The right trailer, in the right city, on the days you need it
Equipment rental is stubbornly local. Big Rentals matches renters to nearby trailers and machines with real prices and real availability, and gives 900+ suppliers a way to fill idle equipment.
- Role
- Full-stack development
- Type
- Two-sided rental marketplace
- Scope
- Search, listings, booking, supplier side
- Status
- Live at bigrentals.com
- Customers and contractors
- 30k+
- Verified suppliers
- 900+
- Trailer categories
- 11
- Metro areas covered
- 18
You cannot tow a trailer across three states.
A contractor who needs a dump trailer on Thursday needs one within about thirty minutes of the job site. That constraint makes equipment rental a fundamentally different problem from most e-commerce, where the whole country is your catalogue. Here, ninety-nine percent of the inventory is irrelevant before anyone types a word.
The old way of solving it was a phone tree. Call four yards, ask what is on the lot, ask what it costs, find out the one you wanted went out this morning. Price and availability both lived in someone's head, and neither was visible until you asked.
- Inventory relevance collapses to a radius, not a country
- Availability changes hourly and was never published
- Prices were quoted per call, so nothing was comparable
One query that means here, these days, this kind.
The search bar takes three inputs and treats them as one question: a city or ZIP, a start and end date, and a category. Behind it, a single query walks the inventory by proximity and by availability window at the same time, because answering those separately produces a list of trailers that are either too far away or already out.
The data model is the reason it holds together. Equipment, locations, and availability windows are related in Postgres through Prisma, so the system can answer whether a given asset is the right type, close enough, and free on those exact dates, without a second round trip.
- Location, date range, and category resolved in one pass
- Availability modelled as windows, not a boolean in stock flag
- Category tabs narrow the result set without a new search
Every number a renter asks for, before they have to ask.
A listing page carries the year, make, and model, full specifications, an asset ID, and how far the trailer is from where you searched. Rates are shown three ways at once, daily, weekly, and monthly, because a contractor deciding between a four-day and a seven-day rental is doing that arithmetic anyway.
The pickup and return pickers sit next to the price rather than at the end of a funnel, so changing the dates reprices the booking in place. Where a supplier has enabled it, the listing carries an Instant Book badge, which is the difference between a booking and an enquiry.
- Daily, weekly, and monthly rates shown together
- Distance from the search location on every result
- Instant Book where the supplier has opted in
A marketplace is only as good as the yard down the road.
Demand is the easy half to talk about and the useless half on its own. If a renter searches Austin and finds four trailers, the product has failed regardless of how good the search is. So the supplier side had to be as considered as the renter side.
Listing is free, with no setup fee and no monthly charge, which removes the objection that stops a two-trailer owner signing up. Suppliers get a dashboard for their bookings, automated payments, and control over which assets accept instant booking. The pitch is deliberately narrow: you already own the equipment, it is idle some of the time, and this fills those days.
Local matches in seconds, on both sides of the deal.
Big Rentals now covers eleven trailer categories across eighteen metro areas, with more than 900 verified suppliers and 30,000 customers and contractors using it. A renter goes from a city name to a bookable trailer with a real price in a handful of seconds.
The thing that makes it work is unglamorous. One data model that understands equipment, place, and time together, and a search that asks all three questions at once instead of filtering three times.
What we built it with
Production-proven tools chosen for performance, developer velocity, and long-term maintainability.
Next.js
TypeScript
PostgreSQL
Prisma
Tailwind CSS
Vercel
What shipped
- Location, date, and category resolved in a single query
- Availability windows modelled per asset rather than a stock flag
- Daily, weekly, and monthly pricing on every listing
- Instant Book for suppliers who opt in
- Free supplier listings with a booking dashboard
- 11 trailer categories live across 18 metro areas
Want results like these?
Book a free 30-minute call. We'll scope your project, recommend the right approach, and tell you honestly if we're the right fit.