HotCrate Equipment Rental App

About this project

HotCrate is rental management software for a single business to run its own gear catalog, not a marketplace that lists multiple rental houses together. A camera or production rental house uses it to track inventory, manage availability, and handle the day-to-day logistics of gear going out and coming back.

A rental starts one of two ways: a customer submits an inquiry from the public catalog, or the owner creates it manually. Either way it moves through the same lifecycle, from pending to accepted, prepped, picked up, and returned, with a daily "My Day" view of what's going out and coming back. Owners can also pre-build bundles, like a two-camera interview kit or a documentary run-and-gun package, priced as a set with the savings shown right on the card.

Every account gets its own branding, and pricing can be configured once and left alone: rate tiers automatically switch a rental to a cheaper weekly or monthly rate whenever a booking runs long enough to qualify, with no manual recalculation.

The feature the name leans on is the catalog itself, which is built to live outside HotCrate. An iframe embed drops straight into Squarespace, Wix, or Webflow with no code, and a script embed renders inline on sites that allow custom code and quietly adds hidden schema.org markup, so search engines can index a gear list that technically never has its own page. A separate Rate Card extension gives the same catalog a dense, printable price sheet with its own link and QR code, for a trade show table or a wall by the counter.