A tour of Namaste Community, feature by feature
Yellow Pages, Marketplace, Ask, Events, chat, SOS and the AI that fills in your forms — what each part is for, and the bits people miss.
Namaste Community has grown a fair bit since the first version. This is a proper walk through what’s in the app today — including a few things that are easy to miss.
📖 Yellow Pages
A directory of businesses and professionals, built around the thing that actually matters when you’ve just moved: whether they’ll understand you. Listings can say which languages they speak, and you can filter by category, city and distance.
Every listing is reviewed before it goes live, and members can leave ratings and reviews. Phone, WhatsApp and email are visible to signed-in members inside the app — deliberately not on the public web, so business owners don’t get scraped.
🛍️ Marketplace
Buy and sell locally: furniture from someone moving back home, a bike, a pushchair, kitchen equipment. It also handles rentals and property, with fields for rent period, deposit, bedrooms and whether it’s furnished — because “for sale” and “to rent” are genuinely different things and squeezing them into one form helps nobody.
Message a seller directly in the app. No phone number swap needed to start.
💬 Ask
The heart of it, honestly. Questions about visas, schools, doctors who speak English, where to find good paneer, whether a landlord is allowed to ask for that.
Ask anonymously
Some questions are easier without your name on them. You keep a consistent pseudonym so people can still follow a thread.
Polls
Ask the community to vote instead of writing an essay. Good for “which area should we move to?” style questions.
📅 Events
Festivals, meet-ups, dance classes, temple events. RSVP in a tap, see who else is going, and add it straight to your phone’s calendar. Organisers can now attach an event website and a ticket link, so “where do I actually buy tickets?” has an obvious answer.
✨ The AI bits
Writing a good listing is work, and most people give up halfway. So the app helps:
AI suggest
Turn a rough draft or a few keywords into a properly written description or title. It only polishes what you wrote — it won’t invent prices or dates.
Autofill
Paste a WhatsApp forward or drop in a link to an event page, and the form fills itself in — date, venue, price, ticket link. Check it and post.
Why it won’t guess
🆘 SOS and safety
An SOS screen with the emergency numbers that matter here, plus your own emergency contacts. Alongside that: block and report on every profile and post, moderation on everything before it goes public, and full account deletion from inside the app.
🌍 Languages and location
The app speaks English, French and Dutch, and follows the language on your profile. Content is distance-aware, so what you see is what’s actually near you rather than everything in the country.
What’s next
More of what you ask for, mostly. If something here is missing or half-baked, tell us via the feedback form or WhatsApp — we read all of it.
Found this useful? Pass it on.
Someone who’s just moved will thank you for it.
Get the app
Free to join. Find services, buy & sell, and discover events near you.