Your favorite farmers market, but online.
Rootly is a local food marketplace that connects farmers, bakers, beekeepers, ranchers, gardeners, and food makers with the people in their community who want to buy from them. Browse a map, find sellers near you, order online, pick up fresh.
The Story
Rootly started the way a lot of things start on a homestead — with too many eggs and not enough people to give them to.
Evan is a hobby homesteader in Michigan. Chickens, a garden, the usual. When he started having more food than his family could eat, he did what everyone does: posted in a Facebook group. And it worked, kind of. Buyers would DM him, they'd go back and forth about pickup times, someone would forget, someone else would no-show. Rinse and repeat every week.
The farmers market was the other option — but booth fees, early mornings, and the gamble of whether enough people would show up made it tough for a small-scale producer. And the big online platforms? They were built for shipping boxes across the country, not for the neighbor down the road selling a dozen eggs.
One night, somewhere between collecting eggs and refreshing Facebook Marketplace, the idea clicked: What if there was an Airbnb for local food?A place where any producer could set up a store in minutes, buyers could browse a map and see what's available nearby, and the whole thing just worked — no DMs, no booth fees, no shipping headaches.
So Evan built it. Every screen, every API, every line of code. Rootly is a solo-founder project built from scratch by someone who actually has dirt under his fingernails.
What We Believe
Local food should be easy to find and honest to sell
Buying local food shouldn't require joining five Facebook groups and messaging strangers. Selling it shouldn't require a website, a marketing degree, or a $200 booth fee. We make both sides simple.
Sellers keep what they earn
We charge sellers a flat monthly subscription — not a cut of every sale. Your prices are your prices. Buyers pay a small service fee at checkout to keep the lights on.
Technology should help small producers compete
Big ag has logistics software, supply chain optimization, and marketing budgets. A backyard egg farmer has a phone. We built Rootly so that phone is enough — sellers manage everything from their pocket, no website needed.
Support the neighbors who grow your food
Every order on Rootly goes directly to a real person in your community. Not a warehouse, not a middleman. The person who grew it hands it to the person who eats it. That's the whole idea.
Built for Every Community
Rootly is live in all 50 states from day one. Whether you're in a Brighton, Michigan farmers market town, a rural homestead in Montana, or a suburb of Atlanta — local food works the same way everywhere. Neighbors growing food. Neighbors buying food. The platform underneath should just get out of the way.
Every feature in Rootly comes from real conversations with real producers — the beekeeper who needed flexible pickup windows, the baker who wanted to manage inventory from her phone between batches, the flower grower who needed a way to show buyers exactly where to find her.
There are over a million small farms in the United States. Most of them sell directly to consumers. Most of them are doing it through word of mouth, hand-drawn signs, and social media posts that disappear in a day. They deserve better tools, and we're building them — for every community in America that has local food producers worth supporting.
The Team
It's Evan. Just Evan. Solo founder, sole developer, and the person who answers your support emails. Built the entire platform, maintains it, and still collects eggs every morning.
Have questions, feedback, or just want to say hi? support@rootlymarket.com