In the platform economy, a company (the orchestrator) opens its technological platform for others—i.e. organisations and individuals (complementors)— to work with and offer their own products. This kind of an approach can be seen as a useful tool also in development aid. Here, a company, from a western industrialised country builds and offers a technological plat form for complementors from developing countries to work with. On the one hand, the spill-over effects from successful complementors would create economical well-being in their respective areas. On the other hand, this approach can be argued to be just modernised version of imperialism where rich western corporations are benefiting from cheap labour. In this article, we describe the aforementioned problem and present ethical discussion on the dilemma. Finally, this study calls for further work on understanding ethical issues of ecosystem and platform management.