RentIt

Overview

RentIt is an ecommerce-style videoke machine rental platform. Customers browse machines, place bookings, and track equipment, while staff manage orders, dispatch, inventory, and late fees from a separate admin portal — all as a zero-dependency web app with no backend framework or database required.

The Problem

Innovator Crews ran their videoke machine rental business manually, and it didn't scale: no online presence for customers to discover or book machines, no central system for orders, dispatch, or maintenance, no customer self-service, and no staff visibility into revenue, active rentals, or overdue units. The result was slow turnaround, double-booking risk, lost track of damaged units, and late returns that were never billed.

The Solution

A dual-portal web app that mirrors how the business actually operates. For customers it's a familiar ecommerce experience — browse the catalog, book, then track rentals, view history, and initiate returns. For staff it's a full operations console covering the whole order lifecycle: confirm bookings, schedule dispatch and pickup, log repairs and damage, and surface overdue rentals for late-fee billing, with a KPI dashboard for instant visibility.

Key Features

• Browse machines and place rental bookings
• Staff portal for orders, dispatch, and inventory
• Late-fee tracking and order management
• Zero-dependency — runs with no backend or database

Tech Stack & Why

• Vanilla JS — Proves a full storefront + admin flow can run lean, with no framework to learn or maintain.
• HTML5 / CSS3 — Hand-built, responsive UI with full control over the experience.
• Vercel — Free static hosting with instant deploys.

Biggest Challenge

Migrating a working React/Vite app to vanilla HTML/CSS/JS without losing reusable-component ergonomics. Solved with a JS component-injection system (shared sidebar, header, footer) and a CSS design-token layer, keeping the code DRY and themeable framework-free. The migration cut the bundle from ~500 KB to ~50 KB, dependencies from 50+ to 0, and initial load from ~2 s to ~0.5 s.

Results & Impact

• Replaced a fully manual booking-and-operations workflow with a single source of truth
• Cut deploy and maintenance overhead to near zero (0 dependencies, push-to-deploy)
• Gave staff at-a-glance visibility into revenue, active rentals, and overdue equipment
• Client-delivered production system under real business constraints

What I Learned

Leading RentIt showed me how much logic a “simple” rental flow really hides — availability, dispatch, and late fees all interact. Splitting the customer and staff experiences cleanly was the key design decision.