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Comment by holidaygoose | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how this works, so maybe someone can enlighten me. You pay 50 euro in exchange for some banners/logos to start a repair cafe, but they don't help you repair? I would have thought the starter kit would have supplies or something. What would you do when someone comes in with a toaster to repair? Do you just go on Youtube to figure it out together?

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You don't get supplies, you do get tools though. I think item owners are expected to pay for parts. And yes, to start out with maybe you are sitting down with YouTube and figuring out, but over time people will get more experienced.

> send you a unique code with which you can order the highly ingenious Repair Café toolkit[1] from iFixit Europe for free, only paying shipping costs (normal price: € 74,95 + shipping costs)

The €50 is buying you (apart from your €75 toolkit) membership, so you get a head start on connections and visibility compared to going it alone.

1: https://repaircafe.org/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/03...

You need to already have or find a network of "experts" to staff the cafe but there are loads of people out there. You can schedule different sorts of repairs on different days but a lot of electrical goods only require some basic faulting-finding and then spares from the internet.

I see. So then this Repair Cafe is basically a branding/marketing tool, so that you can some traffic via people who see their website.

When I looked into having some of these events at our Makerspace a few years ago, I found that the branding was very restrictive as well. My takaway was that they demanded that you put their logo on everything you do and every event you put on, even if it has nothing to do with them.

There's no way in hell I was going to agree to that.

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