A rental marketplace taken to launch.
RentMy · two-sided rental marketplace
A previous team had not delivered, so we took on an unfamiliar codebase and shipped the marketplace, with payments, identity checks and a dispute route in the first version.
Overview
RentMy is a rental marketplace where people list what they own and other people rent it: cameras, tools, bikes, the things that sit unused most of the year. OpenKit came in with the codebase already written, in a stack we had not chosen, and built on what was there.
The work covered the whole platform: the booking and scheduling layer, payments and payouts, identity verification, messaging and reviews, dispute resolution, an admin panel and CMS, the interface redesign, and the search and rendering work behind it. RentMy's founder reviewed every flow as it was built, so the people who would run the marketplace had seen it working before it went live.
- Picked up mid-build on someone else’s architecture and took the marketplace to a live launch.
- Payments, deposits, scheduled release and identity verification through Stripe, with a dispute path designed before it was needed.
- Engineered against a stated load requirement of 30,000 concurrent users, with the caching and queueing for it put in during the build.
10,000+
Sign-ups in three months
30,000
Concurrent users, the load requirement the client set
Two-sided
Marketplace for lenders and renters
First version
Payments, identity checks and a dispute route all shipped in it
Challenge
What a rental marketplace has to get right
Getting two strangers to hand over a £900 camera is the whole problem. Most rental platforms launch with a good browse experience and discover the rest of it the first time something comes back broken, at which point the fix is a policy email and the users are already gone. Taking over a half-built platform made that sharper, because the parts already written were the easy ones and what was left was everything the launch depended on.
- A lender has to get paid, on the right side of the handover, without chasing anyone.
- Both sides have to know the other is a verified person before anything changes hands.
- When something goes wrong, there has to be a route through it that both parties agreed to in advance.
Approach
What we took on
Booking against a real calendar
Items reserved for specific dates, with the collection at the start of a rental and the return at the end both scheduled. Get the calendar wrong and a listing turns into an argument, so it was the first thing we fixed.
Payments, deposits and scheduled payouts
Stripe carried payments, deposits and discount codes, and we scheduled the release so the lender was paid on the right side of the handover.
Knowing who is on the other end
Identity verification through Stripe and authentication through Auth0, so a lender handing a camera to someone they have never met knows the account on the other end belongs to a checked person.
A dispute route agreed in advance
If an item came back damaged the lender raised an additional charge, both parties placed what they thought it was worth on a sliding scale, and a mediator stepped in where that did not settle it. The deposit was already held, so there was something concrete to settle against.
Rendered on the server, installable on a phone
Server-side rendering so the listing and landing pages could rank, and a progressive web app conversion so renters could keep it on the home screen without an app-store download in the way.
The tools the team run it with
An admin panel for accounts, items and transactions, a CMS for the content around them, and analytics and email instrumentation so the team could see what people did and follow up on it.
Search
Search that knows what is available
Search filtered by category, location, availability and price, with availability doing the work most marketplaces leave out, so what came back was what a renter could actually book on the dates they needed.
Result
Where RentMy got to
- The platform launched and took real users, recording over 10,000 sign-ups in three months.
- The trust the marketplace runs on shipped in the first version: payments held and released on schedule, identities checked before anything changed hands, and a dispute route both sides had agreed to.
- The RentMy team took over running the marketplace themselves, managing accounts, listings and transactions from the admin panel and CMS we built.
Stack
What the marketplace was built with
The build
- React + Redux
- .NET + PostgreSQL
- Azure
- Stripe payments + identity
- Auth0
- Progressive web app
OpenKit certifications
- ISO 27001
- ISO 9001, UKAS-accredited
- Cyber Essentials
Controls on this project
- UK GDPR
- UK data residency
Other engagements
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