If you have ever worked on a marketplace, you already know that the hardest part is rarely the feature code. The hard part is everything that comes after your app works locally.
I ran into this exact problem while working with Sharetribe Open Source. From a development perspective, Sharetribe is solid. You get a real marketplace foundation, proper transaction flows, background jobs, APIs, and the flexibility to build something genuinely custom. It does not feel like a toy framework.
But deploying it felt like a separate project altogether.
When Sharetribe Usually Becomes a Problem
Once you move past local development, Sharetribe stops being “just a Rails app”.
You now need to think about how the web process runs, how background jobs are handled, how the database scales, how search behaves under load, and how HTTPS and domains are configured. None of this is unique to Sharetribe, but Sharetribe’s workload makes these decisions matter very quickly.
For most developers, this leads to one of two outcomes. Either you spend a significant amount of time doing DevOps work, or you compromise by moving to a hosted marketplace platform and give up flexibility. Neither option feels great when your goal is to build and iterate quickly.
The Deployment Flow (No Hidden Steps)
What surprised me most was how little there was to “learn”.
You can deploy in one click using: kuberns
I forked the Sharetribe Open Source repository into my GitHub account. This is the same repository you customise for marketplace logic, so nothing changes in your development workflow. You are not preparing a special deployment branch or adding platform-specific files.
After that, I connected my GitHub account to Kuberns and selected the Sharetribe repository. There was no configuration screen asking how many services I wanted or which database engine to pick. The platform detected the stack automatically.
The final step was clicking deploy using kuberns
A few minutes later, I had a live Sharetribe marketplace running behind HTTPS, with background jobs working and a database already wired up. There was no point where I had to open a cloud console or tweak infrastructure settings.
Kuberns is an AI powered alternative to heroku, render and railway where you can deploy any project in just few clicks
If you want to see this exact flow visually, this one-click Sharetribe deployment template shows how the repository-to-production path works in practice.
Why This Is Different From Hosted Marketplace Platforms
Hosted marketplace platforms often market themselves as “easy deployment”, but what they really offer is a trade-off. You get convenience, but you lose control.
With this setup, there is no trade-off. You are not deploying a restricted version of Sharetribe. You are deploying the open source version, with all the flexibility that comes with it. The difference is that you are not paying the DevOps tax that usually comes with running it in production.
Costs scale with infrastructure usage, not with how many users or listings your marketplace has. That distinction matters a lot once a marketplace starts growing.
For developers who want a deeper look at how this works internally, this guide on deploying a Sharetribe marketplace with AI explains the setup in more detail.
Why This Approach Makes Sense
Deploying Sharetribe does not need to feel like a DevOps project.
If you can fork a repository and connect your GitHub account, you can get a production-ready Sharetribe marketplace online. The infrastructure complexity is still there, but it is no longer something you have to manage directly.
For developers who want to focus on building marketplaces instead of running them, that is a meaningful shift.
Top comments (0)