VQRental.com

The Problem: Equipment rental companies — from bouncy houses to construction tools — are underserved by software. Most use spreadsheets or generic e-commerce platforms that don't understand rental concepts like availability windows, delivery zones, or damage waivers. I analyzed 60 rental company websites and tracked 30 industry-specific features to find the gaps.

The Approach: Multi-tenant SaaS with a twist — an AI site scanner that visits a prospect's existing website, extracts their inventory, logo, and brand colors, and generates a fully loaded demo store. Zero signup friction. The prospect sees their own business reflected back in minutes, not days. Built on the same custom PHP MVC as Buffalo Eats, with a StoreContext tenant resolver supporting subdomains, custom domains, and query parameters.

What Was Hard: The AI site scanner was the hardest feature I've built. Scraping rental websites reliably — where every site has different markup, some are WordPress, some are Wix, some are static HTML — required a multi-pass extraction pipeline. First pass gets images and text, second pass uses Claude to identify product names and prices, third pass maps to inventory schema. Handling edge cases (sites with JavaScript rendering, CDN-hosted images, lazy loading) took weeks of iteration.

The Result: 27 of 30 tracked industry features implemented. 1,220 Playwright E2E tests and 374 PHPUnit tests — one of the most thoroughly tested projects in the portfolio. Every test runs nightly via ARIA CI. Live at vqrental.com.