On the face of it, Loconomics and Bring It Local sound like typical tech startups.

But behind the scenes, both companies are fomenting a quiet revolution in their business structures. They are organizing themselves as cooperatives - for-profit enterprises owned by the people who work for and use the services.

Loconomics provides an online marketplace and business-management software for entrepreneurs such as bodyworkers and psychotherapists. Bring It Local offers online crowdfunding tools for grassroots groups.

The co-op members - freelancers in the case of Loconomics; employees and donors in the case of Bring It Local - will own shares, receive dividends and have a voice in running the companies.

"Loconomics is like TaskRabbit if the rabbits owned the company," said attorney Janelle Orsi of the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Berkeley, who's helping set up the business structure. "It's not a platform for the rich to get richer, it's a platform for reversing that."

In hyper-capitalistic Silicon Valley, where companies and investors focus on a big payday, co-ops sound like a vestige of the counterculture 1960s. But as traditional employment continues to wane, worker-owned co-ops are making a comeback in the tech world as well as in other sectors.

Josh Danielson, who co-founded San Francisco's Loconomics with an MBA classmate from IESE Business School in Barcelona, said principles played a big role in deciding on the approach.

"A platform helping with self-employment shouldn't be owned by the 1 percent," he said. "We're at a crossroads where technology exists to help the common worker break free from traditional employment models. I felt it was important it be owned by the workers."

Membership fee

He's been working a day job to help bootstrap the company, which is still in beta. Its main thrust is to give freelancers software for their customers to book services, submit payments and leave reviews. It will charge providers an annual membership fee of a couple of hundred dollars. In exchange, they'll have access to the software and a stake in the company.

For the entrepreneurs who use Loconomics, the co-op structure is a major plus.

"I like to feel I'm putting my money, time and energy into something that will come back to my business and all our businesses, as opposed to being at the whims of a for-profit corporation," said Christopher Tellez of SF Reiki Center, who will be a board member of the new co-op.

Loconomics will technically be a freelancer-owned co-op, distinct from worker-owned co-ops like Rainbow Grocery and Arizmendi Bakery, or consumer-owned co-ops like REI. That's because the tutors, gardeners and massage therapists on Loconomics are independent entrepreneurs, not its employees.

"We're inventing a new wheel because there are no co-ops out there to use as models," Orsi said.

Orsi coined the term "T Corp." for such enterprises, after the tax code section that deals with democratically governed entities that distribute profits to members based on their patronage.

"The word cooperative has so much baggage," she said. "People have examples in mind involving hippies or grocery stores or long meetings; something clunky and unwieldy. This is cooperative at a different scale."

Technology for functions such as board elections, accounting and member surveys should help streamline the process of creating cutting-edge co-ops.

For Bring It Local in Fairfax, ideology also prompted the move to go co-op.

"It was clear to me that the people who use the site ultimately have to own the site," said founder Mark White. "The co-op structure is completely in sync with our philosophy of keeping money circulating locally in communities, and shows that we are walking our talk."

Virtual garage sale

Bring It Local processes donations to causes and lets donors shop online at sites that give referral fees to the groups they support. It soon will add a virtual garage sale feature for people to sell their stuff online to benefit an organization they support.

White said the co-op will have two types of members: company employees, and donors who use the platform and want to pay a modest membership fee.

"We're writing the bylaws for the co-op now," he said. "It's like writing a constitution; we are creating a democracy."

That points to one potential disadvantage of co-ops: Decision making and quick execution can be difficult when hundreds of members must weigh in.

Co-ops also fly in the face of the Silicon Valley emphasis on venture capital, in which companies turn over partial ownership and control in exchange for money to grow big, fast.

"I want to scale naturally," Danielson said. "Everyone thinks you need to be global in a year. That's not necessarily true."

Going co-op might not shut the door for venture capital, said Lisa Gansky, who both consults on and invests in "collaborative economy" companies through Mesh Labs. For one thing, investors are already accustomed to smaller returns when they fund companies later in their life cycle.

For another, going co-op could help some enterprises stand out in a crowded market.

"Imagine if all 5,000-plus guides on Vayable were also owners of the company," she said. "The eye on the prize would be building a long-term brand, community and organization rather than focusing on an exit through an IPO or acquisition."

In the so-called "sharing economy," companies now pay service providers a percentage of each transaction. Both Gansky and Orsi thinks co-ops could have an edge in populating a new generation of marketplaces like Uber for paid rides and VRBO for renting out homes, which depend on marshalling many people to participate as drivers or hosts.

"As there is more competition for great drivers or well located homes, these people can demand more participation in the value chain of the business," Gansky said.

Top-level domain

The Bay Area is home to several dozen co-ops, including such well-known ones as Berkeley's Cheese Board Collective, according to the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives. Nationwide, there are thousands. The Internet even has a top-level domain - ".coop" - to distinguish co-ops from .coms and .orgs. It has more than 7,000 addresses, according to the National Cooperative Business Association.

Orsi said that several dozen companies, including both tech startups and more traditional businesses like florists, caterers, landscapers and food producers, have approached her Sustainable Economies Law Center to explore going co-op.

"That would almost double the number of worker co-ops in the Bay Area in the next few years," she said. "People come to it from an economic justice standpoint. They realize they don't want to work for or buy from entities that exist just to help shareholders get richer."

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid