An equipment hire booking system that cannot book the same item twice.
Payment at the point of booking, availability worked out live, and a database that refuses a second booking for the same hour. Built for you, owned by you, and proven on our own hire product.
The one thing it cannot get wrong
One item, one place, one hour.
Hire has one hard rule: a piece of equipment is in one place at a time. A system that checks availability and then writes the booking, hoping nobody else got there in between, will one day sell the same hour twice, and the customer who turns up to nothing is the one who tells people.
Ours does not check and hope. The rule lives in the database, so the second booking for the same hour is rejected by the database itself. It is impossible, not unlikely.
What breaks when it gets busy
Three places it usually goes wrong.
- 01
Bookings taken by hand
Every booking arrives by phone or WhatsApp and is typed into a diary by you. It works at three bookings a month and stops working when it is busy.
- 02
Two customers, one hour
Two people ask for the same slot within minutes. Whoever you answer second has already been told yes by someone else, or by nobody.
- 03
Nobody has paid yet
The hour is held with a promise. If they do not turn up, the item sat idle and there was no money in it.
The proof
Recorded, not mocked up.
ShotBot is our own product: a padel ball machine hired by the hour, at a club in Corsham. It is not a client build, and the figures below are its own.
July
3
bookings, the last month on the old platform
August
8
bookings, month one on the platform
September
27
bookings, month two on the platform
Admin per day
10 minutes
was 2 hours a day
35 paid bookings in two months on the platform, at Padel People, Corsham. The growth came alongside a visibility push at the venue, not from the platform alone. Figures as of 30 September 2026, ShotBot’s own.
Try it
Two customers want Friday, 10:00. Press both Pay buttons, as fast as you like.
Customer A
Customer B
Friday 10:00 · free
A demonstration in your browser: nothing is booked or charged. £10 is ShotBot’s real price for an hour. On the live system the same rule is held by the database, so it holds however close together the two payments arrive.
What the build includes
The Order build: From £3,500.
Everything in Attention, plus customers booking or ordering and paying for themselves, without ever double-booking you. Typically 4 to 8 weeks. Monthly retainer £249. Fixed price, 50% to start and 50% on delivery.
- Up to 8 pages, with booking and service pages included
- Real-time availability, calculated server-side rather than cached and hoped for
- Double-booking prevented by a database constraint, not application logic: impossible, not unlikely
- Payment captured at the point of booking through Stripe, so the slot is paid for before anyone turns up
- Automated transactional email: confirmations, reminders, cancellations
- Admin dashboard: bookings, customers, revenue, exports
- Cancellation, rescheduling and refund handling, without a phone call
- Online ordering and recurring subscriptions, with delivery priced by postcode
- Basic follow-up for enquiries that don’t convert
Every price is published on the services page. Most projects start with the £450 Diagnostic, credited in full against a build within 30 days.
Rent or build
Renting is sometimes the right answer.
A rented booking tool can be the right answer, especially for a simple diary. It costs less to start and you do not have to think about it. What changes as you grow is what it charges per booking or per client, and what you own at the end of it, which is nothing. If you take a lot of bookings, or your terms and payments are unusual, building can cost less over time. Neither is always right, and the costs page sets out both.
What a booking system costs: renting or building
Also built for gyms and classes, trades and jobs. Local to Wiltshire, Bath and Bristol.
Questions
Three questions, answered directly.
How much does an equipment hire booking system cost?
What happens if two customers try to book the same hour?
Do customers pay when they book?
→Start
Tell us what breaks when you get busy.
The first step is a call, and it costs nothing: twenty minutes on what your business does and what breaks when you get busy. Most projects then start with the £450 Diagnostic: half a day walking your process end to end, with a written recommendation and a fixed quote, credited in full against a build if you go ahead within thirty days. If you already know which package you need and its scope is clear, we quote it directly.