insta.rent

insta.rent is a web application designed to make renting equipment and tools — like bicycles, pedalos, or ski gear — easier for both rental companies and their customers. By leveraging QR code technology, Insta.rent allows companies to manage their assets and enables customers to track their rental time with ease.

Insta.rent was born from a need for a simple, yet powerful tool rental management system using QR codes. By choosing Django for its robust backend (well more because django is my hammer :)  and HTMX for lightweight frontend interactivity, I was able to build an efficient, user-friendly platform without the overhead of a full-fledged JavaScript framework.

The combination of Django and HTMX together with ntfy, enabled me to have a native mobile app experience on the web. I'm excited about the future of insta.rent and look forward to further enhancing the platform with more features and customizations based on user feedback. And for that, I need more users.

At the moment insta.rent is online and being used by pedalo renting companies in Lausanne. It is developed to be in 4 languages. That are, 3 Swiss languages and English. Also it has a nice dashboard interface for the companies to manage their pedalos/bikes.

The app is mainly separated into 3 parts. The landing page, the rental session page and the admin dashboard. The landing page is a bit heavy on assets but the rental session page is super light. This was mainly because when people rent a pedalo, the go on the lake with it and the internet connection might not be very well there. So, the page they see when they scan the QR code keeps being super light and fast even with low speed connection.

One of the key achievements of insta.rent is that the clients of pedalo renting companies don't need to create an account or signup for the app. We dont collect any customer information but still keep track of the sessions. If you rent a pedalo and there happens to be a QR code on the pedalo for time tracking, you scan the QR code and see your session but only your session, then 3 hours later someone else rents the same pedalo and they scan the same QR code, they see their own session. That evening you go to the same URL on your phone and you see the summary of your session, that other person sees their own summary.

It is a very simple time tracking app that only tracks time.