Project Proposal · Confidential
SunnySide Up Rentals: a vacation rental marketplace for the Alabama Gulf Coast
Turn a 12-condo book-direct site into a multi-owner marketplace for Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, live ahead of the summer season.
Turn a 12-condo book-direct site into a multi-owner marketplace for Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, live ahead of the summer season.
SunnySide Up Rentals already has what most new marketplaces lack: real inventory, real guests, and a local reputation. This proposal turns that into a platform where other Gulf Shores and Orange Beach owners list their condos, guests book direct, and SunnySide earns a commission on every stay. We deliver it as a fixed-price project: one month of prototype design and validation, then two and a half months of development, launched with a 60-day bug guarantee.
Marketplace Studio is a small team of senior operators who have designed, built, funded, and scaled two-sided platforms. We work with a handful of partners at a time so every build gets senior attention.
We think in supply and demand, liquidity, trust, and take rate, not generic web projects. Your build is shaped by people who have solved the chicken-and-egg problem before.
Product, design, and development are led by people with a decade in marketplaces, including founding and scaling well-known rental platforms.
We deliberately keep our active partner count low. You get continuity, context, and a team that treats your marketplace like its own.
Guests searching for Gulf Shores and Orange Beach condos land on the big booking platforms and pay service fees on top of the nightly rate. Owners pay commission too. A local marketplace that is cheaper for guests and more personal for owners has room to win.
Guests search by place and by building: "Crystal Shores condo rental", "Orange Beach gulf front 3 bedroom". Category and condo complex pages capture that intent and turn it into bookings with no guest service fee. Every booking from a partner owner earns SunnySide a commission, so revenue grows with supply instead of with the number of units you manage yourself.
You solve the chicken-and-egg problem on day one. Twelve gulf front condos, strong reviews, and an existing guest base give the marketplace live supply and real demand at launch. Owners in the same complexes see a local operator they can talk to, and calendar sync with the tools they already use means joining takes minutes, not a switch of systems.
Your promise to guests is "book direct and save", so we recommend charging the commission to owners and keeping guest fees low or at zero. The take rate is configurable in the admin panel, so you can test a launch rate with early owners and adjust.
Repeat guests and owners can be tempted to book off-platform after a first stay. On-platform messaging, reviews, secure payments, and a clear dispute process give both sides a reason to keep transacting through SunnySide.
We solve problems, we do not just ship features. The full experience is designed and tested as a clickable prototype before a line of production code is written, so development builds what owners and guests actually need.
Decisions grounded in research and user interviews. We empathize, define the problem, ideate, prototype, test, and iterate.
Modern, accelerated development turns the validated prototype into working software quickly. It is how we deliver this scope at this price and pace without cutting quality.
Every feature is tied to a real problem for an owner, a guest, or your ops team, not built for its own sake.
Pre-development locks the design and proves it with real users. Development builds the full marketplace. We are closed for two weeks over Christmas, which is built into the plan.
Select a phase to see what you get and what we need from you.
A complete, custom-designed marketplace for guests, owners, and your ops team, on desktop and responsive web.
A clickable prototype of every screen in this scope, tested in two user interviews (one owner, one guest) and refined with 15 hours of design variations. It becomes the blueprint for development.
Map search with dates and guests, category pages (by town, bedrooms, gulf front), and condo complex pages for buildings like Crystal Shores and Harbor House. Property pages carry photos, amenities, availability, and reviews, then flow into secure Stripe checkout.
Owners manage listings, bookings, payouts, and messages in one dashboard. A calendar view lets them block dates and see every reservation, kept in sync with their property management software.
Calendar sync with three popular property management platforms, so owners already on those tools keep availability accurate and avoid double bookings. The three platforms are confirmed in pre-development.
Bookings, cancellations, and refunds run through Stripe, with automatic owner payouts and your commission taken at checkout. Guests and owners can open a dispute on a booking, share details and photos, and your team resolves it from the admin panel.
Your team approves owners and listings, manages users, bookings, disputes, and reviews, sets the commission rate, and sees platform activity in one place.
Everything below is included in the fixed price.
Production-grade infrastructure that scales with you and keeps you in control of your data and your code from day one.
Each feature ships with automated end-to-end tests written in Playwright, so it keeps working as the marketplace grows.
Tests drive real journeys the way guests and owners will: search, book, pay, message, sync a calendar, open a dispute.
Tests run on every change, so a new feature does not quietly break an old one.
Checkout, payouts, refunds, and commission are tested end to end before anything reaches a real guest.
You follow the project through the Control Centre: one place for what is in progress, what is done, and what needs your input.
Track every feature from design through QA to done, without chasing anyone for a status update.
Log issues, watch them move through triage, and see each one resolved against clear priorities.
Review designs, approve work, and find demo videos and release notes in one place.
You always know when we meet, what we are building, and where things stand.
Two workshops per week through the design sprint, plus the two user interviews and prototype reviews.
One call every two weeks, weekly written updates, async conversations as needed, and video demos as features land.
Weekly calls in the final two weeks, plus bug tracking and release notes in the Control Centre.
Live testing and bug fixing, a closed beta with your current guests and a few partner owners, then public launch.
We stand behind what we ship. For 60 days after launch, we fix any bug at no cost. A bug is something that does not work as designed, distinct from a new feature or change.
Defects in anything in this scope: a feature that does not behave as designed and agreed.
Raise it in the Control Centre. We triage by priority, fix it, and ship the fix with a note back to you.
Ongoing support and new features are available through our monthly partnership, sized to your pace.
One price for the full scope in this proposal. A 20% deposit holds your start date, and the balance is split into four equal monthly payments across the project.
| Deposit, on signing | 20% | $4,460 |
| Payment 1, December 15, 2026 | 20% | $4,460 |
| Payment 2, January 15, 2027 | 20% | $4,460 |
| Payment 3, February 15, 2027 | 20% | $4,460 |
| Payment 4, March 15, 2027 | 20% | $4,460 |
| Total | 100% | $22,300 |
All amounts in USD. Third-party service fees (hosting, database, maps, email, Stripe processing, domain) are billed directly to your accounts and are not included.
A fixed price works when scope is clear. These are the assumptions behind it. Anything outside them is handled through a written change request with a cost estimate before work starts.
Integrations sync calendar availability and bookings with three property management platforms agreed in pre-development, subject to each provider granting API access. Rates, listing content, and messaging sync are not included.
Checkout shows configurable tax lines for state, county, and city lodging taxes. Filing and remittance stay with SunnySide Up Rentals and owners. We recommend confirming your obligations as a platform with an Alabama tax advisor before launch.
You provide copy, FAQ answers, and photos. We structure them for SEO and load your current properties as the first listings ahead of launch.
Desktop and responsive web; native mobile apps are not included. The timeline assumes feedback and approvals within two business days. We are closed December 21 to January 1.
Approve the proposal and pay the $4,460 deposit to hold the November 16 start.
We meet to confirm owner and guest personas, the three PMS platforms, and your launch commission rate.
We stand up your Control Centre, shared design workspace, and the accounts for Stripe, Supabase, Mapbox, and Resend in your name.
Prototype design starts in week one, with the first user interview booked inside the first two weeks.
Sign this week to hold a November 16 kickoff and a March launch, in time for the summer season.
Reply to Darren · dcody@marketplacestudio.io