A peer-to-peer storage marketplace built by students, for students — and beyond.
Storage Buddy is a peer-to-peer storage marketplace that connects people who need somewhere to keep their belongings with neighbours who have space to spare. Think of it as Airbnb for the spare space in your home — a closet, a spare room, a basement, even just a corner in your living room — except instead of renting a bed, you're renting space for your stuff.
The platform has been built by students at Columbia University and Barnard College, for a problem we live firsthand. Every May, thousands of students scramble to find somewhere to store their belongings over the summer. Commercial storage facilities are expensive, inconveniently located, and frankly not designed with students in mind. Meanwhile, the city is full of unused space sitting idle in spare rooms, oversized closets, and forgotten corners, especially with out fellow students who keep their leases over the summer.
Storage Buddy bridges that gap. Renters get affordable, accessible storage. Hosts earn money from space they already have. And the neighbourhood benefits.
Storage in cities like New York is broken. A standard 5×5 unit in Manhattan can cost upwards of $150 a month — a figure that is simply untenable for a student, a recent graduate, or anyone watching their budget. And the options are limited: a handful of large commercial operators dominate the market and compete minimally on price.
At the same time, cities are dense with dead space. Rooms that sit unused. Closets that go untouched for months. Storage units rented by people who don't need everything in them. The supply exists. It's just not connected to the demand.
Storage Buddy makes that connection — with transparency, fairness, and the belief that the people in a community are better placed to serve each other than a faceless corporation ever could be.
Prices on Storage Buddy are set by real people, not algorithms designed to extract maximum yield. Hosts set their own rates. Renters see exactly what they are paying. No hidden fees, no surprise rate hikes, no fine print. We also support sub-monthly payment options and pro-rated charges for partial months — you pay for what you use, not a full month you don't need.
The dollars spent through Storage Buddy go to real people — not a corporation. When people within a community transact directly with each other, the community as a whole gets stronger.
Cities are full of dead space. Storage Buddy is part of a broader shift toward using what already exists more intelligently — because building more storage while existing space goes unused is a failure of imagination as much as economics.
Storage Buddy started at Columbia and Barnard. Our ambition is to make peer-to-peer storage a normal, trusted part of urban life. University campuses are the beginning, not the limit.