About Kaya
Singapore is full of people running very good little businesses out of their own flats — a kitchen, a nail table, a tutor’s spare room — and almost all of it is found by word of mouth, an Instagram account, or a friend who happens to know. Kaya is a platform for the rest of us.
We open to seekers in November 2026. Until then Kaya is open to makers only: you can set a shop up, publish it and share its link, and there is nothing to browse yet.
What it is
Kaya lists home-based businesses across Singapore. You search by what you want, where you are and which MRT line you are on, read the shop, and order from the person who does the work. Some shops read your request and accept it; others publish a timetable and you book a collection time out of it. Either way you pay them by PayNow and collect it yourself.
That is deliberately a small thing to be. We are not a marketplace holding your money, not a delivery company, and not a brand putting our name on somebody else’s work. The shop is theirs; we are the page it sits on.
What we hold to
You pay the maker directly
Your PayNow transfer goes straight from your bank app into the maker’s account. Kaya is never in the middle of it.
Nobody’s home address is published
A listing shows the building. The unit number is private, and reaches one seeker only after that seeker has paid and the maker has confirmed it — if the maker collects at their door at all.
Nobody is committed before the maker is
At most shops an order is a request: the maker reads it and decides, so asking costs nothing and a decline costs nothing. At a shop that books collection times, the maker committed in advance by publishing the timetable and saying how many they could have ready — so there is nothing left to ask, and the slot is yours.
The conversation stays here
Ask a question before you order and it stays in one thread with that shop, through every order after it — not scattered across a chat app the maker has to search.
Why not a marketplace
The usual model takes a cut of every order, which means it has to own the payment, which means it has to own the customer. For a home baker selling forty loaves a month, or a nail tech with one chair and a Saturday, that cut can be the difference between worth doing and not.
So Kaya stays out of the payment: a seeker's PayNow transfer goes straight to the maker, and we can't refund it either, which we'd rather say plainly than bury. What a maker gets today is the whole of what they charged, with nothing added to it.
What we deliberately don’t do
- Delivery. Every order here is collected in person. Collection is the thing a home business can actually promise.
- Hold your money. PayNow goes seeker to maker. Nothing sits in an account of ours.
- Inspect anybody’s kitchen or workspace. We check the certificates a shop chooses to claim, and we say so on their page. We do not pretend that is the same as an inspection.
- Charge to be listed. Listing is free. If that ever changes, makers will hear it well before it does.
Kaya is early, and it grows one maker at a time. If you make or do something out of your own home, listing it takes about ten minutes. If you are here to buy, start browsing.