What to expect from us
Choosing an operations platform means betting your season on a supplier. This page is what you are actually signing up to: how quickly we change things, what happens when you find a gap, and what we owe you when something breaks.
We would rather you read this before you commit than discover it in July.
We ship continuously
RentalTide changes most weeks, sometimes several times a week. There is no annual release cycle to wait for.
Every change is published to the changelog, which you can read at signlos.com/p/rentaltide/changelog, inside the app under What's New, and on your home dashboard.
A fast-moving product cuts both ways, and it is worth being honest about both.
In your favour: a gap you report is often closed in days rather than quarters. Operators who tell us what is missing tend to get it.
Against: screens change. A workflow your staff learned in April may look different in July, usually because it got better, occasionally because it got different. Significant changes are in the changelog before they reach you.
When you find something missing
You will find something. Every operator does, because no platform covers every way a rental business can work, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
What we ask is that you tell us rather than working around it silently. The workarounds are how a small gap becomes a permanent operational cost.
How to report:
- In-app — the fastest route, and it carries the context of what you were doing
- Email — support@rentaltide.com
- Docs AI — the assistant on this site answers most "how do I" questions immediately, and tells you plainly when the answer is that the feature does not exist
What happens next: a bug that breaks a workflow gets fixed quickly. A missing capability gets an honest answer about whether and roughly when we will build it, including "no" when the answer is no. We would rather tell you it is not coming than leave you waiting on a maybe.
What we commit to when something breaks
Real numbers, not aspirations. The engineering behind each is in the technical appendix.
| Failure | Back up within | Data lost |
|---|---|---|
| Single availability zone fails | Under 2 minutes | None |
| Application instance crashes | Under 60 seconds | None |
| Bad deploy | Under 5 minutes | None |
| Full AWS region outage | Under 4 hours | Under 5 minutes |
| Catastrophic data corruption | Under 6 hours | Under 5 minutes |
During an incident you hear from us in three places:
- status.rentaltide.com, updated within minutes of detection. This is the source of truth.
- Your support channel, with anything specific to your location.
- A written postmortem, published within five business days for any incident with customer impact lasting more than fifteen minutes.
If you cannot reach us through the usual channel during an outage, support@rentaltide.com is monitored from outside our own infrastructure.
And if we are entirely unreachable, you can still trade. Reliability and continuity covers taking walk-ups on paper, keeping card readers running and getting back in sync afterwards. Have your staff read it before the season, not during an outage.
What we do not do
Stated plainly, so it is not a surprise later.
- We do not lock you in. Free is month to month with no contract. Your bookings, customers, waivers and financials export whenever you want. See Exports.
- We do not hold your money. Payments go through your own Stripe account, direct to your bank. If you left tomorrow, your Stripe account and its history stay yours.
- We do not charge per message. SMS and email confirmations, reminders and receipts carry no per-message fee on any plan.
- We do not gate features behind plans. Every plan has every feature. A paid plan buys a per-booking cap, not a capability. See Pricing.
- We do not price on your revenue. Plans are banded by booking count, because what you earn is your business.
Where to look when you are stuck
The search box on this site covers every page. The AI assistant answers in plain language and cites the pages it used, so you can check it.
If neither gets you there, email us. A question that the docs failed to answer is a docs bug, and we treat it as one.