I Built Airbnb for Your Neighbour's Ladder (and It Might Get You Outside) (my pick)

Prince Kumar — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 21:23:49 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass

*## What I Built
*
Somewhere in your neighbourhood, there's a ladder sitting in a corner collecting dust. A speaker that came out twice a year. A camera that got bought with big plans and now lives in a drawer.

And somewhere a few streets away, someone is about to spend ₹4,000 on a speaker they'll use for one birthday party.

RentKaro connects those two people.

It's a local, peer-to-peer rental marketplace. The first screen asks one simple thing: what do you want to do?

List an item: upload photos, set your own price per hour, security deposit, available timings and pickup rules, then watch requests come in and accept or decline them.
Rent an item: search by name and pincode, sort by what's nearest, pick your date and time, and send a request.

Why does this belong in a "Touch Grass" challenge? Because the whole point is that the transaction happens in real life. You walk to a neighbour's gate. You say hello, you pick up the tent, and you actually go camping. The app is only there to get you off the screen and out the door faster. It's for people in Indian cities who'd rather borrow than buy, and for anyone with things lying around that could earn their keep.

Demo

🔗 Live: - https://rentkaro-hjvw.vercel.app/

Try both paths. List something with a photo, then switch over and rent something nearby.

Code

📦 GitHub: - ``https://github.com/prinxe-kr/rentkaro

How I Built It

I wanted to go from idea to something clickable fast, so I kept the stack deliberately small: plain HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript, with no heavy framework, deployed on Vercel.

Before writing code, I wrote a short PRD so I wouldn't drown in features: two flows (List and Rent), a clear MVP, and a long "later" list I forced myself to ignore. Payments, OTP login and chat are all deliberately left out for now. The prototype handles:

Multi-photo upload and a full listing form (pricing, deposit, timings, rules)
Search by keyword, category and pincode, with sorting by nearest pincode, price and rating
A booking form with a live total (rent plus refundable deposit)
An owner dashboard with requests and Accept/Decline
A renter tracker that shows the status of each booking

For the look, I picked deep teal for trust and amber for energy. Teal says "you can rely on this" and amber says "go do the thing."

AI used: [ADD YOUR OPEN-SOURCE MODEL / TOOL HERE, e.g. which open-weight model or agent harness you used, and what it helped with.]

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

RentKaro is built on a very simple idea: things are worth more when they're shared. Open innovation works the same way.

I built this with open web standards and open tools that anyone can read, copy and improve. Anyone, from a student in Patna to a developer in another city, can fork this repo and adapt it for their own town without asking permission or paying for access. That matters for a product like this, because every city is different. Local pincodes, local trust and local habits can't be solved by one closed platform. They get solved by people who live there and can change the code.

Open source made this possible for me as a solo builder with a weekend and an idea.

Thanks for reading. If you've got a ladder you never use, you know where to list it. 🪜

DEV Community: Prince Kumar

I Built Airbnb for Your Neighbour's Ladder (and It Might Get You Outside) (my pick)

Demo

Code

How I Built It

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?