Why this exists

I've been keeping reef tanks for about 20 years, and been thinking about building this for about 15 years. Not constantly - but every time I tried to buy or sell something in this hobby, the same frustrations came back.

The forum classifieds are bare bones. No proper tooling, no decent search, no seller ratings. Just posts in a thread. The classified ads on other sites were worse - half the listings looked like scams and the other half were out of date.

Existing solutions make you jump through hoops. Listing a single coral meant filling in a million fields, uploading photos in exactly the right format etc. And the fees - huge chunks gone from every sale. If a buyer claimed DOA, you ate 100% of the loss regardless of your track record.

Facebook groups came and went. Livestock got banned so listings just look like scams now. WhatsApp groups are disorganised and barely searchable. And on all of them, the same problem: you're sending money to some random's PayPal account and just hoping they actually post the thing. No ratings, no protection, no comeback if they ghost you.

I could never see where items actually were. I wanted to plan a route, pick up from a few sellers in one trip. Instead I'd be messaging five different people asking 'where are you based?' before I could figure out if collection was even realistic.

Every few months I'd think: someone should build a proper marketplace for this. Dedicated to reef keeping. With actual seller profiles, transparent track records, location-based search, secure payments, and fair DOA policies.

So I thought, why not, and built one.