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A desert camp after dark: a van, camp chairs, an e-bike and a fire under a full star field

How it works

The idea in one paragraph

Festival gear sits still eleven months a year. An RV, a trailer, a generator, a battery station, a PA, a set of e-bikes: each one is worth thousands and earns nothing between events. The pool lets members list what they own, book from each other, and get paid, with a desk in the middle running the contract, the deposit, the handover record and the payout. Nobody buys a fleet. Nobody builds a warehouse. The members' own gear is the inventory, and the record of every handover is what makes lending safe.

The pool

  • Members join by invitation and a founder's approval, with a ZIP code that is checked on the spot (California, Oregon and Nevada for now) and a note of what they own. Looking costs nothing and needs no account: anyone can browse the pool, every unit page, every rate and every free date. Listing your own gear is free too, at every tier, with no ceiling on what you may list. Renting is what needs a membership: the free Camp tier rents gear up to $2,500 and the paid tiers open the bigger rigs. Applying signs you in on that phone. After that you sign in anywhere with the email address you joined with and the password you chose at join; the personal sign-in link a founder texts you signs that one phone in without either, and keeps it signed in. Passwords were added on 21 September, after an evening in which the email address alone was the whole sign-in: a password is kept only as a scrambled copy nobody can read back, five wrong tries lock an account for fifteen minutes, and a forgotten password is replaced through the personal link, never read out. There is no member code on any member-facing page.
  • Members list gear they own. It stays where it is until booked. Rigs start from the VIN: type or scan it and the year, make and model fill themselves. Small gear starts from the model: type the make, pick the model from the list, and wattage, weight, value and a suggested day rate fill themselves. Photograph the label plate and the desk reads it at review: make, model, serial and wattage go on the record without typing. Hexayurts pick from the published plans (H13, Classic H12, H17 plus, 10 ft, 5.5, Pentayurt, OctoYurt, De La Wolfie, H8, Octayurt, H4, H2, Pup, or a custom build): panel count, wall height, floor area and sleeping capacity fill themselves, six questions cover the kit itself, and the listing says what it takes to haul it. Every hexayurt listing carries one warning the owner cannot remove: tape is never reusable, so the renter buys new tape themselves before the event — it is not in the day rate, not rented and not sold by the pool. The renter has to tick that they will, and it shows again on the booking page. Satellite internet listings answer one question the owner cannot skip: a dish is useless without an active plan, and a plan is billed by the month however long the rental is, so either the owner keeps his own account live for those dates — in which case the service is charged to the renter on the card with the booking, priced so the owner recovers what the plan costs him — or the renter brings his own active account and the listing carries that warning.
  • An owner can change his own listing whenever it is not out. Rate, deposit, photos, dates, notes, add-ons, the operator answer: all of it is on the listing's own Edit page, and it can be paused off the board for a weekend and put back. The one stop is a live rental — while a booking is confirmed or the unit is out, the listing is held exactly as the renter agreed it, and it opens again at the return tap. Anything that cannot wait, the desk changes for you. A booking that is already confirmed is never repriced by an edit either way: its numbers froze when the renter asked.
  • Every member has one identity check before their first pickup: a founder looks at a government photo ID and confirms it is you, in person or on a short video call. Only the date and the verdict are kept, never the ID itself.
  • Events. The pool keeps a calendar of every event in California, Oregon and Nevada its gear is built for: the burns, the festivals, the faires, the desert races, the county and state fairs, and the private camps and weddings that are on no calendar at all. The events page lists them by month; pick one and the search opens with its dates already in, showing only what is free that week. On a request, start typing the event and the place, the coordinates and the dates fill themselves. Dates marked confirmed come from the organiser; the rest carry the slot the event has always held and say so, so nobody books travel on a guess.
  • Members book from members. Nobody rents to strangers. A request asks one short question to show a person is sending it, the same check the join form asks.
  • The service fee is mandatory, and it is already in the price. Every price on the site — the cards, the unit page, the request page — is the all-in price a renter pays, with the service fee built in. It is not optional, it cannot be removed, and nothing is added at the end. The prices shown to everyone are the free tier's; a member on a paid tier pays less and is shown their own lower price by name.
  • The desk quotes, takes the payment, writes the contract, and pays the owner within three days of return.
  • No cash, ever. The whole booking — rental, add-ons, waiver, handover fee and deposit — is paid by card to the desk when the booking is confirmed, before pickup, the way a hotel or Airbnb works. The owner is paid by the desk afterwards. No money passes between members at the gate, for anything: not fuel, not ice, not damage, not an operator. Anything a renter uses up is either priced on the listing and paid on the card with the booking, or it is something they buy for themselves beforehand. Check-out on the tag page stays locked until the desk has recorded the payment, so a handover cannot happen off the books.
  • Every unit carries an NFC tag. Tap it at pickup and at return: photos, time, names.
  • Every rental is covered in layers: deposit, a renter-paid damage waiver (Standard, Plus or Diamond; none of them covers theft or loss), a renter-bought policy on high-value units, and the desk's own liability cover. Vehicles ride on a peer-to-peer platform's insurance. Details on the protection page.
  • Owners keep the larger share of every rental; the desk keeps a small share for running it.
  • Every page reads in any language. The picker sits at the top of the page: pick one of the thirty-odd languages listed, or type your own, and the whole page changes. Your choice is remembered on that phone.

Three tiers of membership

Everyone who joins can rent. What the tier changes is how expensive the gear is allowed to get, and what the desk has seen you do with it.

