What we do
Most bike and scooter hire businesses are small: one or two locations, a few dozen vehicles, a counter and a card machine. The mobility platforms everyone has heard of are built for city-scale schemes and priced for them. We built ours for the other end of the market, and we run it as a service rather than selling a licence and walking away.
An operator comes to us with a fleet. We set the platform up under their brand, connect it to their own payment account and to the locks fitted on their vehicles, and hand them two things: an app their customers download, and a dashboard they run the day from. Hosting, updates and support stay with us. The customer relationship stays with them.
What the platform does
| Customer app | See what is available, start and end a hire, pay by card or from a prepaid balance. Published under the operator's name and branding. |
|---|---|
| Operator dashboard | Every vehicle and every hire in progress, in one view. Pricing and deposit rules, hire history, staff accounts and permissions. |
| Payments | Card payments, prepaid top-ups, deposits and refunds. Money settles into the operator's own merchant account, not ours. |
| Vehicle hardware | Integration with the IoT locks and trackers fitted to bikes and scooters, so a hire can be unlocked from the app and closed off when the vehicle is returned. |
| Walk-up counter | A kiosk mode for the customer who turns up without the app. Staff take payment and issue the hire at the desk; it lands in the same system. |
| Reporting | Daily takings split by card and cash, utilisation per vehicle, and an export that reconciles against the operator's bank and accounting. |
Who it's for
Hire shops and tour operators in tourist cities, where the fleet is out all day in season and parked for half the year. Hotels, resorts and estates with a pool of bikes for guests. Campuses and business parks running a shared fleet for staff.
Typical deployments run from around twenty vehicles up to a few hundred. Below that the spreadsheet still wins, and we will say so.
In service
Up Cycles — bicycle rental and guided tours, Cape Town. Runs app hires, walk-up counter sales and tour bookings through one system, with daily reconciliation into the operator's accounts.
upcycles.co.za
Billing and terms
What we charge for. A one-off setup fee to configure, brand and launch a deployment, then a monthly licence fee per fleet, scaled to the number of vehicles on the platform. Custom integration work — a lock type we have not met before, a payment provider we do not yet support — is quoted separately before it starts.
How we invoice. Licence fees are invoiced monthly in advance, in US dollars. Setup and integration work is invoiced on completion. We accept payment by card; card payments are processed by Stripe, and we never see or store the card number ourselves.
Cancellation. Licences run month to month after the first term. Either side can end the arrangement with thirty days' written notice, and we will hand over the operator's data in a usable export before the account closes. Setup fees are not refundable once a deployment has been built, but any licence period billed in advance and not yet used is refunded in full.
Data and privacy. We hold customer records on the operator's behalf: name, contact details, hire history and the tokens needed to charge a card. We do not sell that data, share it, or use it for anything other than running the service. Payment card details are held by the payment processor, not by us. An operator can request an export or deletion of their data at any time, and we will action it within thirty days.
Support. Email support on UAE business days, with an emergency line for operators whose fleet is down. Planned maintenance is scheduled outside the operator's trading hours where the time zone allows.
Contact
- Registered office
- The Tropics Holdings L.L.C-FZ
Meydan Grandstand, 6th Floor
Meydan Road, Nad Al Sheba
Dubai, United Arab Emirates - Registration
- Licensed by Meydan Free Zone, Dubai. Licence no. 2535919.01.