GateShare: the honesty box has gone digital

I found GateShare by accident this week, scrolling TikTok. A Kiwi woman was talking about an app she'd built to put roadside stalls on a map. I didn't catch her name at the time. I've since learnt it's Em Nesbit.

You know the stall I mean. A table at the end of the drive, a few bags of lemons, a jar of honey, and an old ice cream container with a slot cut in the lid. You drop your coins in and trust does the rest.

GateShare is that, for the whole country, on your phone.

Our GateShare stall page at Whangārei Heads.

What it is

GateShare is a map of what people near you have at their gate right now. It runs on iOS, Android, and in the browser at gateshare.co.nz.

Anything you grow, make, raise, or craft can go on it. Eggs, veges, seedlings, saved seed, native trees, honey, baking, firewood, art, woodwork, knitting. You don't even need an actual stall. The "gate" is wherever the buyer collects from: a chilly bin on the porch, the letterbox, a box halfway down the drive.

It has the feel Trade Me had when it first started. Trade Me now feels like a shit show, and GateShare is definitely not that. It's not the place to sell the Christmas presents you got and didn't want. It's for things you create and produce yourself.

It's also very new. Em launched it at the start of September. According to The Post, the push to finish it came in June, when a storm washed out the bridge at Lake Ferry and cut her and her family off from the shops. Her tech experience before this was a couple of websites. She built a national marketplace anyway.

Why it lands for me right now

One of my goals for our place is simple. Our little block needs to earn its keep.

I want the land to pay its own way. First the rates. Then the insurance. Then the utilities. If the property can cover those, I'm sorted for life, come what may. We already grow our own veges, and there's plenty of kaimoana on the beaches around us.

A stall at the gate won't cover all of that on its own. It's one income line among several. But it's a real one, and it's built from things I'm already doing.

The Selling view for our stall, with the seedlings I've already listed.

Local by design

The people most likely to buy from me live within 5 to 10 km. Nobody is driving 25 km for a punnet of seedlings.

They might for something special. If someone nearby had a unique set of native trees I wanted for our property, I'd go out of my way. Otherwise, this is about the people around me, in my area.

That's the part that excites me. GateShare doesn't connect me to the whole country. It connects me to my neighbours.

GateShare starts with a simple idea: buy local, sell local, share local.

Community, the way it used to work

I grew up in Ararimu, a little valley district in the Bombay Hills. There were 31 kids at my school, aged 5 to 12, before we went off to high school. Everybody knew everybody. Everybody knew everybody's business, too. But you also knew who you could count on.

Years later I went back for the school centennial. A man got up to speak. He'd been an airline pilot and had a small block in the district. He'd laid some concrete one day and it started setting wrong. Back then you didn't get someone in. You did it yourself.

He could see trouble coming, so in the middle of the night he rang my dad. They'd never met. He just knew Dad's reputation. Dad went straight over and sorted out the concrete, because Dad knew concrete.

That's what community looked like. You knew who to call, and they came.

With the way the world is going right now, I think we need that more than ever. Every stall on that map is a neighbour you might not have met yet. Every pickup at the gate is a conversation. And a conversation is how you find out who knows concrete.

The GateShare map turns stalls across New Zealand into neighbours you can find.

The Barefoot Investor rule

About six years ago I read The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape. It changed our family's financial literacy. We applied all of it, Kiwi-fying it where we needed to, and it changed our lives. It's a big reason we're in a solid financial position today.

One of Pape's rules stuck with me. Don't stop working when you retire. Keep doing some paid work, even a day or so a week. It offsets your retirement income, and more importantly it keeps your mind active and keeps you engaged.

GateShare fits that rule well. Whatever you enjoy, whether that's gardening, propagating, baking, woodwork, or painting, it lets you turn it into a little earner on the side. No shopfront, no market site fee, no boss.

The details they got right

I read through the FAQ before I listed anything. A few things stood out.

• No commission. GateShare takes nothing from your sales. It earns from plans instead. The Free plan gives you one priced listing at a time, paid in cash at the gate. Stallholder is $10 a month for up to 10 listings plus card payments. In Trade is $40 a month for people selling at commercial scale.
• Card payments through Stripe. If you're on a paid plan, GateShare sets you up with your own Stripe account and card money goes straight into it. The buyer's payment is held until they confirm they've collected. The seller pays Stripe's processing fee, which was 2.65% plus 30 cents per card sale as of September 2026, so price your goods with that in mind. Cash at the gate costs nobody anything.
• Koha and swaps. You can list things for free, for koha, or as a swap. Those listings never count against your plan's limit. Lemons for eggs, the old way.
• Your address stays private. Your pin on the public map is shifted up to about 500 m from your real address. The exact spot only goes to a buyer once an order is confirmed.
• The rules in plain English. When you list eggs, honey, baking, or plants, the app shows you the rules for that category and asks you to confirm them. For plants and seed, that includes the National Pest Plant Accord list and plant variety rights. Worth knowing before you sell your first seedling.

My stall is open

I've already put up a few seedlings I've been propagating in our greenhouse. I'm still learning the art of propagation, and every tray teaches me something.

Go and have a look at gateshare.co.nz. You can browse the map without an account and see what's sitting at the gates near you. Buy from your neighbours. Or walk your garden, your shed, and your kitchen bench, work out what you've got too much of, and set up your own stall.

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Mark Smith is Principal AI Counsel at Cloverbase. To discuss this article or work with me, contact me at Cloverbase.