LocalUncle

The Brief

A hyper-local marketplace connecting residents in Chandigarh with verified service providers — plumbers, electricians, cleaners and more. Seekers post custom requests, providers bid with proposals, and every booking runs through a secure escrow wallet that releases funds only after the seeker confirms completion with a one-time OTP.

The challenge was a category-wide trust problem. Plumbers, electricians, and cleaners in India operate almost entirely on personal referrals — there's no platform layer between a resident with a broken pipe and the person who shows up to fix it. Cash-in-hand, no receipts, no accountability if the job goes wrong. LocalUncle was built to be that platform layer — not just a directory, but an end-to-end transaction infrastructure for local services.

What We Built

LocalUncle is a two-sided marketplace: seekers post a job with their requirements and budget, verified providers bid on it with a price and timeline, and the whole exchange — from quote to payout — runs through the platform instead of a phone call and cash in hand. The buyer never hands over money until the work is confirmed done.

The escrow model is the core of the product. Razorpay holds the seeker's payment from the moment the bid is accepted. When the job is complete, the seeker receives a one-time OTP via Twilio and enters it in person with the provider. That OTP is the trigger — escrow releases, provider gets paid, seeker gets a receipt. No OTP, no payout. The trust gap that makes cash-first local services so friction-heavy closes with one four-digit code.

• Custom request posting — seekers describe the job once and receive competing proposals from verified local providers.
• Provider bidding — providers quote their own price and timeline against each request instead of a fixed rate card.
• Escrow wallet powered by Razorpay — payment is held, not released, until the job is actually done.
• OTP-gated completion via Twilio — the seeker confirms the work in person before funds move, closing the trust gap in cash-first local services.
• Provider verification flow to keep the marketplace to genuine, vetted local professionals.

The trust layer — why it took longer than expected

Every marketplace has a trust problem. Service marketplaces in the home-services category have it at both ends: seekers don't trust that the provider will show up and do the job, and providers don't trust that the seeker will pay once the job is done. The escrow layer solves the payment side. Provider verification solves the identity side.

The verification flow — document upload, manual admin review, approval gate before any provider appears in search results — added about three weeks to the build. It's invisible to end users, but it's what makes "verified provider" mean something rather than being a label anyone can claim. The admin dashboard that powers the review process is as much a part of the product as the seeker-facing UI.

Tech Stack

Backend on Django with a Django REST Framework API. Tailwind CSS on the frontend for a clean, fast UI that works well on the mobile browsers most local service seekers are using. Razorpay handles the escrow payment flow — we integrated the Escrow API rather than standard checkout, which required mapping the escrow lifecycle (creation, hold, release, dispute) to platform events. Twilio powers the OTP SMS that gates job completion. The provider verification pipeline runs through a custom admin view built on Django Admin with additional document handling.

The bidding system is real-time — providers see new requests as they come in and submit proposals within the platform. Seekers get notified (SMS + in-app) when a new bid arrives and can accept directly from the notification. The whole flow from job posting to bid acceptance is designed to happen in under 15 minutes on a mobile browser.

Brand & Design

A warm gold palette — Primary Gold (#B08B37), Secondary Gold (#D4B36E) — that reads as premium and trustworthy without leaning on the generic blue-green palette that dominates the home-services category. Clean off-white surfaces for the product itself, with dark navy (#0F172A) for the high-contrast elements. The logo and identity were designed before a line of product UI was written, which meant every screen shipped with a coherent visual language from day one.