[HN Gopher] Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon
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Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon
I'm building an open source Amazon. In other words, an open source
decentralized marketplace. But like Carl Sagan said, to make an
apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. So
first I had to make open source management systems for every
vertical. I'm launching the first one today, Openfront e-commerce,
an open source Shopify alternative. Next will be Openfront
restaurant, Openfront grocery, and Openfront gym. And all of these
Openfronts will connect to our decentralized marketplace,
"the/marketplace", seamlessly. Once we launch other Openfronts,
you'll be able to do everything from booking hotels to ordering
groceries right from one place with no middle men. The marketplace
simply connects to the Openfront just like its built-in storefront
does. Together, we can use open source to disrupt marketplaces and
make sure sellers, in every vertical, are never beholden to them.
Marketplace: https://marketplace.openship.org Openfront platforms:
https://openship.org/openfront-ecommerce Source code:
https://github.com/openshiporg/openfront Demo - Openfront:
https://youtu.be/jz0ZZmtBHgo Demo - Marketplace:
https://youtu.be/LM6hRjZIDcs Part 1 -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32690410
Author : theturtletalks
Score : 25 points
Date : 2025-12-12 18:19 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (openship.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (openship.org)
| Hackbraten wrote:
| The landing page scrolls with 2 fps on my phone, making it
| completely unusable.
|
| I wish there was a browser setting to disable CPU-heavy CSS
| filters in Firefox to fix pages like this one.
| grekowalski wrote:
| What is your mobile phone and browser?
| XCSme wrote:
| It's also laggy for me, with a 5900x + 3090...
| llbbdd wrote:
| I couldn't believe this but I see other threads on the Internet
| from over a year ago complaining that Firefox can't handle the
| backdrop blur filter performantly at all. Chrome has no issue;
| I had to squint to even figure out what heavy work might have
| been weighing Firefox down. This design element has been
| everywhere for years, I didn't know it had gotten this bad at
| Mozilla.
| dang wrote:
| A previous thread:
|
| _Show HN: I 'm building an open-source Amazon_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32690410 - Sept 2022 (301
| comments)
|
| (Reposts are fine after a year or so; to past threads are just to
| satisfy extra-curious readers)
| ranger_danger wrote:
| I clicked on the openfront repo, and...
|
| Having a .claude folder, which also contains full publicly-
| accessible postgres credentials, does not instill confidence I'm
| afraid.
| abigail95 wrote:
| I feel safer always running him in dangerous mode now.
| joshribakoff wrote:
| 10 minutes after your comment I checked and I don't see any
| pgsql credentials, but I do see that they have committed their
| local settings instead, including their local file paths now.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| https://github.com/openshiporg/openfront/blob/master/.claude.
| ..
| theturtletalks wrote:
| That is an old database used for development, I will remove
| and add .claude to gitignore
| pxx wrote:
| It's still there. Check the pg_dump command.
| joshribakoff wrote:
| This is a very low quality submission. Its a vibe coded app that
| gives me a chat ui. When i ask for soup it shows me t shirts.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| It's using AISDK and MCP-UI, which is standard for chats. If
| you check the cart in the input, there's only 2 stores added
| for now.
|
| Also, that chat is just one part of it. Those stores are
| running on Openfront, our Shopify alternative. Please check our
| ethos to get the full vision.
|
| Also, I was working on this before AI. Openfront and
| the/marketplace are part of an ecosystem. We built Openship, an
| e-commerce order management system, years ago.
| orbeliani wrote:
| Don't confuse vibe coding with a low effort build, vibe coding
| can lead to the high-quality, amazing products. I'm just here
| to protect the vibe coding phenomenon :D
| happytoexplain wrote:
| It's just a semantic disagreement. In my experience, "vibe
| coding" means "software made with genAI, casually iterated
| until it passes tests and appears to work, without exhaustive
| or experienced review of the output, and is therefore often
| bad." It doesn't _have_ to mean that, but in practice that
| seems to be the dominant definition currently.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| > Openfronts will connect to our decentralized marketplac
|
| How exactly does (or will?) this decentralisation work?
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Each store has its own Openfront setup, with its own database,
| checkout, and payment (Stripe & Paypal) account. The
| marketplace just connects to the store's API in real time,
| fetching products, adding items to the cart, and handing off to
| checkout. When a customer pays, the funds go directly to the
| store's Stripe account.
|
| There's no central database or shared backend. The marketplace
| is simply a discovery layer that sits on top of fully
| independent stores.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I 'm building an open source Amazon._
|
| No you're not. Amazon is not the software that runs the website.
| 'Amazon' is the millions of relationships that Amazon has with
| suppliers and customers. It's the strong brand, the trust that
| people have that they can shop there safely, the sheer scale of
| the operation meaning that products are about as cheap as
| possible and will arrive when Amazon say they will. It's the ease
| of using an invisible, massively optimized chain of systems from
| a pretty basic app.
|
| You can't build a new (and hopefully better) Amazon by copying
| the software. You need to work out how to get sellers and buyers
| to come to your site before they go Amazon, then build _that
| thing_ so they do. How good the software is and whether it 's
| open source of not probably doesn't matter. Better software is
| never going to be enough of a reason for people to switch away
| from Amazon.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Yeah, you're right. Amazon isn't really about the software at
| this point. It's the lock-in. Sellers can't leave without
| losing all their reviews, rankings, and years of optimization.
| That's the moat.
|
| I'm not building better software to compete directly with
| Amazon. I'm building infrastructure that sellers can truly own,
| so lock-in stops being such a powerful moat.
|
| Traditional marketplaces charge 15-30% because they provide
| checkout, payments, and the customer database. But if stores
| already own that infrastructure, the only thing you really need
| is discovery. And discovery doesn't have to cost anything.
|
| Our marketplace is essentially just a directory. Stores keep
| their own checkout and process their own payments. We query
| their API and render the results conversationally. And because
| the code is open source, if we ever became like Amazon, anyone
| could fork it and launch a competing directory.
| mbirth wrote:
| How does this compare to flohmarkt?
|
| https://codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt
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