Description
A Repair Café is a free meeting where volunteers help people repair their own broken things: toasters, lamps, clothes, bikes, toys, laptops. It is an alternative to throwing away a broken appliance and buying a new one because a repair shop seems too expensive or there is none nearby.
The Dutch journalist Martine Postma held the first one in Amsterdam on 18 October 2009, and in 2010 set up the Repair Café Foundation (Stichting Repair Café International), which supports local groups. Each Repair Café is run independently by volunteers, often monthly, in a community centre, library or café; visitors bring the object and repair it together with a volunteer, with tools on hand. Help is free. In October 2025 the foundation’s map listed more than 3,800 Repair Cafés worldwide; Germany alone had over 300 in 2016.
Groups record their repairs in RepairMonitor, an open database that held more than 305,000 repairs in October 2025. The foundation offers a starter kit, in five languages, for people who want to open a Repair Café, and organises International Repair Day on the third Saturday of October. Asked whether free repair competes with professional repairers, the foundation answers “quite the opposite”.
Strengths
- Free help from skilled volunteers, with the tools at hand.
- Visitors repair with the volunteer and learn how to fix the next thing themselves.
- More than 3,800 meetings worldwide, found on one map, and a starter kit for anyone who wants to open one.
Weaknesses
- Most meetings take place once a month for a few hours, so a broken item may wait weeks.
- Spare parts are the visitor’s job to find and pay for.
- Some devices are glued or sealed and can’t be opened, so not everything can be fixed.
Who it is for
Anyone with a broken object and an afternoon to spare, especially people who want to learn to repair rather than pay a shop.
Sources
- Repair Café: about, checked November 2026
- Wikipedia: Repair Café