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BeanPool is a free app your community uses to trade help, goods and skills with each other. Instead of money, you use Beans: help someone and Beans come to you; get help and they go the other way. Zero is the goal — give about as much as you take.
No lookalike tracking, data harvesting, or get-rich guru algorithms.
Beans are mutual credit for real trade — never pumped on exchanges.
No dopamine-loop doomscrolling — only real local offerings and neighbors.
No interest, no banks, and no middlemen. 100% of circulation funds your Commons.
You join BeanPool through someone who is already in your community. Install the app, then open the invite link or scan the QR code they gave you. Invites work once and last 30 days.
Sam goes up to +30. Ana goes down to −30.
Ana is back to 0. Lee is now at −30.
Everyone is back near zero, and three jobs got done without anyone spending money.
The seller keeps 98.5% of each price; the other 1.5% goes to the community's Commons pool, so the real numbers land a little under these.
From an invite to your first trade.
Someone already in your community sends you an invite link or a QR code. Open it in the app and pick your callsign — the name people will know you by.
The app makes your account on your phone and shows you 12 words. Write them down and keep them safe: they bring your account back if you lose or change your phone.
Put up something you can do or share: a lift to town, eggs, fixing a bike, an hour of gardening. You need at least one offer up before you can post a need or buy.
Agree a price in Beans. The Beans are held safely until the job is done, then they go to the seller. You rate each other afterwards.
The phone app has six tabs: Market, Map, Talk, Pulse, Commons and Ledger, where you see your balance and your trades.
What people in your community are offering and what they need, with polls and events in the same feed. Search it, filter by category, and tap to trade.
See what is on offer near you. You place every pin yourself: use your location once, at the moment you post, or drop the pin by hand. BeanPool never tracks where you are. Enterprise and event pins can be set to Approximate, which rounds the spot to about 100 m. Pins are public: anyone who opens your community's map can see them.
Post a working bee, a repair café or a skill-share with a time and a place. People tap Going or Interested. Everyone going gets the event chat and the host's private note — the gate code, what to bring — and hears about it if the time or place changes or it is cancelled. Events are free; no Beans change hands. Find them on the map under Today, This weekend or Next 7 days, and use Copy to a new date to run one again.
Message anyone in your community. Direct messages between two members are end-to-end encrypted: your community's node carries them but cannot read them. Enterprise discussions and event chats can be read by the people who run your community's node, so they can be moderated — the app says so on each of those chats.
An enterprise is something your community runs together: an egg flock, a tool library, a firewood depot, or a project with a goal and an end date. Keepers run it and a lead keeper leads it; members can ask to join as keepers. It has its own Beans, posts offers and needs in the Market like anyone else, shows its income and spending, and can pause for the season. No keeper can approve a payment to themselves: another keeper has to.
Anyone can ask the community a question with a poll in the Market. Bigger choices are Decisions, in the Commons tab: a grant from the Commons pool to an enterprise, a hardship grant, replacing a lead keeper. A Decision is open for 7 days and carries itself out if it passes. Once you have completed a trade, you can propose one.
Start a group for your street, your garden club or your band, and you become its convenor. Post to the group only, and choose whether it is open, people ask to join, or it is invite only.
See what local people are making. Members can connect their own channels — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, SoundCloud or a blog feed — and their public posts show up in your community's Pulse. Connecting is up to each member. Anything that shouldn't be there can be reported, and your community's node can take it down.
Nobody buys Beans, and nobody pays interest.
A new account has 0 Beans. When you sell, your balance goes up; when you buy, it goes down. Across the whole community the balances always add up to zero.
Once you have completed a trade, you can go below zero to get help before you have given it back. Your credit line grows as you trade with more people. The offers you keep up set how much of it you can use: one offer lets you use up to 200 Beans of it, five offers up to 2000.
Over time you earn badges: Newcomer, Resident, Steward, Elder. They show your history in the community. They don't unlock anything.
A 1.5% fee on completed trades, and a small monthly fee on the part of a balance above 200 Beans, go to your community's Commons pool — not to us or anyone else. Your community decides what the pool pays for, through Decisions.
On the phone app your key is held in the phone's secure storage, and you can add a fingerprint or face lock. In the web app it is held in that browser's own storage. Either way it never leaves your device, and your 12 words are the backup that depends on nobody. On the phone app you can also link an Apple, Google, Facebook or GitHub sign-in so your community's node can help you back onto a new phone — the people who run the node could use that path too.
You can report a post, a member, an event or a Pulse item, and block anyone. Reports go to the people who run your community's node — its owner and admins — who can remove content and accounts. Members can also vote on a Decision to suspend or remove someone.
What is stored, who can see it, and how to delete your account.
Discover active communities running BeanPool nodes connecting people near you.
Every community runs on its own node: a small server that holds that community's members, posts and ledger. Someone local runs it. If your town or valley doesn't have one yet, it could be you.
You and the admins you appoint are your community's moderators: reports come to you. Your members' data lives on your machine, so you keep it backed up. You can read enterprise discussions and event chats; you can't read direct messages. You invite the first members, and they invite the rest.
Your node comes with its own settings app in the browser. From it you name your community, appoint an owner and admins who sign in with their own keys, print QR invites, watch disk health, choose a public web address or a tunnel, and help a member who has lost both their phone and their 12 words back onto a new account.
Since v1.2.21 a node keeps its members' messages and balances to signed-in members from the moment it starts — there is nothing to switch on. The Market, the map, enterprises, Decisions and the community's activity feed stay open, so a neighbour can see what is happening before they join — that feed names the members in a completed trade and the Beans involved.
Two communities can agree to link so their members can trade with each other. Beans never leave home: each pair keeps a running tally of what one community owes the other, and each side sets its own limit. Linking is off until both operators switch it on.
BeanPool is published as a Docker image for Intel/AMD and ARM64, so a node runs on a small server, a Mini PC, a NAS or a Raspberry Pi. These four commands fetch the compose file, create the network the node uses, pull the published image and start it. You name your community and set its contact details afterwards, in the node's own settings app — there is nothing to configure before it boots.
git clone https://github.com/beanpool-org/beanpool.git && cd beanpool
docker network create beanpool-shared
docker compose pull
docker compose -p beanpool up -d
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