AI Pricing Engine

RentBridge prices every booking dynamically — demand, season, and rental duration all flow into the quote — while you keep full control of the base rates it anchors on.

How Quotes Are Calculated

Every quote is computed live from four factors:

quote = base rate × demand multiplier × seasonal adjustment − duration discount

1. Base rate — the daily/weekly/monthly rate you set on the equipment
2. Demand multiplier — learned from your booking history by the market learning loop; hot categories price up, idle ones price down
3. Seasonal adjustment — construction demand peaks in summer: winter −10%, spring +5%, summer +10%, fall neutral
4. Duration discount — longer commitments earn lower effective rates: 5% off at 3+ days, 10% off at 1+ week, 20% off at 4+ weeks

The quote is generated at booking time (POST /api/v1/pricing/quote) and locked when the rental is reserved — later rate changes never affect existing bookings.

Worked Example

Your excavator's base rate is $400/day. A renter books 10 days in July:

• Demand multiplier for excavators (learned): 1.08
• Seasonal adjustment (summer): ×1.10
• Duration discount (7+ days): −10%

Effective daily rate: 400 × 1.08 × 1.10 × 0.90 ≈ $427.68/day — higher than base because summer demand outweighs the weekly discount. The same booking in February would price near $349/day.

Setting Your Base Rates

Base rates live on each equipment record (hourly/daily/weekly/monthly). They're your anchors:

1. Fleet > [Equipment] — edit the rates
2. New quotes use the new anchors immediately
3. Existing rentals keep their locked-in price

AI Rate Recommendations

Two agent-powered aids for choosing good anchors:

• Per-unit recommendation — GET /api/v1/equipment/{id}/recommended-price (or from the equipment page): the Pricing Agent suggests a rate from utilization and demand, with reasoning
• Weekly review — every Monday the agent reviews your whole fleet and flags units whose rates look out of line

Recommendations are advisory — nothing changes until you edit the rate.

Rate Comparison

Sanity-check a unit against its category: GET /api/v1/rates/compare shows how rates within a category stack up for a given rental duration. Useful before acting on a recommendation.

How the Demand Multiplier Learns

Every completed rental feeds the market learning loop with what was booked, in which category, for how long, and when. The loop aggregates this into per-category demand insights that the quote engine reads at pricing time. More rental history → sharper multipliers. See Learning Loops.

Seasonality

The seasonal adjustments reflect equipment-rental reality (construction peaks in summer):

Season	Adjustment
Winter (Dec–Feb)	×0.90
Spring (Mar–May)	×1.05
Summer (Jun–Aug)	×1.10
Fall (Sep–Nov)	×1.00

Duration Discounts

Built-in incentives for longer commitments:

Rental Length	Discount
3+ days	5%
7+ days (1+ week)	10%
28+ days (4+ weeks)	20%

Applied automatically at quote time — renters always get the discount their duration earns.

Coming Soon

• Min/max pricing bounds with auto-apply mode
• Promotional pricing and promo codes
• Competitor rate intelligence
• Pricing performance analytics and A/B testing

Troubleshooting

Quote differs from the daily rate?

• That's the engine working — check the formula above. Demand, season, and duration all move the number.

Quote seems too low?

• Duration discounts stack with a slow season — a 4-week winter rental prices at base × ~0.90 × 0.80. If that's below your floor, raise the base rate (bounds controls are coming).

Rates not changing after editing?

• New rates apply to new quotes; existing rentals keep their locked price by design.

Recommendation looks generic?

• The agent needs rental history to learn from — new accounts start with conservative suggestions.

See Pricing Agent and Common Issues for more.