Rent collection for salon booth renters

The idea

A salon with eight booths moves 6,000-10,000 USD a month in rent through Venmo, cash, and memory. The owner texts late payers, keeps no ledger, and has nothing to show an accountant or a court. Meanwhile most states require booth renters to hold their own cosmetology licence and liability insurance, and no one tracks when those expire.

Salon software is built for the employment model - appointments, commissions, retail. Booth-rental salons are landlords, and what a landlord needs is automatic rent collection with a paper trail. The wedge is ACH-first recurring billing plus licence and insurance expiry tracking, which no generic invoicing tool does.

Who pays

The buyer is the salon owner renting out 4-20 booths, at 39 USD/month plus pass-through card fees (ACH free). One avoided week of chasing a late payer covers the cost. Distribution: salon owner groups on Facebook and Instagram, booth-rental education accounts, and the state-board-adjacent content that owners search when converting to the rental model.

MVP scope

• Renter roster with booth, rate, and billing schedule
• Recurring Stripe billing, ACH-first, with retry logic and late-payer flags
• Renter payment portal via tokenised link, no login
• Licence and insurance certificate storage with 30-day expiry reminders
• Exportable payment ledger per renter
• Skip for v1: lease document e-signing, appointment booking, multi-salon portfolios, renter-side mobile app

Build BoothPay, a web app for salon owners to collect booth rent
automatically. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase for Postgres and auth,
Stripe for payments using Stripe Connect so rent lands in the salon owner's
own Stripe account. Magic-link auth for owners; renters get a tokenised
payment portal link, no account required.

Core flow: owner adds renters (name, phone, email, booth number, weekly or
monthly rent amount, billing day). Each renter receives a link to save a
card or, preferably, a US bank account via Stripe's ACH flow - ACH is the
default because fees on 300 USD/week rent matter. Rent then charges
automatically on schedule. Failed payments retry twice, then flag the renter
as late on the owner dashboard and text them a pay link.

Compliance layer: per renter, store cosmetology licence number and expiry
plus liability insurance certificate (file upload to Supabase Storage) and
expiry. Email the owner and the renter 30 days before either expires.

Pages: dashboard (this week's collected/pending/late totals), renter list
with status badges, renter detail with full payment ledger, and settings.
Every charge, retry, and manual adjustment writes to a ledger table so the
owner has a clean record at tax time, exportable as CSV.

Pricing: 39 USD/month per salon via Stripe Billing, card fees passed
through to renters, ACH free. 30-day trial.