Submitted — and the most useful thing we learned came from a buyer who couldn't check out
Feira is in for the Build with Gemini XPRIZE. Rather than list features, here is what actually happened this week.
A real buyer found a listing, and we lost the sale to our own sign-in
On 13 August someone living near Fundão — no prior relationship, about fifty kilometres away — found a listing on Feira and drove over to buy it. She tried to pay in the app and gave up at the sign-in. In her own words:
"I didn't get past the jumping cats in the app."
She paid the seller in cash instead, so Feira earned nothing from it, and because she never finished sign-up she appears in none of our user numbers.
The cause: hCaptcha's free tier only runs always challenge — it cannot fall back to a checkbox. We replaced it with Cloudflare Turnstile the same afternoon (589cec5), live in production at 17:22 UTC. Three days later the payment rail carried its first completed order end to end.
Where the AI actually is
| Logged Gemini operations | 174, all successful, across 13 active days |
| Engines | 9 deployed and enabled, 8 exercised in production |
| Listings drafted from a photograph | 8 of 9 |
| Translation records | 220, five locales, rendered at write time |
| Embeddings | 100% of listings |
| Total Gemini spend | €2.77 |
summarization has never been called by anyone. We would rather say that than imply a longer history.
The AI Assistant went live on submission day. Its first production calls were on 17 August: someone asked how to plant Luffa seedlings and got an answer specific to the Beira region — frost timing, night temperatures above 15 °C, trellising.
What we are not claiming
One completed order, €15.00, and the buyer is a family member. Arm's-length customer transactions: zero. At this volume the AI layer costs more than the platform earns — €2.77 against €1.50 of commission.
The machine works. Almost nothing is flowing through it yet, and that is the number we intend to move next.
Live: feira.market · Demo: 2:32 on YouTube
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