Sparehawk is open. It is a search engine and a request-for-quote service for industrial spare parts: you find the part, you see who has it and at what price, and you ask them all at once.
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.
Prices you can see without logging in. Where a supplier is willing to publish a price, it is on the page. No account, no "request access", no e-mail gate.
One request, many suppliers. Build a list or upload a bill of materials, send it once, and it reaches every supplier who can cover a line. Quotes come back into one comparison rather than eight PDFs.
Lifecycle and replacements. Every part page says whether the part is active, in phase-out or discontinued, and names the documented successor where one exists — with the source, so you can check it.
Supplier pages that carry evidence. Response rate and median response time measured by the platform, not claimed by the supplier. Verification means we checked the company's registration and VAT id. Reviews come from buyers who actually transacted.
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 is large and incomplete. Some part numbers resolve to nothing. When that happens you can still send a request with a photograph, and a supplier who carries the family will usually identify it.
What we are asking for
If you buy spare parts: search for the last three parts that gave you trouble and tell us what you find. The failures are more useful to us than the successes.
If you sell them: listing is free, quoting is free, and a stock file in whatever format your system exports is enough to get started. The suppliers who publish prices and answer within the day are already getting a disproportionate share of the requests.
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 — there is a report button on every page and it goes to a person.