Sparehawk is open. It is a marketplace for spare parts of every kind of equipment: suppliers list their stock, and buyers search it by part number, see who has a part and at what price, and send them one request for quotes (how it works). It has just opened: the catalogue starts with its categories and manufacturers, and parts appear as suppliers list their stock.
The problem we started from
Sourcing an industrial spare part in Europe in 2026 still looks like this. A drive fails. Somebody photographs the rating plate, types the number into a search engine, and gets a page of distributor sites that each want a login before they will say whether they have one. Three of them have a contact form. Two answer the next day. One answers with a price that is 40 % above the others and nobody can tell whether that is because it is genuine new stock or because they felt like it.
Meanwhile there are dealers across Europe with the part on a shelf who will never hear about that request, because there was no way for them to.
Nothing about that is anybody’s fault. It is what happens when supply is fragmented across hundreds of small specialists and demand arrives unpredictably, one part at a time. It is also exactly the shape of problem a marketplace is good at.
What works today
Search that understands part numbers. Type 6ES7 315-2EH14-0AB0, 6ES7315-2EH14-0AB0 or a legacy ordering code from a 2004 drawing. Normalisation, aliases and cross-references are the least glamorous part of this product and the part we have spent the most time on.
Wanted requests, from day one. If nobody lists the part yet, post it as a wanted request. It is public, and suppliers who carry the part see it as they join, so a search that finds nothing still ends in a request rather than an empty page.
Prices you can see without signing in. Where a supplier is willing to publish a price, it is on the page. No account, no “request access”, no email gate.
One request, many suppliers. Build a list or upload a bill of materials, send it once, and it goes to the suppliers who can supply a part on your list. Quotes come back into one comparison rather than eight PDFs.
Lifecycle and replacements, with sources. Once a part is listed, its page says whether it is active, in phase-out or discontinued, and names the documented successor where one exists — with the source, so you can check it. Until the parts arrive, the obsolescence guide explains how to read those statuses.
Supplier pages that carry evidence. As suppliers join, their pages show a response rate and a median response time measured by the platform, not claimed by the supplier. Verification means an admin reviewed the company’s registration extract or VAT certificate. Reviews come only from buyers who actually transacted. The trust page sets out how each of these works.
What is deliberately not here
We do not take the payment and we do not take a commission. Sparehawk introduces the two parties and gets out of the way. The order, the invoice and the warranty are between the buyer and the supplier.
We do not rank by who pays us. There are no paid positions in search results today. When there are, they will be labelled as advertising, and the organic ranking will be the same ranking it was.
We do not hide the marketplace’s own limits. The catalogue has only just started to fill, and most part numbers resolve to nothing yet. When that happens you can still post a wanted request with the number and a description, and a supplier who carries the family can identify the part when they see it.
What we are asking for
If you buy spare parts: post the parts you are looking for as wanted requests, and tell us what you expected to find and did not. At this stage the gaps are more useful to us than the successes.
If you sell them: the first 90 days are free, up to 500 active listings stay free for good, quoting never costs anything, and a CSV or Excel export from whatever system you run is enough to get started. The suppliers who publish prices and answer within the day are the ones buyers will come back to.
If you find something wrong — a part number mapped to the wrong article, a successor that is not a successor, a supplier who does not answer — every offer and supplier page has a report button, and the contact page reaches a person for everything else.