A bidding marketplace that connects businesses with verified lighting engineers.
Lightful connects businesses that need lighting design, installation, and consultation work with a global network of verified lighting engineers. Customers post a task with real project specs — area, timeline, budget, certification requirements — engineers bid with a price and delivery time, and funds sit in escrow until the work is delivered and approved. We built the marketplace end to end: task posting, bidding, messaging, and the awarded-project delivery workflow.
A walk through the product.
Businesses needing lighting work had no reliable way to find and vet the right engineer.
Lighting design and installation work — interiors, exteriors, public spaces — is specialized and project-specific. Finding a qualified engineer usually meant local referrals or generic freelance platforms with no way to compare real bids against real project specs, and no protection if the work didn't hold up.
Lightful needed a marketplace built specifically for this trade: task posting with the technical detail engineers actually need, a transparent bidding process, and a payment model that protects both sides until the work is delivered.
What it took.
- Task specs detailed enough for engineers to bid with confidence. Generic freelance-platform job posts don't capture what a lighting project needs. We built a structured task form — construction type, area, timeline, budget, certification standard, required software, and output format — so engineers can bid without a back-and-forth just to understand the scope.
- A bidding flow that respects both sides. Engineers submit a bid amount, delivery time, and note against a specific task; customers compare bids against the same spec sheet instead of judging on price alone.
- Payments that don't ask for blind trust. Funds are held until the customer approves the delivered work, so an engineer isn't paid for nothing and a customer isn't left funding a project that never finishes.
- A delivery workflow that keeps a project on track after the bid is won. Awarded projects get a running countdown to the delivery deadline, direct messaging with the customer, and a dedicated delivery action — so the relationship doesn't drop off once the bid is accepted.
What ships in the product.
Task posting
Customers post a project with structured specs — construction type, area, timeline, budget, certification standard, required software, and output format.
Browse & filter listings
Search, sort, and filter open projects by keyword and status across the marketplace.
Bidding
Engineers submit a bid amount, delivery time, and note directly on a task.
Bid management
Engineers view, edit, or withdraw a pending bid, with a confirmation step before a withdrawal goes through.
My Bids & Awarded Projects
Bids tracked across Pending, Accepted, and Rejected, with awarded projects moved into their own delivery view.
In-app chat
Customers and engineers message directly once a bid is awarded.
Delivery timers
A live countdown to the delivery deadline on every awarded project, with a dedicated action to deliver the finished work.
Escrow payments
Stripe-backed payments held and released only once the customer approves the delivered work.
Push notifications
Bid updates, messages, and deadline reminders delivered to both sides in real time.
Production-grade from week one.
We built Lightful as a single React web app covering both sides of the marketplace — task posting and bidding for customers, bid management and delivery tracking for engineers — on Firebase, which backs the data store, authentication, and the real-time sync behind chat and live bid status, with Stripe handling payments end to end.
Lightful in the wild.
A closer look at the core user flows built for this product.
Building something like Lightful?
Lightful needed a marketplace where both sides of a bid — the customer and the engineer — could trust the process from task posting through payment. Send us a brief and we'll scope it within 24 hours.