime of 99.99+%. You can always track and subscribe to Flex uptime updates via a publicly available page.

However, uptime is only one aspect of performance: you want to be sure that the marketplace performs well even under load. This was the case with the private pool rental marketplace Swimmy, which grew strongly during its very first years, especially around the summer. The Flex backend doesn't struggle even with a significant surge of users or listings: Swimmy has since grown to tens of thousands of users, and manages to work well under load without issue. The marketplace mentioned in the previous section, Drive Lah, has grown even bigger - beyond 200.000 users.

Business scalability

When choosing a marketplace platform, technical performance is not the only aspect of scaling you need to consider: you should also think about how the solution can accommodate the evolving needs of your users. It is always disruptive to move to a new platform if you already have an established online marketplace somewhere, so it is best to choose a solution you will be happy with in the long run. Some things you should think about are future software updates, the support you can get when you run into different questions, and data/code ownership.

Building with Flex

What makes Flex powerful is that it both gives you the freedom to customize the frontend according to your preferences, while at the same time including all the basic functionality of an online marketplace out of the box.

You get access to the Sharetribe Web Template, an open sourced frontend template that helps you reduce how much development you need to launch.You and your team can skip the time-consuming process of creating basic marketplace functionality like user account management, review creation, login process, etc., and focus on what makes your marketplace special. In other words, you'll be saving both time and money and you'll be able to start scaling faster, since a significant part of the work has already been done on day one when you start on Flex.

Furthermore, you're not locked in to any single developer. If you're a small business owner with a limited budget, you may prefer to hire an agency or a freelancer to build your marketplace, at least its first version. However, when businesses grow, they may at some point want to consider hiring their own developer. With Flex, you can do just that. We don't lock you in with any developer, so you are free to choose the one you like most. You are also free to move to another developer agency with all your custom built code, if you prefer.

As an example, the Flex marketplace Landtrust hired a software agency to help them launch, then hired their own in-house development team as they grew further. Doing so can be especially useful if you at some point need some specific development skills that your current developer may not have, such as specific skills for building a native mobile app. The software architecture behind Sharetribe Flex supports expanding the platform in multiple directions, also after you've launched it.

All in all, we've worked hard to make sure that Flex helps you be successful from the building stage to operating at scale. Flex is built so that it is fast and affordable to start with a custom platform while ensuring that the tech will not stand in your way in the future as you scale. We don't lock you in either with regard to your data, or with regard to which developers you can use, allowing you to remain very flexible within the Flex framework. And in the unlikely event that you decide to move away to a different solution, you're free to do that as well. But we will of course keep working hard to avoid that by making Flex as good as it can be.🙂