Booth rent autopay for salon owners

The idea

Booth rental salons run on weekly rent, and collection is still Venmo requests, cash envelopes, and the owner cornering stylists between clients. When a stylist falls behind, there’s no ledger to point at, just an awkward conversation and a guess about how many weeks are owed. Owners hate this enough that many just eat the losses.

Generic rent-collection tools are built for landlords with annual leases and monthly cycles. Weekly booth rent with chair-level ledgers, grace periods, and automatic late fees is a different shape of problem, and it’s small enough that the incumbents ignore it. ACH mandates via Stripe make the hard part (pulling money on a schedule without chasing anyone) a solved problem.

Who pays

The buyer is the owner of a salon with 5 to 20 independent stylists, paying $39/mo because it removes their least favourite weekly task and the ledger ends rent disputes. Distribution: salon-owner Facebook groups, beauty industry podcasts, and booth-rental listing sites; the pitch is one screenshot of the “who’s behind” dashboard. Stylists never pay; they just connect a bank account once.

MVP scope

• Stylist roster with chair, weekly amount, and collection day
• Stylist invite flow with Stripe ACH mandate setup
• Automated weekly pulls with retry-on-failure and configurable late fees
• Owner dashboard showing paid, pending, failed, and total arrears per stylist
• Immutable per-stylist ledger history
• Skip for v1: card payments, monthly or biweekly cycles, lease documents, multi-location support, stylist mobile app

Build ChairRent, a web app that collects weekly booth rent from salon stylists automatically. Stack: Next.js App Router, Stripe for ACH debits and subscription billing, Supabase for Postgres and magic-link auth.

Core flow: the salon owner adds stylists (name, email, chair number, weekly rent amount, collection day). Each stylist gets an invite email to connect their bank account via Stripe Financial Connections and accept an ACH debit mandate. Every week on the collection day, the app pulls rent using Stripe us_bank_account PaymentIntents. Failed or returned payments trigger a retry after 2 days and apply a configurable late fee (flat or percentage) after a grace period.

Pages: owner dashboard (this week's collections with paid, pending, failed status and total behind), stylist roster with per-chair ledger history, late-fee and grace-period settings, stylist self-serve page (mandate setup, payment history, no dashboard access), owner billing page.

Implementation details: ACH settles in days, so model each pull as pending until the payment_intent.succeeded webhook lands, and show pending distinctly from paid. Store every charge, retry, and fee as immutable ledger rows per stylist so the history is auditable.

Pricing: $39/mo flat via Stripe Checkout, unlimited stylists, 30-day trial. Salon absorbs ACH fees.