Marketplace rules

Food you made: produce you grew, bread you baked, eggs from your own birds, honey from your own hives, jams and preserves you canned, and prepared food your local cottage food law allows. Drinks on the same footing.

Growing things: seedlings, starter plants, cuttings and cut flowers from your own garden.

Things you made by hand: soap, candles, pottery and similar goods, made by you.

Homestead supplies: compost, mulch, topsoil, aged manure, worms and the ordinary supplies of keeping a garden or a small flock.

Milk, eggs and honey from your own animals and hives belong here too. Keep them cold or shelf-stable as they need, and follow applicable laws regarding food preservation and handling — that is the standard on Plut, not a blanket ban on anything refrigerated.

The common thread is that you made it, grew it or raised it. Plut is not a place to move on things you bought.

Alcohol, cannabis and tobacco. Prescription or supplement-style health products. Live animals — worms and other composting invertebrates are the one exception, and only as a soil input. Anything requiring a license you do not hold. Resold goods you did not make or grow. Anything your local cottage food law excludes.

Nothing that has been used on or applied to an animal, and no manure from an animal treated with medication inside its withdrawal period.

Plut is not responsible for ensuring seller compliance with state, local and federal laws. Sellers agree to obtain and maintain all necessary compliance requirements.

That means the registrations, permits, licenses, labels and sales limits your own state, county and city ask of what you sell. The checks Plut runs — the porch check, the prohibited-items list, the sales-cap tracker — are there to help, and none of them is a substitute for knowing your own rules.

Photograph the actual item, not a stock image of one. State the real quantity and the real price. Give perishables an honest expiry — the hourly sweep will retire them, and a listing that outlives its food is what turns a good block bad.

Disclose allergens. If it contains nuts, dairy, eggs, gluten or soy, say so.

Goods that are not food answer to their own facts rather than to a kitchen. Say what compost is made from and whether it is finished. Say whether manure is aged, and how long. Say what is in a soap or a candle, because someone will have a skin allergy or an asthma trigger and cannot smell it through a photograph. Selling by volume — a bag, a scoop, a cubic foot — means saying which, and meaning it.

Producers: mark the order ready only when it actually is, and leave it where your porch instructions say. Buyers: come inside the window you agreed to, confirm collection in the app, and do not linger at a stranger's home beyond the pickup.

A revealed address belongs to that one order. Do not save it, share it, or show up uninvited later.

No returns: it is food, and returned food is unsafe. Once an order has been picked up it cannot be brought back, swapped or handed on to another buyer, and the same goes for the plants, soap and supplies sold beside the food.

There are two ways not to pay, or to get money back, and only two: cancel the order before pickup, and the hold on your card is released so you pay nothing; or open a dispute in the order and an operator decides it. If something was wrong with what you collected, open the dispute — do not carry it back to the porch.

Paying in the app is what makes it safe to buy food from someone you have not met: the order only puts a hold on the buyer's card, and the card is charged once both sides confirm the pickup. Asking a neighbor to pay you by Venmo, Cash App, Zelle or cash for an order found here removes their only protection, and it is grounds for removal on the first offense.

The feed is for the block: garden updates, seed swaps, tool shares, pest and disease questions. No harassment, slurs, or abuse. No political campaigning, no commercial spam for anything that is not a listing, no reselling other people's posts.

Points are a reward, not currency — they cannot be bought, transferred between accounts, or cashed out for money.

Points are only given for a completed transaction: they land when an order completes, and an order that is refunded earns nothing (points it already earned are taken back).

As a buyer, they build with ordinary use: a completed purchase earns points on what you spend, writing a review after pickup earns more, bringing a reusable bag to the pickup earns more still, and referring a neighbor pays out once they sign up and complete their first purchase or sale. Spend them at checkout for up to 5% off an order — 100 points are $1.

As a producer, they build the same way from the selling side: your first completed sale, each order you fulfill, a punctual pickup, a five-star review, and a neighbor you refer pays out once they sign up and complete their first purchase or sale. Spend them on a 48-hour boost for your map pin, a wider-radius boost on a listing, or a month of Plut Elite without paying for it.

Posting or replying in the neighborhood forum earns a small amount too, either way.

Review the order you actually had. Do not trade, buy, or coordinate reviews, and do not farm Plut points with self-referrals or throwaway accounts — points and badges are what strangers use to decide whether to trust you, and inflating them is fraud against your own block.

Every post, comment, thread and message carries a report control. A reported item is masked immediately and queued for an operator, who restores it or removes it and, when warranted, bans the account. Blocking someone hides their pins, posts and chats from you permanently and takes effect at once.

Serious safety issues — a foodborne illness, a threat, anything involving a minor — are escalated to the operator immediately, and to the appropriate authorities where the law requires it.