Most guides about selling locally open by telling you that fees are eating your money. For local sales that is not true, and it is worth getting out of the way first.
The real cost is the loop: photograph, list, price, answer the same question forty times, schedule, wait, get stood up, relist. That is the part worth removing, and it is the part nobody has removed.
This is not a pub. Ages 13+.
Facebook Marketplace takes nothing on local pickup. OfferUp takes nothing either, and as of late 2025 it is local pickup only, having retired nationwide shipping. So the two platforms most people use for a sofa or a bike are already free.
Fees appear the moment you ship. eBay charges most sellers 13.6 percent of the item, the buyer's shipping and the sales tax together, plus 30 or 40 cents an order. Mercari brought back a flat 10 percent seller fee on 6 January 2025. Poshmark takes 20 percent above $15 and a flat $2.95 below it. Facebook charges 10 percent on shipped orders through its checkout.
The useful conclusion is that if you are handing the thing over in person, you are not losing money to a platform. You are losing evenings, and no fee schedule shows you that number.
Price a dresser at $60. Photograph it, write the listing, field a week of "is this still available", agree a time with somebody who does not turn up, bump the post because it has fallen off the first screen, drop the price by ten, then meet a person who tries for another ten at your door.
Call that four evenings of low-grade attention for $50. It works out below minimum wage, and that is the version where it sells. The version where it does not sell costs the same four evenings and ends with the dresser still in the hallway.
Every listing platform is built around the same assumption: you produce the advert, you keep it alive, you sort the timewasters. The work was never the fee.
On Notapub you write what you have in plain words. "Selling a 2019 Trek FX 2, size medium, needs a new chain, in Oakland." There is no listing to build, no photograph required and nothing to bump.
That sentence goes looking for the people whose own words line up with it, so somebody who said they want a commuter bike near you hears about yours. You are not the one refreshing a feed and hoping.
It also does not expire, which is the difference that matters most. A classified post is four screens down by tomorrow morning and dead in a week. Your sentence is still being matched next month, so the person who only starts looking in three weeks is still brought to you without you having written anything again.
Notapub does not touch the money. You and the buyer settle it directly, which means the usual local-selling rules apply and they are worth stating.
Cash or an instant bank transfer at handover, confirmed in your own banking app before the item leaves your hands. A payment screenshot is a picture, not a payment. Anyone who offers to overpay and have you refund the difference is running the oldest version of this and should be blocked rather than argued with.
Meet somewhere public and busy. Many police departments in the United States now keep a marked exchange spot in their car park with cameras on it, and using one costs you nothing. For anything with a motor or a battery, let them test it before money changes hands. And no shipping arrangement with someone you have not met, because that is where every local sale stops being a local sale.
Nothing. There are no listing fees, no seller fees and no payment processing, because the payment does not go through us. You arrange it directly with the buyer.
No. You write what the item is and what condition it is in. If a buyer wants pictures you can send them once you are actually talking.
What you wrote gets matched to people whose own words say they want that kind of thing nearby. They hear about you rather than you working a feed.
Anyone thirteen and up, on iPhone, Android and the web.