  • Camp is free. Gear worth up to $2,500: shade, cooking, lighting, small batteries, tools. A 5% renter service fee, three dollars minimum.
  • Crew is $19 a month, or $190 a year. Gear up to $10,000: e-bikes, big battery stations, PA rigs, trailers. The service fee drops to 3%. It asks for an identity check and one clean return behind you.
  • Pro is $59 a month, or $590 a year. No ceiling at all: RVs, tow-behind generators, full production rigs. No renter service fee. It asks for an identity check, three clean returns, a rating of 4.6 or better, and one short-term rental policy you have already bought and had verified.

Dues never buy their way past the record. A founder can refuse the upgrade until the returns are there, whatever has been paid, because the gear at the top of the pool belongs to people who work off it. Owners keep 80% of the rental at every tier: the tier changes the renter's side, never the owner's. The three doors are on the membership page.

Why the tag matters

Four taps on a rental, and no more than that. Check-out when the unit leaves the owner. Arrived, once, when the renter gets to the site and the unit is set up. Leaving, once, when they pack up to bring it back. Check-in when it is back with the owner. There is no daily check-in: it was tried on 21 September and dropped the same day as more than the job needs. The two middle taps have to carry a location — that is the whole point of them — and the desk is told if a unit goes out and is never tapped on site, or if the return date passes with the unit still out.

Every tap also records where the unit is. That location is asset management and belongs to the desk: no member sees another member's location, and no location ever appears on a public page. An owner is told, always, the event place his renter registered at booking. Day-to-day locations reach the owner only when the owner and the renter have both agreed to it on that booking, and either of them can take that agreement back at any time. A phone that refuses the location permission never blocks a handover: the tap is recorded, and recorded as refused.

The single biggest reason people will not lend gear is the fear of getting it back broken with no proof. The tag fixes that. A tap opens the unit's page; two sets of time-stamped photos, one at pickup and one at return, decide any dispute. The same record follows the unit for its whole life in the pool, so when it is eventually sold, its history sells with it.

  • Gear that needs a trained operator. The owner answers yes or no when they list it, and says who may run it: their own operator (priced per day, charged through the desk), an operator the renter supplies and names on the request, or either. When the answer is yes, the desk refuses a request until the renter settles it — the unit page, the request page and the booking all say who is running it. If the renter brings their own operator, the desk charges a coordination fee of 10% of what that operator is paid — its own line on the renter's bill, nothing out of the owner. An operator running unpaid still carries the fee at 10% of the owner's own published operator rate, if they published one.

Zero waste: nothing gets built for your event

The greenest piece of gear at a festival is the one that already exists. Every unit in this pool was bought years ago by somebody who uses it a few weekends a year. Renting it out is not a smaller purchase — it is no purchase at all.

  • Nothing is manufactured for an event. A production that takes forty radios, twelve canopies and six spider boxes from the pool causes nothing to be made, shipped or packaged.
  • Everything comes back, and the pool can prove it. Four taps on a tag — out at the owner, arrived on site, leaving site, back in — are a return receipt. Gear goes home, not into the dumpster behind the vendor row.
  • Rechargeable over disposable. Battery stations and solar instead of a generator idling all night. Rechargeable radio batteries instead of alkalines by the case. Solar path lighting instead of cable runs.
  • Leave no trace is a checklist. Rebar, caps, stakes, cord and cases are counted out and counted back, with a name against anything missing.
  • The honest exception. Hexayurt tape is not reusable. Every hexayurt listing says so, the pool does not sell it, and a panel take-back scheme is being worked on so the panels outlive the tape.

Festivals and productions: bulk out the whole load-in

A member rents one generator. A production needs forty radios with bank chargers, spare batteries and earpieces; spider boxes, distro and cable by the run; generators, battery power and solar; PA, lighting, shade and crew shelter; carts, e-bikes, cold chain and crew rigs. That is one list, one contact and one delivery to one gate, and it is a quote written by a founder rather than a booking made on the site.

The festivals and productions page carries the whole bulk-out list with quantities. Pick what you need and the desk comes back with what the pool holds today, what comes from the member network, and anything that has to be brought in from a named supplier — line by line, so nobody finds out on build day. Nothing on that form holds a unit or charges a card. A confirmed order is paid by card to the desk before load-in; no cash changes hands on site, with anyone.

Organisers can also talk to the desk about official gear sponsorship: the pool supplies an agreed part of the production's gear against sponsor billing and on-site presence, quotes the rest at a fixed event rate, and gives the organiser a zero-waste count they can publish afterwards. Vendors and crew working the event rent from the pool at the same event rate.

On your home screen

GearPool installs as an app without an App Store. Get the app puts the icon on your phone: full screen, the tag scanner one tap away, and it stays signed in. On Android it is one button. On an iPhone it is the Share menu in Safari, then Add to Home Screen — Apple gives no web page a button for it. Buttons that record something buzz when it lands, so you know a tag tap or a return was taken without reading the screen; that can be turned off on the same page. With no signal the app says so plainly instead of showing a browser error: nothing is cached, because a price or a free date shown from yesterday would be worse than no page at all.

Finding an event

The events page filters by what an event actually is — music, art and burns, food and drink, family and fairs, faires and history, racing and off-road, or simply the ones you camp at — and by state. Every row opens the pool with that event's dates already in, so you only see what is free that week. Dates marked confirmed come from the organiser; the rest carry the slot the event has always held.