Why we built PickRV honestly

If you are reading this in the spring of 2026, PickRV is a newer marketplace that is live, with hosts onboarding. Our LLC paperwork is in motion. Our Stripe Connect account is restricted-mode. Our insurance carrier is selected but the bind certificate hasn't been issued. Most of our pages will tell you these things in plain English at the top, because the alternative is to pretend, and pretending in a marketplace is how renters and hosts lose money they can't recover.

Most marketplaces don't talk like this in public. They want you to believe they are bigger, older, safer than they are. We chose the opposite. The site you are reading was built under a rule we wrote down on day one: every claim has to survive a Federal Trade Commission §5 review. If a number is not real, the number is not on the page.

We do not have 250,000 travelers. We do not have a national fleet. We do not have institutional venture capital. We do not have a customer-service department of 85 people. The previous version of our /about page made one of those claims for a few weeks, and the moment we saw it we removed it, archived the file, and wrote down what really existed.

What we do have today is a working booking engine, a hand-vetted host onboarding process with hosts moving through it right now, a published pricing model — hosts keep 100% of the base price they set, PickRV adds a 15% markup on top of that base into the listed price, and renters pay a transparent 10% service fee at checkout — and a published insurance partner architecture (third-party carrier — PickRV is not an insurer). The number of live hosts is shown in real time on the About page; when it is small, the page says so.

There is an existing industry that tells renters their road trip will be magical and tells hosts they will be passive landlords. We don't think either is true. A Class C is a 32-foot rolling apartment that gets eight miles per gallon and has a domestic water heater that breaks on the third Friday of every month. A host running three rigs is a small business operator who pays quarterly tax and stays awake on Sunday nights waiting for renters to return keys. We want a marketplace where both sides can read what is actually about to happen to them.

That changes the surface area of the product. The hero of the homepage is not a thirty-something with a guitar by a lake. It is a calculator that tells you the trip's real total cost, including mileage overage and dump-station tipping and the night you got rerouted because of wildfire smoke. The trust page is not a list of icons; it is a transparency report. The story you are reading is not a marketing fable; it is a letter signed by the people who wrote the code.

Three things. First, we owe you the same numbers our hosts see in their dashboard — commission, fee, insurance, cancellation window. Second, we owe you the truth about scale on the day you book; if there is only one Class B in Oregon, we say one. Third, we owe you a way to talk to a human; the founder reads every message that comes to support@pickrv.com, and that won't change after the LLC files.

We are not a venture-funded promise. We are a small marketplace being built in public. Thank you for reading the small print before the rest of the site.