If you've ever looked at a marketplace's fee page and felt your eye twitch, this post is for you.

The major selling platforms take their cut from every angle — transaction fees, listing fees, monthly subscriptions, payment processing. The percentages vary but the direction doesn't: a meaningful slice of every sale goes to infrastructure you don't own or control. And that's before the visibility problem: on a marketplace of millions of listings, the algorithm decides whether your work gets seen at all.

My girlfriend had been listing her work on one of the big marketplaces for a while — barely any traffic, zero sales. The fees were almost beside the point. I saw the disappointment and floated the idea: her own site, her own corner of the internet — and I'd build it.

I'm a software engineer. I like a challenge. So I set out to give it a shot. The result runs at €3.29/mo for all backend infrastructure. The site is live at nadiapoe.co.uk .…