Why we built PickRV honestly

This letter was written in the spring of 2026, in the weeks after PickRV went live and the first hosts started moving through onboarding. At the time our Stripe Connect account was in restricted mode, our insurance carrier was selected but the bind certificate had not been issued, and our registration with the State of Florida had not yet come through. Our pages said all of that 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.

The paperwork has since landed: PICKRV LLC is an active Florida limited liability company. We have re-tensed the passages that spoke about that filing in the future tense, and left the rest of the letter alone — because a company that only publishes the version of itself that already worked out is doing the exact thing this letter was written to argue against.

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 forming the company did not change that.

We are not a venture-funded promise. We are a working marketplace being built in public, and this page is where we write down what we cannot claim yet. Thank you for reading the small print before the rest of the site.