Container dispatch for roll-off dumpster rentals

The idea

Independent roll-off operators run 20 to 80 numbered containers and genuinely lose them: a can sits behind a contractor’s site fence for six weeks while the office thinks it came back. Worse, the rental terms say 7 days included, then $10 to $25 per extra day, and untracked cans mean those overage days, which are pure margin, never get billed. The whiteboard in the office is the inventory system.

Docket and Dispatcher serve this vertical but are priced and built for fleets. The wedge for independents is can-level truth: every container in exactly one place, every move timestamped, and a rental timer that turns overage days into invoice lines automatically instead of depending on someone remembering.

Who pays

The buyer is the owner of an independent roll-off company, typically two to five trucks, paying $99/mo without hesitation because recovering even three unbilled overage days a month covers it, before counting the found containers. Distribution: waste industry Facebook groups, dumpster rental business courses (another active YouTube niche), and roll-off truck dealers and brokers who talk to every new entrant.

MVP scope

• Numbered can inventory with a single authoritative state per can
• Drop, swap, and pull dispatch with phone confirmation and timestamps
• Rental-period timers with automatic overage line items on Stripe invoice drafts
• Cans board showing location, days on site, and overdue flags
• Move-history log per container
• Skip for v1: customer-facing online booking, driver routing and maps, landfill ticket and weight tracking, QuickBooks sync, multi-yard support

Build CanLedger, a container-tracking and billing tool for independent roll-off dumpster operators. Stack: Next.js App Router, Supabase (Postgres, magic-link auth), Stripe for invoicing. 

Core flow: the operator registers their numbered cans (size, number). Every can is always in exactly one state: in the yard, on a job site (which address, since when), or on a truck. Booking a rental creates a job with a customer, address, can size, rental period (for example 7 days), base price, and per-day overage rate. Dispatch actions are drop, swap, and pull, each scheduled to a day and confirmed from a phone, and each confirmation moves the can and timestamps the move. The rental clock starts at drop confirmation; when a can passes its included period, the app automatically appends overage line items per day to the job's Stripe invoice draft, which the operator reviews and sends at pull. A cans board shows every container, where it sits, and days on site, with cans past their period flagged red.

Pages: cans board, jobs list with rental timers, dispatch day view (drops, swaps, pulls), job detail with billing lines, customers, settings (sizes, rates, included days), billing.

Implementation details: model can state as an event log of moves so location history is reconstructable; a swap is one action that atomically pulls one can and drops another, keeping the rental clock continuous.

Pricing: $99/mo up to 100 cans, via Stripe Checkout.