“Good network for hiring and lending. I do feel they pressure sales too much. After a recent enquiry which i didn't have time to respond to in the moment, they kept calling me on my mobile to answer the message. Thats downright rude and should be stopped. I’ll answer in my own time thanks.”
“The idea is amazing and the world needs it - and it's great to see someone actually trying to do this! Currently using Fat Llama is a pretty slow and cumbersome experience though.
Firstly, it's totally manual: there are no tools to make the renting process seamless. For example, even though Doodle has existed for 10 years, there are no built-in tools to make it easier to find a mutual pickup time and location, and instead you have to use slow back and forth exchange of text messages. That alone makes it completely impractical to use FatLlama to lend items where the rental value is under £5.
Second, the product itself still feels like a first version. This is probably growing pains, but nevertheless. By default they email, push notify, *and* text message you every time there is a reply to a message, and send follow-ups if you don't reply straight away. This means that if one person sends one message to you, you can end up getting 4-6 notifications. You have to email support to get the email notifications turned off (there's no setting in your profile to control that). On an iPhone SE, many of the critical buttons don't even appear on the screen because they are covered by a banner - it's been assumed that everyone is using a bigger screen.
Maybe most importantly, there's really not that much on FatLlama. They've gone for a "rent anything from anyone anywhere in the world" approach, which seems to have led to there being a few listings spread very sparsely around big cities, rather than a concentrated and varied group of listings in any single area. That means you will have to travel a long way to pick something up.
Ultimately all these things mean FatLlama is only really for renting very high value items right now. If they billed themselves as specifically for high end audiovisual equipment this would be totally fair enough, but instead they bill themselves as "rent anything from anyone". That's just not accurate.
I really hope they succeed though! The world definitely needs fewer copies of the same items when so much of the time they sit around redundant most of the time.”
“System is pretty slick, works well.
My biggest issues are that there are substantial fees for both the renter and hirer. For example, renting out kit for £100 results in the hirer being charged £15 extra, but also I lost £15 of that. This makes no sense in my mind, and I can't think of any other service that does this. For starters, that means you can quote a value in a message, but then look silly when they end up charging more.
My other issue is that while they say they cover items that could be damaged, lost or stolen, they expect you to go through your insurance first.
Again, this is at the expense of the renter, even though they take rougly 30% of the total cost.
The only possible justification for such high fees are that 20%+ of rented items are damaged/lost etc. I really don't see that being the case.”
“When renting out my camera equipment It was great at the start (about a year ago) but now is saturated. Also people only want to rent for one day which means for lower priced items it's just not worth the hassle. Site works really well and the idea is great but with so many lenders all offering lower and lower prices I'll only be using Fat Lama to rent other peoples items.”
