Honey Badger Software in cooperation with Silverado Systems, Inc. of Folsom, California has developed a new production and postproduction rental app available on the Apple iTunes App Store called Rent Me. This app helps cost gear and kits for short term rental. It can be used to determine the fair value of gear, using an algorithm that Silverado, as a rental facility, has used for years and rarely shared outside of the company.
Silverado is one of the original RED owners and has developed proficiency for deploying full feature film cinema kits based on RED equipment. This includes such diverse things as extra lenses, batteries, matte boxes and media. Silverado will be using Rent Me to determine pricing on all new rentals.
Users can simply enter the item they are pricing out a name for reference (i.e. RED EPIC Camera System) and then put in the total retail cost of the item or items. Rent Me then generates a daily rental rate based on the price of the item and the rental house algorithm that’s applied to it.
There are also a couple of handy modifiers, like whether the item is current or a generation behind the new gear. That will affect the final price. Users can also set a modifier based on the item’s demand in the market, whether it is “normal” or “soft.” Items like a Canon 5D or a set of inexpensive lights might be classified as “soft” whereas more rare items like a Phantom camera would be “normal.”
“I thought it would be a while before I used Rent Me on an active rental, but I used it within hours of downloading it,” said Torrey Loomis, CEO of Silverado. “I had a customer come in and request an item that we normally don’t unbundle from a larger package. Using Rent Me, I instantly calculated the rental price and the customer paid for it on the spot. This app paid for itself tenfold the very first day I used it and I can’t say that about any other app in my toolkit.”
“We’re always getting requests for different gear packages when we go on location and its one of the more challenging aspects of doing our bids,” explained Kevin Beck of Red Barn Films. “We’ll use Rent Me from now on as our baseline tool for valuation. There is nothing else even remotely close to this tool available anywhere. Very few of my apps gets regular use, but I can guarantee that Rent Me will be used weekly for Red Barn productions.”
Rent Me is available for $6.99. The price will increase to $14.99 later in 2011.
