RentalTide has four plans. Free is $0 a month and always will be. The three paid plans are annual contracts that put a hard ceiling on what any single booking can cost you.
The rate is 4.9% on every plan, including the paid ones. A plan does not buy a cheaper percentage. It buys a cap.
Every plan includes every feature.
The plans
| Plan | Price | Volume | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Any | 4.9% of booking value |
| Core | $2,400 / year | Up to 1,500 bookings/yr | 4.9%, max $25 per booking |
| Scale | $6,000 / year | 1,501 – 6,000 bookings/yr | 4.9%, max $25 per booking |
| Fleet | $12,000 / year | 6,001 – 20,000 bookings/yr | 4.9%, max $25 per booking |
Above 20,000 bookings a year we price individually — talk to us.
Card processing is billed separately at your local rate on every plan, including Free. It is never bundled into a plan price.
Why we changed it
A percentage prices the booking, not the work.
Two operators running the same software, taking the same number of bookings, using the same support — one renting $120 kayak sessions and one running $2,000 charters — paid wildly different amounts for it. Measured across our own customers at 4.9%, the software cost per booking ran from $5.82 to $101.59. A 17.5× spread, decided entirely by what you happen to rent.
That is indefensible, and high-value operators told us so. Where the flat rate clearly did not fit a business we adjusted it for them, one account at a time, until we were running a collection of one-off arrangements instead of a rate card. If a number needs an exception that often, the number is wrong.
The per-booking cap fixes the specific unfairness, and only that. A $4,000 charter and a $600 charter both cost $25. Above $510.20 of booking value the fee stops climbing.
We deliberately did not pair the cap with a lower percentage. A cheaper rate would have been a discount on every booking, including the small ones the 4.9% was always fair on, and it would have grown without limit as an operator grew. The cap is bounded by what it replaces: it can never save you more than the fee you would have paid. That keeps the plan honest about what it is for.
The practical consequence, stated plainly: if your bookings are mostly under $510, a plan will not save you money and we will not pretend otherwise. The comparison on your Subscription page does this arithmetic on your own bookings and recommends Free when Free is right.
Why bookings, not revenue
Plans are banded by how many bookings you take, never by how much money you make.
That is deliberate. What you earn is your business, not ours, and asking for it just to work out what software costs is intrusive. Booking count is a number you already know, and it is the one that actually reflects what running your account costs us.
Why the cap is per booking and not per seat
Our costs are per transaction, not per person. A twenty-seat tour sold as twenty ticket bookings is twenty payments, twenty confirmations and twenty messages. One whole-boat charter is one of each. Pricing per transaction tracks what it actually costs us to run.
What it means for you
A plan pays off only if enough of your bookings are large. There is no single revenue figure at which that becomes true, because it depends on the size of individual bookings and not on your total. Two operators with an identical $400,000 year can land on opposite answers: 800 bookings at $500 saves nothing at all, while 200 bookings at $2,000 saves thousands.
The rule of thumb is the $510.20 line. Every booking above it saves you the difference between 4.9% and $25; every booking below it saves you nothing. When those savings add up to more than the plan price, the plan is worth buying.
The comparison on your Subscription page prices every plan against your own last twelve months, booking by booking, and says plainly when a paid plan would cost you more.
Above that, a paid plan saves you money, and the higher your average booking value the more the $25 ceiling is worth on top.
When a plan pays for itself
There is no single revenue figure, and any table claiming one would be wrong. What a plan saves depends on the size of your individual bookings, not on your total.
The arithmetic, per booking:
| Booking value | Fee at 4.9% | With the cap | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| $200 | $9.80 | $9.80 | nothing |
| $510.20 | $25.00 | $25.00 | nothing |
| $1,000 | $49.00 | $25.00 | $24.00 |
| $2,000 | $98.00 | $25.00 | $73.00 |
| $10,000 | $490.00 | $25.00 | $465.00 |
Add up the savings on your own bookings over a year. If the total beats the plan price, the plan is worth buying.
