You run a classifieds board. Classic cars, horses, industrial equipment, a B2B inventory catalog. Some place where buyers and sellers need to find each other. They almost never close the deal on your site. They swap a phone number, meet in a driveway, inspect the thing, and pay however they agreed. Cash, wire, handshake.

So why does your software charge you a cut of every "transaction"?

Because sometime in the last decade, every classifieds tool pivoted to become a marketplace. Search "classifieds software" today and you'll find marketplaces built for rentals and payouts, priced per transaction, marketed at people trying to build the next Airbnb.

That's not what you're building. You're not trying to beat Facebook groups or the giant classifieds sites either. You'd lose. You just need a clean place for a specific community to find each other, and software that doesn't tax every conversation as if it were a sale.

I should know. I've spent 12 years keeping Yclas running, back when it was called Open Classifieds. I don't own it; I just keep the lights on. When the product pivoted to chase the marketplace boom, the customers who needed actual classifieds quietly drifted away. The 60 who stayed run communities too specific for the marketplace tools to bother with. They stayed because what they'd built mattered, and they're the proof this niche is still alive. Watching what they actually need taught me what to build.

So I built Yclas Neo. The full product is free, with every feature, unlimited listings and messaging, for as long as you want. It's funded by the operators who outgrow it: $29/mo for your own domain and the branding off. No per-transaction fees, no payment rails nobody asked for. To see why that matters, you have to see what the alternatives actually cost.

What Sharetribe charges

The cheapest usable plan is $99/mo, and that locks you to a mysharetribe.com subdomain. Your own domain takes the $199/mo Pro plan. On top of the subscription, every plan charges $0.19 per "transaction" after a thin monthly allowance, plus Stripe's 1.5 to 3% on payments.

Then there's the part Sharetribe doesn't put on the pricing page. They define a "transaction" as "an attempt at a value exchange... or initiating a conversation thread." A buyer messaging a seller counts as one. And you pay for it.

On a classifieds board, whose whole purpose is buyers and sellers messaging to arrange an offline deal, that means every inquiry is taxed. Not just sales. The "is this still available?" The "can I come look at it Saturday?"

Their own pricing changelog admits it: "lots of people find Sharetribe too expensive and never subscribe."

Yclas made the same mistake. When it rebranded from Open Classifieds, it pivoted to call itself a "marketplace solution" and chased the same boom, and the customers who needed classifieds got left behind. One of them told me why they stayed: Yclas felt "more classifieds-driven than transactional-driven."

They didn't want transactions. They wanted listings and conversations. Nobody was building for them.

What Yclas Neo is

That's the gap. Yclas Neo is a classifieds platform built to fill it, full stop. You sign up at yclas-neo.com, create a site, and it's live on a subdomain in a minute.

Listings have custom fields, as many photos as you need, location with map search, and categories with subcategories. The custom fields are set per category and double as search filters, so a car board, a horse board, and an equipment board each get the fields that matter to them, like make and model, breed and age, or manufacturer and condition, and buyers filter on any of them. You can add a YouTube link as a custom field for video, conformation clips for horses, walkthroughs for equipment, whatever your niche needs to show.

Messaging is an in-app inbox tied to the listing that started the conversation. Every new message emails the seller so nothing sits unread, and replies happen in the inbox. As the site owner you can review every buyer-seller conversation from your admin panel. Sellers can close a listing when it's gone and reopen it if a deal falls through.

You also get a logo, a page builder, and full translation control. On creation it auto-generates your legal pages and a welcome page you can rebuild yourself.

One thing missing: access control and private boards, meaning the ability to restrict who can join or see listings, aren't built yet. They're on the roadmap and landing soon. If you need a gated board today, tell me and I'll fast-track it.

What's different from the old Yclas is everything. The old one ran on a framework that's been dead for years; Neo is rebuilt from scratch, nothing ported. It does three things and only three: publish listings, browse listings, let buyers and sellers talk. No payment rails, no booking calendars, no escrow. The design is modern, closer to Sharetribe than to the 2014 interface the old one still ships. And it fixes the two complaints I heard most: the welcome page wasn't customizable without paying extra, and the old one forced you through Cloudflare. Neo does neither.

