South African communities deserve better than WhatsApp and a printed register.
tribe.one is built by people who’ve sat on body corporates, run street committees, and watched trustees burn out. We’re building the tool we wished we had.
Why it exists
Community administration is real work, and it is done by volunteers: collect the levies, chase the arrears, run the vote, remember what was decided, keep the gate honest, and answer the same twenty questions every week. Most South African communities do all of it on a spreadsheet, a group chat and a paper register — tools that were never built to hold money, decisions or a safety record.
tribe.one gives that work one place to happen: recorded once, visible to the people it affects, and handed over to the next committee intact. It is not software for its own sake — it is so that a treasurer can do in an evening what used to take a term, and residents can see it was done.
- Know where the money is — every rand on one double-entry ledger, with EFT payments reconciled per home.
- Decide, and be able to prove it — quorum, thresholds and an immutable record of every vote.
- Keep the place safe and accountable — visitors, patrols and incidents on the record instead of in a story.
- Keep the right people informed — announcements and rooms, not 400 unread messages.
- Survive a change of committee — documents, governing rules, an audit trail and one-click export.
Shamfa Technologies
tribe.one is built in Johannesburg by Shamfa Technologies (Pty) Ltd (registration 2021/388151/07) — with local currency (ZAR), locale (en-ZA) and South African community structures baked in from the first line of code.
- Stokvel-ready rotating savings
- Body corporate and HOA workflows
- Rand-first money handling
The principles we won’t compromise on
Tenant data stays with the tenant
Three-layer isolation, append-only audit, one-click export. Your community’s data is yours — not ours to monetise.
Money truth, not money guesses
Double-entry ledger. bigint cents. Immutable entries. Approvals over thresholds.
Audit everything, hide nothing
Every action is logged with actor, time, before/after. Compliance and trust are the foundation, not an add-on.
Mobile-first, low-data
Most South African communities run from phones, often on capped data. tribe.one is built for that.
Honest pricing, in ZAR
No per-resident gotchas, no surprise overages, no platform fees on community money. Free tier exists forever.
Quiet by default
Notifications are opt-in unless they’re emergencies. We optimise for not waking people up.
How we got here
Still early — and building in the open.
The company
Shamfa Technologies (Pty) Ltd is registered in South Africa — the company that would go on to build tribe.one.
The idea
A body corporate’s spreadsheets, group chats and paper registers make the case: money, decisions and records belong in one place, not in three that cannot talk to each other.
Heads-down building
The platform takes shape: chat, treasury and levies, voting, safety, projects — module by module.
Early access
Eighteen modules complete — from chat and levies to visitor passes, stokvel rotation, patrol payroll and rental management. The first communities begin onboarding.
Founding communities
Our first estates, HOAs and stokvels come on board — and shape the roadmap with us. You could be one of them.
Team
Small, opinionated, in Johannesburg.
Product & engineering
Builds and runs the platform
Onboarding & support
Migrates your roll and hand-holds the first term
A small team in Johannesburg
Engineering · design · support
Want to help us build it?
Whether you’re a community looking to onboard or an engineer who wants to work on civic software in ZAR, we’d love to hear from you.