Worked example: an operator taking 200 charters a year at $2,000 saves $73 on each, or $14,600. Core costs $2,400, so they are $12,200 ahead. An operator taking 2,000 rentals a year at $180 saves nothing on any of them, and Core would cost them $2,400 for nothing. Both of those answers appear on your Subscription page automatically.
Terms
Paid plans are twelve-month contracts, billed annually. Free stays month-to-month with no contract — that has not changed.
Terms run 1st to 1st. Invoices are calendar months, so a plan term ends on the 1st of a month rather than on the day you happened to buy it. If you start mid-month your first term is short, and you are charged pro rata for it. Buy on 16 August and your first term runs to 1 August the following year: 350 days, so 350/365 of the price. Every renewal after that is a clean full year. You are never charged more than the annual price, including in a leap year.
Switching up is pro-rated. You pay the difference in annual price for the days left in your term, charged to the card on file. Your new rate applies from that moment; bookings already taken stay at the rate they were charged at.
If you outgrow your plan, we move you up. You pay the pro-rated difference for the remaining days. You are never put back on 4.9%, and you are never back-billed for the months you were over. There is 10% of headroom past a plan's ceiling before anything happens, so a busy fortnight will not bounce you between plans.
Downgrades take effect at renewal. Nothing is refunded mid-term.
What every plan includes
Plans change your price. They never change what you can do.
- Unlimited bookings, locations, inventory and staff accounts
- Online booking page, embeddable widget, and your own website
- Point of sale, walk-ups, cart and card terminals
- Digital waivers and guest check-in
- Tours, charters and multi-day rentals
- Deposits, instalments, refunds, damage deposits, gift cards and memberships
- SMS and email confirmations, reminders and receipts, with no per-message fee
- Marketing campaigns, sequences, cart recovery and review requests
- AI website chat, AI phone answering and AI agents
- Full API, webhooks and the MCP connector
- Reporting, analytics and accounting exports
- Support, onboarding and the EDU academy
The one thing a paid plan adds
Every feature is on every plan, so a paid plan buys a rate, not a capability. There is one exception, and it lives in another product:
50% off Vectra GPS plans, on any paid plan. Vectra is our GPS tracking product, sold per tracker per month. While your RentalTide plan is active, every Vectra subscription on your account is half price. It applies to the trackers you already have as well as any you add, and it stops when the plan does.
Redeem it at checkout on Vectra. Sign in with the same email you use for RentalTide and the discount is applied automatically. There is no code to type, because the entitlement is checked against your live plan rather than a code that would keep working after the plan ended.
The one thing that scales
AI credits grow with your revenue, not with your plan. A larger operator gets a larger monthly AI allowance on every plan, including Free. Your current allowance and usage are shown on the Subscription page.
Billed separately
| Add-on | Price |
|---|---|
| Slip management | $10 per slip per month |
| Card terminals | $35 per terminal per month |
| Phone numbers | $5 per number per month |
| Card processing | Your local rate — see below |
Phone numbers are the dedicated numbers you provision for a location, used for calls, SMS confirmations and AI phone answering. The rental is billed monthly per number for as long as you hold it, because that is how our own carrier bills us: a number costs money every month whether it rings or not. Calls and messages themselves carry no per-minute or per-message fee.
Release a number you are not using and the charge stops. Numbers held before 1 September 2026 were provisioned free and are not billed for any earlier month.
Card processing
Card processing is billed at cost-plus and is identical on every plan. It is quoted per country because interchange genuinely differs by market — an Australian operator pays materially less than a North American one, and publishing a single global rate would overcharge them.
Your own rates are shown on the Subscription page, broken down four ways:
- Online, domestic
- In person, domestic — cheaper, because tapped and chipped cards cost less to process
- Online, international
- In person, international
Changing plans
Everything is self-serve on Admin > Subscription. Pick a plan, see exactly what will be charged before anything happens, and confirm.
Your monthly invoice itemises everything — bookings, card processing, AI usage across every surface, support, and any add-ons — with a per-booking breakdown showing what you charged, what card processing cost, and what RentalTide took. Even a $0.00 month gets a full statement, because the usage record is the point.
Invoices are emailed on the 1st. Set who receives them under Invoice emails on the Subscription page — most operators send them to their finance address rather than the owner's inbox.