RentMy

Pros: After setting up my yard sign rental business, I was eager to find a rental website platform. I checked out quite a few and found that Rentmy seemed to have all of the features I was looking for. In hindsight, there are much better and cheaper ones out there. More of that later. Please read the entire review to see why I would not recommend using RentMy for your business.

USING THE PROGRAM:

RentMy offered a free, but limited, plan which I thought would be perfect while I was figuring things out. While there are a nice selection of features, locating the right place to make changes to inventory and other items is not very intuitive. You may find yourself searching all over the menus to find what you are looking for. Secondly, navigating the screens is absolutely infuriating. Tapping on a menu item usually brings up a second, half screen of items and selections. The problem is finding just the right place on the screen to place your curser so that you can scroll up or down. Even after 2 months of using the software, I was still struggling every time. Another major issue is that the website does not load the first time. I had several customers tell me that the website was not working. Only after a person refreshes the page, will the site load (although extremely slowly).

I made quite a few requests for computer chats to ask for help, and to their credit, they were quite helpful and responsive. They were almost always available when I requested a chat. Most of the questions I had were either trying to figure out how to achieve a particular function or asking to make something work that wasn’t working properly. Everything was fine until I received a message that read something to the effect of, “You have exhausted your amount of time for assistance. Please purchase a paid plan”. That was all fine except for the fact that I still needed help fixing things that weren’t working correctly before I felt comfortable paying $60 a month. Since I really needed their assistance to fix the problems, I went ahead and signed up for a paid plan. I was extremely disappointed to find out that even after paying for a plan, the website was still directing to Rentmy as the main site and referring to their website when I sent a customer a link to my website. I was told that I would have to pay another $100 to have their name removed from the web address. As it turned out, there was absolutely no benefit to upgrading to the paid plan. There was an option to downgrade back to the free site so I immediately did that.

ETHICS AND BUSINESS PRACTICES:

Here’s where it gets ugly. I remained on the free plan, even though they kept “adding” limiting features. For example, just a few days ago, they added a large watermark with the RentMy logo on top of all of my product images. I get it! They want people to purchase the paid plan. I understood this and chose to keep it like this until I decided if I was going to stay with them or find another rental platform. I didn’t have to wait long as RentMy made that decision for me. Remember when I said I had paid for a one month paid plan? I downgraded to the free, limited, version and expected that to be that. I got an email today, saying “Your subscription will renew soon”. “
This is a friendly reminder that your Renterval LLC subscription will automatically renew on September 30, 2020.

Wait! What? I cancelled that subscription. This must be a mistake, right? So I emailed them, telling them that I did not want to renew the subscription. I received a reply a few minutes later saying they were cancelling my account per my request. I replied that I would like to keep the account active until the end of the month. They replied back that they were keeping my data on file until the end of the month (6 more days) but that they deactivated my account because I wasn’t paying. There is so much wrong with this. Where to start.

It seems to me that they had some regrets after they set up a free plan and decided that they wanted to do away with that option. But what about the customers that are already on that plan? Perhaps they could send them an email telling them that they are sorry but we are no longer offering the free plan and as of x date, you will either need to choose a paid plan or the account will be closed. That sounds like a reasonable approach, right? Instead, they chose to deactivate my account, immediately, after I let them know I had no intention of letting them charge my card next month without authorization. The consequences? I have lost all of my client information and have no website.

Thankfully, I have just found another rental website platform called Reservety. They are responsive, polite, reasonably priced, and most importantly, act with professionalism. Check them out!

Cons: No communication. Unprofessional. They should learn how to deal with customers to make things better and not charge without authorization.

Overall: The platform has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, they are not professional when dealing with customers and use unethical business practices.