JiraniSoko

A neighbourhood marketplace for Kenyan urban communities. Listings, jobs, motors, and property, the categories people actually look for in places like Kilimani, Eldoret, or Kisumu. The pitch is local trust: posts come from your area, and payments go through M-Pesa rather than card rails most people don't have.

Backend is Django and PostgreSQL with the M-Pesa Daraja API for STK Push and B2C disbursements. Mobile is React Native via Expo. The Android build is in beta; iOS follows.

Why this exists

Online listings in Kenya have always lived between WhatsApp groups and Facebook Marketplace, with all the trust and discoverability problems that implies. JiraniSoko is a stab at the right shape for a neighbourhood-first marketplace: posts come from a geofenced area, payments go through M-Pesa rather than card rails, and trust signals (verified phone numbers, ratings, dispute flow) sit at the centre of the design.

Stack

• Backend: Django + DRF + PostgreSQL. Deployed on AWS.
• Mobile: React Native via Expo (EAS Build). Android first, iOS in progress.
• Payments: Safaricom M-Pesa Daraja API. STK Push for buyer→seller, B2C disbursement for delivery payouts.
• Observability: Sentry for errors, Grafana on top of Postgres for weekly KPI dashboards.

What I learned

The gap between a feature working in a notebook and a feature that survives a Saturday afternoon of real users is enormous, and most of it is small operational things: rate limiting, idempotent payment callbacks, careful timezone handling, graceful degradation when a network handover drops mid-checkout. Almost none of it is the model code people pay attention to.