A renter books a boat on RentalTide. Before they pay, they are offered your coverage, priced by you, presented in our interface. If they take it, they answer your underwriting questions inside our checkout, pay once, and you bind the policy. Afterwards they see the policy and its documents on their booking page, and anyone who declined gets a second chance to buy.
You are not building a web app. You expose a handful of HTTPS endpoints. We do the rest: the coverage card, the question rendering, mobile and dark mode, localisation, the payment, the tax, the receipt, the order summary, refunds, the follow-up offer, document display, and the operator-facing reporting.
Your offering works on sandbox locations from the moment you create it, with no approval step — quoting, questions, requoting, binding, the receipt, the Next Steps page. Approval is only needed to sell to real renters.
The renter's journey
| Step | Where | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Booking flow | Renter picks a boat and a time. We call your /quote. Your coverage appears as a card with a real price. |
| 2 | Booking flow | They select it. It joins the order as an estimate. |
| 3 | Checkout | We render your questions in our UI. They answer. |
| 4 | Checkout | We call /requote with the answers and get a final price. |
| 5 | Checkout | They pay once. Your premium is part of that single card charge. |
| 6 | After payment | We call /bind. You return a policy number and a document. |
| 7 | Next Steps page | We show the policy and document, and offer the coverage again to anyone who declined. |
The renter never leaves RentalTide and never sees a third-party form.
Getting set up
1. Create a partner account
partners.rentaltide.com. Free, active immediately, no approval queue for the account itself.
2. Connect a payout account
Payouts → Connect with Stripe. Standard Stripe Express onboarding: bank details, business verification. Do this early — your coverage offering cannot be approved for production without it, and the account you connect here is attached to your offering automatically.
We can pay into the US, UK, EEA, Canada and Switzerland. The country list only shows those, because being told after you have earned money that we cannot send it to you is not a conversation anyone should have.
3. Create your coverage offering
The response to this call contains it. Store it now — no endpoint will return it again.
baseUrlmust be https. We sign every call to it and send renter identity at bind; over plaintext a signature proves nothing to anyone watching.supportedCountriesis where you are licensed to write. Empty means nowhere, not everywhere.quoteTimeoutMsis capped at 5000 and runs while a renter watches a page repaint.
4. Build the endpoints
The contract is below. Implement /quote alone and you will see a real card appear before writing anything else.
5. Test in sandbox
The whole flow, against real bookings on a real test marina. Nothing is transferred in sandbox.
6. Submit for review
We check you are actually ready before approving — a payout account, at least one licensed country, a signing secret — and tell you exactly what is missing if not.
7. Approved
A merchant enables your offering for their locations and it appears in their renters' checkout.
Changing where data or money goes — your baseUrl, payout account, licensed countries or currencies — sends the offering back for review, and it keeps working in sandbox meanwhile. Name, support address, quote timeout and the on/off switch change freely.
The contract
We always call you. The one exception is the messaging endpoint at the end.
Every request we send carries:
Verify both. Reject stale timestamps.
POST /quote
As soon as the renter has chosen a boat and a time. No renter identity is sent — at this point they have bought nothing and agreed to nothing, and most visitors never will.
Response:
depositEffect is one of none, waive, reduce_to, reduce_by, reduce_by_percent. Anything but none or waive must carry a depositEffectValue: a reducing effect with no number renders to the renter as a saving and then changes nothing at hold time, so we reject it.
Miss it and your card does not render; the booking proceeds without it. No renter waits on an insurance quote to see a checkout button.
A premium must be a JSON number. "44.50" is rejected.
POST /schema
We ask once per questionSchemaVersion and cache it, so checkout never waits on you to draw a form.
Supported types: text, number, date, checkbox, dropdown, multiselect, address, and notice for a disclosure block.
- Schema, not markup. No HTML, no scripts. A field type we cannot draw is dropped rather than rendered half-finished.
- Pinned per quote. Changing your schema never alters a quote in flight.
- Patterns are bounded. A regex with a nested quantifier (
(a+)+) is refused: it runs against renter input on our servers. - At most 12 fields. Each one is friction at the moment somebody is deciding to pay, and we measure checkout completion with and without your coverage selected.
POST /requote
When the renter submits your questions.
decision is accepted or declined. A decline is a normal outcome: we remove the coverage and the renter completes their booking without it.
