BoreHub — A Marketplace for South Africa's Water Boom
A two-sided marketplace connecting property owners with vetted borehole contractors — quotes, scheduling, payments and reviews in one place, built for South Africa's scramble for water security.
The situation
Water security has turned borehole drilling from a niche trade into a national rush — and the way people find a driller is still word-of-mouth and guesswork. Owners can't compare quotes or check who's reputable; good contractors have no clean way to win work or get paid online. It's a classic marketplace gap: demand and supply both exist, but nothing trustworthy sits between them.
What I built
BoreHub puts the whole transaction in one place: owners post a job, vetted contractors quote, work gets scheduled, and payment runs through the platform with a marketplace commission on top of the bill. The hard part of a marketplace isn't the listings — it's trust and money moving safely, so the build focused there: server-side price recomputation so totals can't be tampered with, payment webhooks that verify the amount actually paid against the order, and row-level security so one party can never see another's data. It's the 'from built to paid' thesis applied to a marketplace — the rails that let strangers transact are the product.
Highlights
- Two-sided flow: post a job, receive quotes, schedule, pay, review
- Marketplace commission charged on top of the customer bill
- Payments hardened — server-side price recompute and amount-verified webhooks
- Row-level security so buyers, sellers and admins each see only their own data
- Built for a real, growing South African market: water security
Build log
2026
Built the marketplace and ran a launch-hardening pass on auth, payments and data isolation; finishing production wiring.