The problem we built this to fix
An auction where
the house always wins.
The platforms that exist right now weren't designed with tradies in mind. They were designed around the platform. You post a job, six tradies bid against each other, the cheapest one wins, and the platform takes its cut either way.
That's not a marketplace. That's an auction where the house always wins.
For the tradie, it means racing to the bottom on price to compete with whoever's willing to undercut them this week. For the client, it means having no real way to tell the difference between someone with 20 years of experience and a City & Guilds behind them, and someone who just bought a drill.
Quality disappears in a race to the bottom. Every time.
What OpenSpace does differently
No commission. No auction.
No nonsense.
When a client finds you and the job gets done, we don't take a percentage. We're not sitting between you and the client with our hand out. The money you earn is the money you earn.
Tradies build a profile that actually represents them — qualifications, trade, district, portfolio of completed work, and reviews from real clients. A client can see exactly who they're dealing with before they ever pick up the phone.
No auction. No instant quoting war. A client posts what they need, and tradies who are the right fit put their hand up. The client reviews the interest, looks at profiles, and picks who they want to talk to.
Search by trade. Search by district. Find the right person for the job without wading through irrelevant results or sponsored listings.
Why OpenSpace
Space to operate on
your own terms.
Because the trades industry deserves space to operate on its own terms. Open to anyone qualified. Open to clients who want the real thing. No gatekeepers, no bidding wars, no platform taking a percentage of work you did with your own hands.
The community forum exists because tradies have things to say to each other — advice, warnings, recommendations, real talk about the industry. It's not a feature. It's the point.
Who built it
I spent my apprenticeship in carpentry. I know what it's like to quote a job properly, do the work properly, and lose the next one to someone who underbid you and cut every corner.
I also spent 30 years in enterprise IT — running service delivery teams, managing platforms, overseeing systems that served thousands of users. I know how platforms are built, how they make money, and what tradeoffs get made when the platform's interests and the user's interests don't align.
Most of the trades platforms you can name were built by the second kind of person, without any involvement from the first. That's why they work the way they do.
OpenSpace was built by someone who has been on both sides of that fence.
Bryan started as a carpenter in the UK, trained to trade level under the City & Guilds system, before crossing into IT in 1989. He spent the next three decades in enterprise service delivery — Epson, Virgin Atlantic, IBM, the London Underground, and eventually the New Zealand Government at the Earthquake Commission. He retired from corporate IT at 50, came back to the trades as the Wairarapa Handyman, and built OpenSpace because no existing platform came close to serving tradespeople the way they deserved.
He's not an outsider who thinks he understands the trades. He came from them. He returned to them. And he built this with a level of technical rigour that most marketplace platforms — regardless of their funding — simply don't apply.
Get started
Find a tradie. Or get found.
Create a profile. List your trade and your district. Upload your work. Let clients find you on your terms.
Create your profile →Post your job. Review the tradies who express interest. Check their work, read their reviews, and make a proper decision.
Post a job →