Everything you need to run a rental business

Add each piece of gear once, with photos, a daily rate, and a category, and HotCrate tracks the rest. The day you rent something out, those dates block themselves, so you can't accidentally promise the only dolly you own to two shoots at once.

Keep items public for your catalog, or mark them unlisted when you just want to track them internally without putting them up for rent.

Group gear that always goes out together, a camera body, its lenses, and the case, into a single bundle with its own daily rate. Customers book the whole package in one step, and availability still tracks every item inside it. Bundles are part of the Pro plan.

Every booking request lands in your dashboard for review. You approve or decline, and from there HotCrate walks the rental through pick-up, active, returned, and closed, so a piece of gear is never quietly forgotten in someone's trunk.

Each customer builds a history as they rent. Their contact info and past rentals sit in one place instead of scattered across your inbox and text messages.

Renting to people comes with paperwork: insurance certificates, IDs, signed agreements. HotCrate keeps each customer's documents together and, on Pro, tracks their expiration with an at-a-glance valid or expired status, so you know who's actually covered before their gear leaves the shelf.

Every account gets a shareable catalog at hotcrate.co/u/your-name. Send the link, put it in your bio, or let people find it in search. Instead of a phone number and a game of phone tag, a colleague sees what's available, picks their dates, and sends a request.

Want it on your own site? Drop in the embed code and your catalog appears right on the page. Same booking flow, your domain.

Your Rate Card is a clean, menu-style price list of everything you rent, with its own link and QR code. Hand it out at a trade show, drop it on a quote, or text the link to someone who just needs to know what you stock. It updates itself as you add gear or change a price, and it's free on every plan.

HotCrate sends the routine emails for you: booking confirmations, pick-up and return reminders, and status updates. Your customers stay in the loop without you copy-pasting the same message ten times a week.

Add your business name and logo so customers recognize you at a glance. On Pro, set a custom accent color so your catalog, embed, and rate card all match your brand, and remove the HotCrate watermark entirely.

HotCrate Free covers the essentials for getting started: public items, the full catalog and embed, booking requests, customer tracking, availability blocking, and your Rate Card. No credit card required.

Pro adds capacity and polish: higher item limits, bundles, document expiration tracking, custom branding, CSV import, and search engine visibility for your catalog.