Boat clubs
Built, nobody on it yetRun a members-only fleet without a spreadsheet and a group text.
Memberships billed monthly, boats reserved under the rules your tiers set, check-outs with engine hours, maintenance that comes due on its own, and the emails sent for you.
For boat clubs, yacht shares, dealer demo fleets and any operator who rents to members rather than to the public.
Built and tested. Not yet run by a club.
Three different things, and they are worth keeping apart. BUILT: everything on this page exists in the product. TESTED: on 2 November 2026 the reservation rules were executed against a seeded club for the first time — 20 checks covering plan allowances, the active-reservation cap, the advance window, maximum trip length, weekday-only plans refusing a Saturday, a boat in maintenance refusing to be booked, check-out and check-in rolling engine hours onto the boat, and two members reserving the same boat at the same instant. All 20 passed. NOT YET RUN BY A CLUB: no real club, no real member, no real money. The first one gets the same deal our first charter operator got — problems fixed the same week, and a rate agreed in writing before anything is charged.
What "a boat cannot be double-booked" actually means here
It is not a hopeful check in the app. A reservation takes a database lock on that boat for the rest of the transaction, so a second member clicking at the same instant waits, re-reads, and is refused. We tested exactly that with two simultaneous connections: the second one blocked while the first held the lock, then was turned down. The members table is also the only way in — the browser has read-only access to reservations, so there is no path around the rule.
Card billing is switched on per deployment
Subscriptions run through your own Stripe account. Until that is connected, free plans and members you bill yourself work in full; paid plans show a sentence saying the club will set you up directly, rather than a card form that cannot complete.
The big three are not who we are for
The largest boat club networks run their own in-house software and are not buying any of this. The addressable market is independent clubs and small chains — which is also where nobody can tell you how many there are, because no credible count of US boat clubs exists.
What it does
Membership plans, billed for you
Set up tiers the way your club sells them: a monthly or yearly price, an optional signup fee, how many outings a member gets per billing period, how many they can hold on the calendar at once, how far ahead they can book, how long an outing can be, weekends or weekdays, which boat classes. Members pay by card through Stripe and the subscription renews on its own. A member you bill yourself (cash, check, a comped seat) joins a $0 plan and you switch them on.
A join page under your name
Each club gets a page with its plans and a join button. A new member creates an account with an email link, signs your member agreement with a typed name, and pays. The signed version of the agreement is stored against the member, so when you change the wording you know who signed what.
Reservations with the rules built in
A member picks a date, a start time, a length and a boat from the ones that are actually free for that window. The system enforces your club hours, the shortest outing, the member's tier limits and the no-overlap rule for every boat, in one place, so a boat cannot be double-booked by two people clicking at once. You can reserve on a member's behalf and skip their tier limits; you can never skip the overlap rule.
Check out, check in, engine hours
At the dock you check a boat out with its hours and fuel, and in again with hours, fuel, notes and a damage flag. Engine hours roll up to the boat. No-shows are marked, and a late cancellation still counts against the member's allowance while an early one gives it back, with the notice window set by you.
Maintenance by hours or by date
Log the 100-hour service, the prop repair, the annual inspection. Items come due as the hours accrue or the date arrives and show up on the club's front page. An item can take a boat off the reservation board until it is done, so members see 'in for maintenance' instead of a boat that is not there.
The emails, sent for you
Welcome on activation, a confirmation for every reservation, a reminder the day before, a note when a reservation is cancelled by either side, and a nudge when a card is declined. Every one is logged with its outcome, so 'did they get the email' has an answer.
Members manage themselves
From their own account a member sees their plan, their billing period, their upcoming and past outings, reserves and cancels, and opens Stripe's billing page to change a card or cancel at the period end. The club never has to take a card over the phone.
What to ask any vendor in this market, us included
Written from a sweep of the vendors in this category on 1 November 2026. We have put our own answers on this site where we have them, and said so where we do not.
Does it do dues AND boat reservations, or only one?
This is the structural gap in the market and it is worth checking first. Club platforms have a real dues engine but reserve tee times and berths — one of the biggest reserves slips, and boats are not bookable at all. Rental platforms reserve boats and have no dues engine. Of thirteen adjacent platforms checked on 1 Nov 2026, not one names 'boat club' as a target market.
What does it do when a member does not show up?
Across roughly twenty-nine vendors checked, not one advertises a no-show or late-return penalty. The closest anyone comes is a permission to return late, which is the opposite thing. Ask what actually happens to the allowance and to the next member waiting on that boat.
How does it ration the Fourth of July?
The market's answer to peak demand is dynamic pricing. For a club with fixed dues that is no answer at all — the member already paid. Peak-day rationing as an explicit concept is named by nobody in the category.
Where does a damage report live?
Incident reporting is advertised under that name by nobody, including the category leader. Ask where the photos, the member and the charge end up, and whether they are joined to the booking that caused them.
When did the member app last ship?
Worth ten seconds in the App Store before any demo. One category leader's boat club app last shipped on 22 April 2021, under an individual person's developer account rather than the company's, at 3.1 stars — while its marketing page lists 38 features. Check the 'Updated' date and the seller name on whatever you are shown.
If I have two locations, can a member book at the other one?
Multi-location is advertised everywhere; genuine reciprocity with hours tracked centrally is claimed by almost nobody. At least one real multi-club network handles it by asking members to telephone their home club.
Every vendor in this category routes your card payments, and not one of them publishes the rate. Several own the payment company underneath their own software, which is where the margin actually sits. Ask any of us — including us — for the card rate in writing before you sign anything.
The other segments
One product underneath. These are the kinds of business it is shaped for, and each page says plainly where it stands.