For BHU hostels. Opening February 2027, one hostel at a time.
The shop near the gate offers ₹80 for your H C Verma. Our quote is ₹140, paid at your door.
Chaegx is a used-book service for BHU. Photograph a book, get a price from the app, and a student rider checks it for two minutes at your hostel and pays your UPI on the spot. Buying works the same way in reverse, delivered within 24 hours from a depot beside campus.
Built by SHIOT.in, a small company in Varanasi. More on that further down.
physics · chem · maths
arrives tomorrow, before mess ₹420
pickup free with any order ₹0
How it works
Three directions, one corridor
Every flow ends at a hostel door. Pick the one that's yours.
Photograph the book
Front cover, spine, one page inside. Pick the condition honestly. The rider checks the same three things later, so this part is between you and your conscience.
The app prices it
Subject demand, edition, condition. The number appears before anyone is dispatched, and it doesn't change at the door. A decent H C Verma Vol 1 quotes at ₹140.
Pick a slot
Morning between classes or evening after mess. The rider is a student like you, paid per completed pickup, not per knock.
Two-minute check, then UPI
Missing pages, water damage, wrong edition, checked at your door. Match, and the transfer lands before the rider leaves the corridor. No match, the rider leaves empty-handed and you keep the book.
Browse by subject and semester
Physics, chemistry, maths, CS, electronics, mechanical, economics, biology. Every title on the shelf has already been through the same doorstep check yours would fail.
Build a real cart
There's a ₹250 minimum. It sounds like a marketing trick; it's arithmetic. A lone ₹150 book can't pay for a delivery run, and we'd rather nudge you toward a notebook pack than quietly lose money.
Pay however you pay
UPI, card, or netbanking through Razorpay. Campus delivery is ₹15, and free once the cart crosses ₹500.
It arrives within 24 hours
From the depot beside campus, usually the same day. In exam season this is the entire point of the exercise.
List what you're passing down
Graduating? The books you'd otherwise leave on the mess table can reach a junior properly, inspected and listed cheap.
Attach it to any order
If you're buying something anyway, the rider takes the donation in the same trip. No extra fee, no extra visit.
Or pay ₹15 for a standalone pickup
The whole ₹15 goes to the rider. We take nothing from donations; that's a rule, not a mood.
Someone gets it cheap
Donated stock is inspected like everything else and priced at whatever a junior can actually pay.
The money
Every number, in one table
No "starting from", no asterisks. This is the whole fee structure.
| Campus delivery | ₹15 |
| Delivery on a cart over ₹500 | Free |
| Minimum cart | ₹250 |
| Seller payout | Instant, UPI, at your door |
| Donation pickup, with any paid order | Free |
| Donation pickup, standalone | ₹15 — all of it to the rider |
| Our cut of a donation | Nothing |
People ask how we make money on a ₹15 delivery. Honestly, we often don't. A used textbook carries about ₹20 to ₹25 of margin, and a delivery run costs ₹45 to ₹70. Run that math on a single-book order and you've found the hole in every used-book startup before this one.
The fix is the ₹250 minimum and the stationery shelf. Notebooks, practical files, chart paper carry 40 to 50 percent margin, so a cart with one notebook pack in it pays for its own delivery and then some. That's the whole business model, stated plainly instead of hidden behind a coupon code.
And the ₹15 donation fee goes to the rider, not to us, because goodwill that costs us money doesn't survive its first quarter.
One book's trip
From your shelf to a junior's, in about a day
This is the full chain. No third-party courier, no city warehouse, nothing waiting for a route.
The app prices your book instant
Demand for the subject, the edition, the condition you declared. The quote is fixed before anyone is dispatched, and there's no negotiation screen because there's no negotiation.
A rider takes the slot same day
Students, paid per completed pickup, no fixed salary. If there are no pickups, there are no rider costs. That's the only way a service this small can start.
Two minutes at your door
The check is a fixed list: missing pages, water damage, edition. The rider can accept the book or reject it. There is no third button.
Your UPI gets the money seconds
The transfer goes out when the check passes. Not at month end, not after processing, not "within 5-7 working days". The rider is usually still in the corridor.
The depot shelves it same day
A small commercial space beside campus. Graded, priced, and listed the same day it comes in, minutes from every hostel it might ship to.
A junior gets it within 24 hours
Orders ship from that same depot. Campus radius means the rider is minutes away, not routed across a city.
The 24-hour part matters most in exam weeks, which is precisely when courier companies are at their slowest. Everyone in this loop sleeps inside the same two square kilometers.
Where we actually are
What works today, and what doesn't
Every startup page shows you the good part. Here's both columns, because you'd find out anyway.
Working today
- The Android app. A signed release build runs on real devices; login, catalog, cart, checkout, and order tracking all work.
- The quote engine. Prices and rules for the 35 most common BHU titles, seeded, editable from an ops console.
- Razorpay checkout, end to end. In test mode while our KYC finishes. Real payments switch on before launch.
- The rider surface. Pickup queue, the two-minute checklist, the payout ledger.
- Encrypted phone and address storage, rate limits on every endpoint, and 120+ automated tests that run on every commit.
Not yet, honestly
- iOS. The codebase is ready; the Apple developer account isn't. It's about $99 a year and some paperwork, not a rewrite.
- Product photos. Listings carry icons today. Real photos land with the storage batch.
- A signed depot lease. Budgeted for a small space near the main gate, currently shortlisting. No lease, no launch.
- Inventory. A buyback service with nothing to buy back. The December sweep, when seniors empty out, fills the shelf for the February opening.
- You. The service needs its first cohort, hostel by hostel, and that's what the pilot is for.
Questions people actually ask
The awkward ones included
You can. If you enjoy haggling over WhatsApp and meeting a stranger at Lanka at 9pm, OLX works fine. Chaegx is for people who'd rather photograph a book and get paid. The quote also isn't negotiable, which sounds rude until you've haggled once.
The rider can't change the price. The quote is fixed by the app before anyone is dispatched, and the agent's screen has exactly two options: the book matches the described condition, or it doesn't. No negotiation screen, because there's no negotiation.
Then a person prices it, usually within a couple of hours. The catalog covers about 35 common BHU titles today, so this will happen plenty during the first months. It shrinks with every pickup, and it's the reason the quote engine exists instead of a lookup table.
Mostly we don't make it on delivery. The basket is the business: books carry thin margins, stationery carries 40 to 50 percent, so a cart with a notebook pack pays for its own run. That's the entire reason the ₹250 minimum exists, and we're not pretending otherwise.
Three things, in order: payment KYC, the depot lease, and the December buyback sweep. A launch at semester start with an empty shelf would just be a website. Opening with stock, riders, and real payments is the version worth waiting for.
They're encrypted before they touch the database, everything moves over TLS, endpoints are rate-limited, and payment webhooks are verified against signatures. The short version: we built it like a payments app, not a college project.
A note from the founder
I'm Shreyansh. I build software at SHIOT.in, a small company in Varanasi that makes tools for students, and Chaegx is our newest one.
It started with a number I couldn't shake: a used textbook that sells for ₹300 carries about ₹20 of margin, and a delivery run costs three times that. Everyone before us solved this with a fat cut, with ads, or by simply not existing on campus. We're solving it with stationery, semester sets, and riders who already walk these corridors.
The boring parts are what I care about. A quote that can't be haggled down. A payout that lands before the rider leaves your corridor. A two-minute check so nobody receives a book with pages missing. The animations on this page are nice; the payout timing is the product.
If you're at BHU and want in early, or you're convinced this can't work and want to argue about it, I read everything: shiot.in
Shreyansh · SHIOT.in, Varanasi