RentalTide Lite: Online Booking and a Free Website for $19 a Month

Why we built it

RentalTide was built for operators running fleets. Point of sale, card terminals, GPS tracking, staff scheduling, tours, memberships and more than thirty AI agents. That is the right product for a marina or a forty-boat rental dock. It is the wrong product for a two-person lawn company that needs one thing: a page where customers can pick a time and pay.

Small businesses sign up anyway, and we have watched what happens next. They open the app, find dozens of settings sections for things they will never use, and leave before taking a booking. The software was not the problem. The amount of it was.

The price was the second problem. The full platform is free to use and charges 4.9% per booking, which is fair for a fleet and expensive for a small business. A lawn company taking $30,000 a year through RentalTide pays $1,470 on Free. On Lite it pays $528.

What you get

• A website, written for you. We build it at signup from what you tell us about your business. It is free on a rentaltide.com address, and connecting your own domain is free too.
• A booking page and widget. Customers pick what they want and when, and pay by card. Bookings are unlimited.
• Payouts to your bank through Stripe.
• Emails and texts that send themselves. A confirmation when someone books, a reminder before, and a thank-you after. You can change the wording of each one in plain English, and switch off the reminder and the thank-you.
• Refunds and reschedules from the booking itself.
• A basic waiver your customers sign online after they book, with starter wording for your kind of business.
• Jobs at the customer's address, with a service area, for anyone who goes to the work rather than having the work come to them.
• Room for a small team: up to 10 listings, 1 location and 2 logins. The second person can have full access or bookings only.

Five steps from signup to open

1. Tell us about your business: its name, what you do, where you are and a phone number.
2. Check your listings. We draft them from what you told us, with prices and descriptions. Change anything you like, then add them all in one click.
3. Connect Stripe so bookings are paid into your bank account.
4. Open your website. Until you do, it shows an Opening soon page, and you can put a password on it to show it to a few people first.
5. Share your links: your website, your booking link and a QR code for the van, the shop window or a flyer.

There is no test mode. Your account is real from the first step. Your booking page and listings stay off the internet until your website is open and Stripe is connected, so nobody finds a booking page that cannot take their money.

What it costs

$19 a month plus 1% of each booking, however it is paid. Card processing is billed separately at your local rate, exactly as it is on our Free plan. There is no setup fee and no contract.

Nothing is charged until your first sale. Setting up, building your listings and waiting for your first customer are all free. After that, a part month is charged for the days it covers.

Closed for the winter? Pause it. While Lite is paused, customers cannot book, your website says you are taking a break, and there is no monthly fee. Bookings you already have keep working. Resume whenever you are ready.

The fee comes out of your payouts, like every other RentalTide fee. Opening your website asks for a card on file, which is only charged if a balance has been waiting for 30 days with no payouts to take it from: a quiet month of cash jobs, say.

Those figures are a full year after your first sale, without card processing, which is the same on both. Notice the first row. Below about $5,850 a year, Free costs less than Lite, and if that is where you are, start on Free. We would rather tell you than take the $19.

What Lite leaves out

Lite is smaller on purpose. It does not include point of sale or card terminals, staff scheduling, tours, check-in, more than one waiver, memberships, gift cards, marketing campaigns, channels and OTAs, dynamic pricing, accounting integrations, the AI phone agent or Copilot.

If you need any of those, Lite is the wrong product, and the full platform has all of them on the Free plan at 4.9% per booking. Upgrading from Lite is one click in Settings, and you can preview the full platform with your own data before you switch. Nothing is moved or deleted.

When you outgrow it

Lite covers businesses taking up to $50,000 a year through RentalTide, counted over the last 12 months. We email you at 80% so it is never a surprise. Once you pass it, you have 60 days, and then your account moves to the full platform on the Free plan. Every feature turns on, the $19 monthly fee stops, and the platform fee becomes 4.9%.

That is the point of a starter plan. A business that has grown past $50,000 a year usually wants the things Lite leaves out, and it keeps every booking, customer and listing it built on the way.