TradeOff

TradeOff mocks a real product investigation: a local-first marketplace where members earn platform credits by completing jobs for neighbours and spend them on services from other members in the same town. The site turns the spike document into a public-facing product: the credits loop, the earned-never-bought rule, the town-by-town pilot strategy and the deliberate exclusion of safety-critical work all come straight from the spec.

The design is a warm product brand: cream base with violet and coral, Bricolage Grotesque display type, and a hand-built animated app interface as the hero money shot, showing a wallet, an earned trade and a spent one. Two journal articles argue the product thinking in public: why credits beat direct barter, and why the launch is one town at a time.

Under the surface it ships WebApplication and FAQPage structured data, per-page metadata and canonicals, a generated sitemap and robots, an accessible FAQ accordion and a waitlist form with a proper success state. Statically prerendered Next.js, deployed on Vercel with automatic deploys from GitHub.