Answers are validated against your pinned schema on our side first, so minAgeYears and pattern are enforced before they reach you. Conditional fields the renter never saw are not sent.
POST /bind
Only after payment has succeeded. The first and only call carrying renter identity.
We retry on timeout or 5xx. Returning the same policy for the same quote must not write a second one. documentUrl must be https.
POST /reschedule
When a booking's dates move after the policy is bound. Rentals get rescheduled, extended at the dock, and corrected on the order page, so the window you priced is not always the window the renter turns up for.
decision is accepted or declined, with an optional reason. A bare 200 with no decision is read as acceptance.
This is not a requote. The renter has already paid, and there is no path to charge them more without asking them again, so a new premium here is not something we can act on. The question is only whether the policy still stands. A decline is raised to the operator as a customer who paid and is no longer covered.
We detect the change by comparing the window you were bound against with the booking's current dates, so every way a date can move is covered — not only the renter-facing reschedule. Keyed on the policy plus the new window, so a retry after a timeout is the same amendment rather than a second one.
POST /cancel
Estimate, then final price
Between the card and the questions the renter is looking at an estimate.
| Outcome | What we do |
|---|---|
| Same as the estimate | Proceed silently |
| Lower | Proceed, show the new price |
| Higher | Stop. The renter must explicitly accept the new price before paying |
| Declined | Remove the coverage, let the booking continue |
We never charge a renter more than the price they were shown without asking, and we compare against our own record of what was displayed, not a number sent back by the browser.
If final prices routinely differ from estimates, the estimate is doing harm. Worth agreeing a tolerance up front and measuring it.
Money
- One payment. The renter pays the rental and your premium together on one card charge. No second checkout, no second receipt.
- We collect, then pay you. Your premium is held back from the operator's settlement and transferred to your Stripe account, minus our share. The transfer happens after you confirm the policy, so we never pay for a policy that does not exist.
- Refunds. A cancelled booking cancels the policy and reverses the transfer.
- Sandbox moves no money. Everything else runs; the transfer does not.
Talking to the renter
You have real reasons to write to the customer: here is your policy, here is your document, your claim was settled. We will not hand over an address, so instead you ask us to send it:
Categories: policy_issued, policy_document, policy_cancelled, claim_update. There is no custom.
- We resolve the recipient from the policy. You never name an address.
- Plain text only. It is escaped and wrapped in our template, attributed to you, sent from our authenticated domain with your support address as reply-to.
- One of each category per policy. A retried webhook is a no-op, not a second email.
- The merchant must have your offering enabled. If they turn it off, messages stop immediately.
When something fails
Coverage is an add-on. Nothing about it may block a rental.
| Failure | What happens |
|---|---|
/quote times out or errors | Your card does not render. Booking proceeds. |
/requote fails | Coverage is dropped from the order. Booking proceeds. |
/bind fails after payment | The booking stands. It is flagged to the operator within 30 minutes, and the renter's page says the policy has not issued yet. |
| Your service is down | The same, at every step. |
If you have a status endpoint or a maintenance signal, tell us — we would rather stop offering your product cleanly than time out on every page load.
What we need, and what you need
From you
- Sandbox endpoints for
/quote,/schema,/requote,/bind,/rescheduleand/cancel - One product definition: name, description, terms, coverage limit, and what it does to the security deposit
- Your question schema
- The countries and currencies you are licensed to write in
- Stripe Connect onboarding, from the Payouts page
From us
- A partner account and your signing secret
- A sandbox marina with test inventory, so you can run the full renter flow
- This document as the contract between us
- A data-sharing agreement naming the controller for the renter data sent at bind, before you go live
Things we answer per integration
A merchant can run their own damage coverage and yours at the same time. Both appear in the same list, and the merchant decides which products are active per location. You are not competing for a single slot.
Date changes reach you within the hour. A booking that moves after bind calls your /reschedule. If you would rather receive it immediately or not at all, say so during review.
Cancellation. A voided or refunded coverage sale calls your /cancel and reverses the payout.
Claims handling and premium tax are yours to state. Who takes a claim, and whether a region charges insurance premium tax rather than sales tax, differ by underwriter and by country. Tell us in your submission and we will render it at the point of sale rather than guess a default.
Anything else: partners@rentaltide.com.