One thing worth knowing under the hood: every site runs on its own isolated database, which is why the whole thing costs almost nothing to run. (If you're a developer: Neo is SaaS-only, with no public API or webhooks, and it won't be open source or self-hostable. If you need to integrate it into something larger, email me and I'll be straight with you.)

Why it's free

Free should make you nervous. Most "free" software is a trap, so here's exactly how this stays alive. It runs on a $5/mo server. That's not a typo. The marginal cost of a new board is nearly zero; hosting 100 boards costs me barely more than hosting one. That's not venture capital or a future bait-and-switch. The architecture is the business model: because it costs almost nothing to run, it costs almost nothing to give away.

I fund it myself until paying customers show up, and the cost is small enough that it's not a strain. Your own domain and the branding off is $29/mo; priority support is $89. That's the whole engine: no transactions to meter, no runway countdown, no pivot required to survive.

That covers the price.

Moving an existing board over

There's no automated importer yet. For now, launching means a fresh start. But if you commit to a paid plan, I'll move your listings, photos, members, categories, and custom fields over personally, case by case.

Because you bring your own domain on a paid plan, the SEO you've built on that domain comes with you. Individual listing links won't redirect, so old links to specific listings will break. That's the one real cost of the move. But on a classifieds site listings open and close all the time anyway, and Google reindexes as it crawls. What carries over is the domain, and you keep that.

Passwords: coming from the old Yclas, your members keep theirs. From anywhere else, they reset once.

Who it's for

The people already on Yclas are why I built Neo. When I audited the remaining customers, roughly half were car boards, even though the old product never targeted them. Take UAE Cars (uaecars.app): 504 listings, bilingual in English and Arabic, everything from Toyota Land Cruisers to new BMW X5s. A regional board too specific for the global giants to bother with. They found Yclas because nothing else fit. The same repeats across the rest: horse-listings boards, industrial and medical-equipment dealers, niches I'd never have predicted.

The deals still close off-platform, the way they always have. Look at a classic-car board like the South Jersey Region AACA's and you'll find listings ending in a phone number, because that's how buyers and sellers have always connected. On Neo that first contact happens through the site's messaging instead: a buyer starts a conversation, and the seller shares a phone number only when they're ready. Either way, the car gets inspected in a driveway and paid for by handshake or wire. The software's only job is to connect two people.

Then there's the one that stopped me. Neue Sonne Österreich is an Austrian cooperative running sonnenfairkauf.at, 1,155 listings and around 1,360 members. They price everything in ROD, an alternative currency from a Slovakian cooperative, not euros. The "value exchange" never touches a payment processor. A tool that bills every buyer-seller message as a "transaction" isn't just overpriced for them. It's the wrong category of software.

They don't need a marketplace. They need a bulletin board for a community that already has its own economy.

That's the real market, and it's bigger than cars: cooperatives, mutual-aid groups, hobbyist clubs, B2B inventory, anyone who needs to connect without transacting on-platform.

It's here to stay

All of which raises the fair question: won't Neo pivot away from you too, the way Yclas did once?

The difference is structural. Yclas pivoted because it had to chase transaction revenue. The marketplace model demands payments, and payments demand a bigger cut. Neo has no transactions to chase. Revenue comes from operators who outgrow the free tier, flat and predictable, and it already covers the bills. There's no financial pressure to rebrand into something you didn't sign up for.

There's also no hidden owner who can pull the plug. The original Yclas belongs to someone who stepped away and put it on maintenance mode; I'm the one handling support and the occasional bug fix for the customers still on it. Yclas Neo is a separate thing I built and run myself. The person who could abandon it is the same person writing this, and I've been at this for 12 years.

And if you ever want out, request an export anytime. Because every site runs on its own isolated database, I can hand you the actual SQLite database file, not a CSV approximation, the real thing. You're never locked in.

Start here

So the next step is simple. It's free, there's no credit card, and your board is live on its own subdomain a minute after you sign up. Go to yclas-neo.com, create a site, publish a listing, then message yourself from a second account to see how it feels.

If you're running a niche board, cars, horses, equipment, anything where the deal closes off-site, I built this for you. Tell me what's missing.

Create your board →, free, no card, live in a minute. Or explore yclas-neo.com first.