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Open Mercato

Open Mercato is an open-source foundation for building modern business software — CRM/ERP-style systems that power commerce, operations, finance, and growth. We’re building it for teams who need speed without chaos, customization without forking, and enterprise-grade foundations from day one.

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THE STORY

The people and path behind Open Mercato

ORIGINS

How it started

Open Mercato was launched in 2025 by Piotr Karwatka.

Before Open Mercato, Piotr created (among other things) Vue Storefront, which evolved into Alokai — a company that went through Y Combinator and raised $40M USD in its Series A round.

That journey shaped a clear belief: open source can win in enterprise, but only if it’s built with the right architecture, product discipline, and an execution mindset focused on real outcomes.

FOUNDERS

Who's building it

Today, Piotr is building Open Mercato together with his brother Tomasz Karwatka.

Before going all-in on Open Mercato, they built and scaled services companies like Divante and Callstack (a well-known core contributor to React Native). Both companies delivered complex software for major enterprise customers across Europe and the US, and both ended with successful exits.

Now, they’ve fully committed to one mission: make business software dramatically easier to build, evolve, and operate.

They are joined by Patryk Lewczuk and Matt Greń as key members of the Core Team.

TRACTION

Momentum

In the first year, Open Mercato attracted a dozen+ core contributors coming from different companies and backgrounds — builders who know what enterprise software looks like when it meets reality.

At the same time, the project has already moved beyond “nice GitHub repo” territory:

  • the first corporate deployments are underway,
  • real teams are using Open Mercato to ship internal apps and workflows faster,
  • and the community is shaping the foundations in public.
VISION

What we’re aiming for

We believe the future of business software is:

  • modular, not monolithic,
  • extensible, not forked,
  • AI-supported, but still engineered with discipline,
  • outcome-driven, not feature-bloated.

Join us

Github
Discord

If you’re a developer, architect, or product-minded builder who’s tired of slow, fragile enterprise stacks - join the project. Contribute code, build extensions, share real-world requirements, or run Open Mercato inside your organization.

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Let’s build the future of business software creation together.

start with 80%
THE MANIFEST

The end of the era of adapting to systems

Open Mercato is an open-source foundation for building modern business software — CRM/ERP-style systems that power commerce, operations, finance, and growth. We’re building it for teams who need speed without chaos, customization without forking, and enterprise-grade foundations from day one.

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Open Mercato is an AI-native CRM/ERP foundation framework that combines the speed of SaaS with the infinite flexibility of tailor-made solutions.

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Built for AI: Open Mercato was built using AI Assisted Engineering techniques and is designed so that its users can leverage these techniques optimally to create new dedicated functions and modify existing ones.

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Ready-to-use Context: Contexts, documentation, guardrails, specifications, and prompts—everything is prepared and available in the package, ready to start your work with Claude, Codex, or GitHub Copilot (or any other agent).

OUR USP

Why do we win?

Flexibility

Open Mercato can address processes unique to every company—that is our focus. We provide flexibility without the need to rewrite "commodity" features. We take responsibility for their maintenance and security, freeing the client's developers from creating and maintaining them.

Speed

We deliver unique business functions faster than anyone on the market by utilizing ready-made, maintained core components.

Open-Closed (OCP)

The system is delivered as npm packages, and a dedicated implementation is created as an app that can overwrite and change all components, pages, and modules.

Extensibility

A very extensive event system is available, and most elements, such as the queue system, cache, and others, are replaceable based on Strategy and Dependency Injection (DI) patterns. This allows you to build a 100% dedicated application using, for example, 80% of Open Mercato's functionality without modifying the core system, maintaining the ability for very fast updates.

Modern Tech Stack

Few systems of this class are built on Next/React and TypeScript, which is currently the most popular tech stack for applications. Consequently, AI coding agents perform best on it (as React/shadcn and next.js apps form the largest codebase for their training). We also utilize functional programming and modern React design patterns.

Enterprise-Grade Security

Unlike many systems on the market, we offer SOTA (state-of-the-art) data encryption, where you can configure which database fields are encrypted with an individual key. Every data access is monitored (logs), and operations can be reversed from within the application (undo/redo). This opens doors to demanding sectors like HealthTech or Finance. Our standard security gives developers and agents freedom to create and administrators peace of mind.

Enterprise Design Patterns

AI is good at fast coding but often takes shortcuts. Not in Open Mercato—we ensured the use of enterprise-class design patterns, including replaceable strategies, SAGA, SOLID principles, and sensitive data storage rules. This provides a solid framework for AI agents to create dedicated functions while maintaining the quality expected by business and security departments.

Scalability and Value

Building for scalable delivery

We are moving away from selling people's time and toward selling ready-made business solutions based on our proprietary framework. This allows us to drastically increase margins and business scalability. We deliver immense value to clients, priced—where it makes sense—in a fixed price model.

AI-Native from the Foundations

Open Mercato doesn't just "bolt on" AI. Data, workflows, and the permission system are designed from the start for AI agents. When adding new functionalities with AI agents, you use the exact same context and tools we used to create Open Mercato.

Spec-Driven Development

We encourage this approach to improve team communication and ensure the logging of design decisions (ADR - Architecture Decision Records).

WHO IT'S FOR

Who Open Mercato is for

Ideal Customer Profile

Our ideal clients are companies launching new projects, testing new business processes, or introducing innovations that need a secure foundation. They don't want to rely on slow, legacy systems. They want a project delivered on time and within budget — with full ownership of data and code.

Software is about to be built
completely differently.

Start with 80% done.
$ git clone https://github.com/open-mercato/open-mercato.git
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