Circa

Why Circa?
Hero - landing page
How it works
Marketplace

Circa - Giving items a second life, with only a few clicks!

Our Mission

End of the semester = exams, projects, moving out… stress.

The last thing you want to worry about is what to do with that mini fridge, stack of textbooks, or random IKEA lamp, especially if you are a senior who are just about to graduate. Circa makes it easy to pass your stuff on to other students who actually need it. Think of it as a student-only marketplace, built for the Malaysian community.

Why Circa?

Ditch ~~Add2C*rt~~ or KakaoTalk. It's unorganized. Messy. And easy to get lost. We're making a better alternative.

No more messy Telegram groups, separate IG accounts or collaborative Google Sheets. Just a clean, organized marketplace for our community. Simple, effective and fosters active communities.

How it works

flow diagram

1. List or Search

Post something yourself, or search what you need. Browse through items shared by the community.

2. Negotiate & Reserve

Make an offer, bargain a little, or accept one. Once you agree, set a date to lock it in.

3. Meet & Exchange

Chat to plan the meetup, swap your items, and keep the cycle going. Build trust and real connections with fellow students.

How we built it

tech stack diagram

Fueled by caffeine and too many late nights ☕, we hacked Circa together using:

Nuxt + Tailwind + Shadcn for a clean, responsive frontend
Supabase for authentication, database, and real-time messaging
Supabase Realtime for our instant chat and offers system
Deployed on Vercel for smooth dev → prod transitions

Challenges we ran into

At first, we tried to let ChatAndBuild do all the heavy lifting. Spoiler: it didn’t quite work out 😅. No matter how many prompts or retries, we couldn’t get it to build the app the way we wanted. Maybe it's true that AGI is still far … or maybe it was just a skill issue? We never know.

So we took it personally and flipped it around: we used ChatAndBuild to set up the foundation, then built everything else on top ourselves. The mix of AI help + late-night locking in actually made the project come together.

Disclaimer for ChatAndBuild team: we lost our chat, but we managed to recreate it back using the same prompt in our mind (hope that still counts!)

The app does not allow us to share the link. Clicking on the share link button does not work but below is a video of the generation of the app link

What's next for Circa

Circa is production-ready. It works, but we’re not done yet! Next up:

More categories & filters for items.
Location sharing in chat (like WhatsApp style maps).
Open-sourcing and looking for contributors/maintainers. We welcome contributors! This your chance to be part of something early!
Migrate to a different backend (AWS, Azure, GCC?)

If you're interested in Circa's potential. Sign up to our waitlist and become the first to experience future updates to Circa!