Kashless.org

» see kashless.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The origin story is a weight bench. Martin Tobias, a Seattle venture investor who had founded a biodiesel company and sat at Ignition Partners, was clearing out his garage and tried to sell a bench that had cost him $300 for fifty dollars. Three people said they wanted it. Nobody came to collect it. His conclusion was that the market for secondhand objects was broken in a specific and fixable way, and in October 2008 he started a company around the fix.

Kashless.org called itself the first online marketplace where everything is free, and it called the category ReCommerce. The software did two things at once. It pulled free listings out of other services, Craigslist included, into a single local feed, and it bolted onto them the machinery those services had never bothered with: saved searches, scheduling, offers, user reputation and feedback, cross-posting of your listing to Facebook and Craigslist in one action, driving distance to each item, and a tax receipt for the thing you gave away. The taglines were "Set your stuff FREE!" and, less delicately, "Because you're broke".

It opened to the public around Puget Sound in February 2009 with 11,043 items listed near Seattle, and spread from there. The farewell page later claimed communities in more than fifty cities. In July 2009 it ran a celebrity donation promotion, under which Dave Dederer of The Presidents of the United States of America gave away a guitar he had played on stage and a pair of back-country skis, free, to whoever got there first.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the reward points ~

In November 2009 the site added Kashless Rewards, run with RecycleBank, which gave you points for giving things away and let you spend them on RecycleBank's side. By January the blog was publishing a post titled "Kashless Rewards, stopping to take a breath". By February there were two more, one about disappearing reward points and one headed "A few bad apples are threatening the entire Kashless Rewards program". The posts never say what the bad apples were actually doing, but a reward for giving something away is a reward for an action that costs the giver nothing, and the company spent three months trying to police it.

The program was shut on 16 April 2010 with the line that the resources to support the free rewards benefits had expired. That same post is the last one the company ever published, and it carries the only real scale numbers on record: over three million reward points issued, more than 40,000 new members, more than 200,000 items listed by members directly and over a million more through partner sites, and over 500,000 pounds of reusable goods kept out of landfills.

~ what the two companies were ~

The confusing part is the corporate shape. The copyright line said Kashless, Inc. and the blog called the site a not-for-profit, and both were true: the public site was run as a non-profit while the company behind it licensed the same software to other publishers as a private-label product. That is also why the shutdown notice carries an email address for software licensing, under a heading asking whether you are interested in furthering the ReCommerce movement.

By February 2010, ten months before the end, Tobias had launched Tippr, a Seattle group-buying site in the Groupon mold, and the company's energy had gone there. The white-label version, PoweredByTippr, ran deal sites for media publishers and was sold to nCrowd in April 2013. None of that was announced as a pivot. The free-stuff site simply stopped being posted about in April and stopped running in December.

~ the last days of 2010 ~

The servers date the end to three days. On 29 December 2010 the site was still answering, with the Rails application underneath identifying itself in the response headers. By the evening of 31 December the same addresses returned 404 from a bare old Apache, the signature of an application that has been torn down with its wildcard DNS still pointing at whatever remains of the box. Somewhere in those three days somebody turned it off.

The notice that replaced it was still there in late February 2011. It says the site has been shut down, thanks people for their participation, explains that funding has run out and that the site can no longer be operated as a non-profit, and then answers the question "Where else can I find free stuff?" by naming Craigslist and Freecycle. A marketplace built specifically to fix what was wrong with Craigslist and Freecycle closed by sending everybody back to them. Today kashless.org redirects to a nail salon in England.

~ what my street did instead ~

This was an American product in a country where moving a sofa across a city is a normal weekend. When it launched I was in Turkey, where the equivalent was not a website at all, it was the building: you left things by the bins and they were gone within the hour, collected by people who did that for a living. The accounting Kashless was proudest of, the pounds diverted from landfill, was happening on my street already, informally, with nobody counting it and nobody issuing points for it.

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