Self-storage software runs a business that rents out small lockable rooms, called units, where people and businesses keep their belongings. It handles online booking, the gate code or card that lets the customer in, the monthly rent and the insurance sold with each unit. Self-storage is a large and common business in the United States, where most of this software is sold.
People rent a storage unit when they have more things than space. Some are moving house. Some are students away for the summer. Some are small shops that need a place for extra stock. A storage site may have hundreds of units of different sizes, from a large cupboard to a room as big as a garage. The customer brings the goods, locks the unit with a personal lock, and comes and goes at any time during opening hours.
Here is a typical case. A storage site in Texas, in the United States, has 600 units. A family moving house books a 10-foot by 10-foot unit on the site's website for $140 a month. The software shows which units are free and charges the first month through a payment gateway. During booking, it offers a protection plan for $12 a month, which pays up to $3,000 if the belongings are damaged or stolen. Insurance sold inside another purchase like this is called embedded insurance. The family then gets a gate code on their phone. The keypad at the gate is run by physical access control software. So the gate opens for that code, and records each visit. After that, the rent is charged to the family's card every month.
If a customer stops paying, the software follows a fixed set of steps. It sends reminders and adds late fees. After a set period, it disables the gate code, so that the customer cannot remove anything until the rent is paid. If the rent is still unpaid after the period that the state's law allows, the business may sell the contents at auction to recover the rent.
The software also sets prices. When most units of one size are rented, it raises the rent asked for the next one. This is a form of dynamic pricing. The business can see on one screen how many of its units are rented and what each one earns.
India has a small self-storage business, mainly in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi NCR. There, customers often pay in ₹ and the company sometimes collects the goods from the customer's home. Most of the software described here is built for the American market, and much of it is engineered in Hyderabad.