In need of new socks? A pair of crutches? A washing machine? On the new marketplace app Freefy, developed by UG student Floris de Kam (21), you can pick it all up for free. This way, he hopes to give used items a second or even third life.
‘Everyone loves free stuff, right?’ laughs Floris. The artificial intelligence student took this concept, added the idea of sustainability, and created the Freefy app.
The app, which looks like the lovechild of Tinder and Marktplaats, is Floris’ and his friend Alex’s answer to a wasteful society that loves to collect more items than it could ever need. ‘There’s an overload of stuff, I’ve seen it at my parents’ house’, says Floris. ‘You could throw it all away or make somebody else happy with it, like we are doing.’
And Freefy seems to have filled a need, because less than two weeks after launching, it already has over five hundred registered users nationwide. The idea is simple: users upload photos of their giveaway items and others can swipe through them, swiping left if they are not interested and swiping right if they want to pick the item up.
Convenience
The concept of giving away stuff you don’t need certainly isn’t new. Most of us have donated something to a thrift shop, gotten things second-hand from friends or picked up an item off the sidewalk. The difference is the convenience of Freefy, says Floris. ‘We offer direct customer-to-customer contact, without a mediator such as Mamamini. And because we show you the items closest to you, it reduces emissions.’
To get things started, Floris looked for content for the app everywhere. ‘We asked friends, our parents and other family members to contribute some of their possessions that they no longer need’, he explains. A quick swipe through the app turns up a wide range of free stuff, from rainbow socks, crutches, and a washing machine to two Star Wars lightsabers for the gaming console Wii.
While getting free stuff is fun, Floris also sees the app as a community tool. ‘Maybe Freefy initiates contact among neighbours who’ve never been in contact with each other before.’
Sustainability
This focus on the collective is also visible in Floris’ sustainability goals for the app. Reusing items, for him, is his contribution to protecting society from burning through already scarce resources. ‘Sustainability is important to me because it is an issue that is important for the whole world’, he says.
For now, they only market Freefy via social media, for example by posting funny TikTok videos about the stuff you can find in the app, since they do not have the funds to invest in advertisements.
But Floris plans to introduce in-app advertisements and fee-based premium functions at one point. ‘Alex and I put our savings in this app, so we hope one day we can make a profit.’
He is optimistic that will happen. ‘So much work went into this app, I have to be!’