FareHarbor Pricing: What It Actually Costs You

In March you sign up because the software is free. In October you sit down to work out where the season went, and there is no line item to look at, because the money never touched your bank account. It came off the top of what your renters paid, on every booking, all summer.

That is not a scandal. It is the model, and for plenty of tour companies it is a fine deal. But if you rent golf carts and you are trying to compare FareHarbor pricing against a monthly subscription, you will find the comparison is deliberately hard to make.

We run Welaka Golf Carts in Putnam County, Florida, and we built Greenlit to run it. We have shopped this category as buyers, and this is what we learned about what booking software actually costs.

FareHarbor pricing is not published anywhere

Start here, because it explains everything downstream. There is no pricing page with tiers on it. There is a demo request.

What FareHarbor does publish, in its provider terms, is the shape of the arrangement: the software carries no monthly license fee, and a booking fee is charged to the person making the booking and retained by FareHarbor. You are the merchant of record, which means the transaction runs through payment processing set up in your name.

So the honest one-line answer to "what does FareHarbor cost" is: nothing on your monthly statement, and an amount added to your renter's total on every online booking that you will not see itemized in your own revenue.

What it looked like on a real checkout

On September 11 2026 we walked a real Florida cart rental booking through to the payment screen. Not ours, and we are not naming it. A four-seat gas LSV, one week, listed at $550.

What the renter sees at the payment step:

• Subtotal $550.00
• Taxes $38.50
• Fees $33.00
• Total $621.50

The $33 is exactly 6 percent of the subtotal and it is not taxed. Hover the info icon next to "Fees" and the tooltip says, in FareHarbor's own words, that the renter pays this fee to FareHarbor for the online booking and payment process. The renter also has to accept FareHarbor's terms of service, and the page footer says "Powered by FareHarbor."

Two things follow from that, and only two.

This is one operator's checkout on one day. It is not proof of what every FareHarbor account is charged, and we are not going to present it as one. Rates can vary by operator.

And your renter can see the software's name. They did not choose it. They chose you, and the extra line on their total arrived under your business name.

About that 6 percent

One checkout is not a rate card. Search this topic for ten minutes and you will see 6 percent repeated as though it were published.

It is not. The figure traces back to an estimate by Arival, the tours and activities research group, and Arival itself flags the number as unconfirmed. From there it has been copied across dozens of comparison posts, most of them written by competing booking platforms, none of them citing a source document.

We are not going to state it as fact and neither should anything you read. Operator reviews cluster in that neighborhood, which is worth something, but "several people on Reddit said" is not a contract.

What you can do instead: ask for the exact percentage in writing, ask whether it applies to add-ons and delivery fees as well as the base rate, and ask what happens to it on a phone booking you enter yourself. Any vendor that will not put those three answers in an email is telling you something.

The three shapes this market comes in

Every platform you will look at is one of these, and card processing sits on top of all three.

A fee charged to your renter. FareHarbor, Peek Pro and RevRent Solutions all work this way. Your software line is zero or near zero. The cost is real, it is just paid by somebody else, and it appears on your checkout page next to your name.

A percentage taken from you. Checkfront publishes $99 a month plus 3 percent. Rezdy publishes tiers at $49, $99 and $249 a month plus 3 percent. You feel this one directly, which is uncomfortable and also clearer.

A flat subscription. Booqable runs $29 to $149 a month on annual billing with no commission. Greenlit is $49 a month. The number does not move when you have a good July.

Then card processing, which everybody pays regardless. Roughly the usual online card rate plus a fixed amount per transaction, depending on your processor and your mix of cards. Checkfront is unusual in publishing a processing rate card at all.

Run the arithmetic on your own numbers

Here is the calculation, not a claim about your business. Take your own figures and do it in five minutes.

Say a fleet takes 260 online bookings across a season at an average of $400 each. That is $104,000 in booking value.

• At a 5 percent renter-paid fee, $20 is added to each renter's total. Across the season, $5,200 leaves your renters' pockets.
• At 6 percent, $24 per booking. $6,240 for the season.
• At 7 percent, $28 per booking. $7,280.

A $99 a month plus 3 percent plan on the same volume is $1,188 in subscription plus $3,120 in commission, so $4,308, paid by you rather than by your renters.

A $49 a month flat subscription on the same volume is $588 for the year, with no service fee on top of what the renter is paying you.

Your numbers will be different. The point of running it is that the three models diverge fast as volume grows, and they diverge in opposite directions. The percentage models get more expensive exactly when the season goes well. The flat model does not.

There is a real argument on the other side and you should hear it. If you have a slow year, a percentage model costs you less than a subscription, because you pay nothing when nothing books. If your fleet is four carts and you take thirty bookings a season, the percentage math genuinely favors you. Do not switch away from something that is working out cheaper.

What the fee does at your checkout

Be careful here, because the internet is full of confident claims that are not supported.

What is fair to say: the fee appears on your renter's total, on your booking page, under your business name. If they call to ask what it is, they call you.

What is not fair to say, and we are not going to say it: that adding a fee at checkout measurably costs you bookings. Nobody has measured that for cart rentals. The one large field experiment on hidden fees, run by StubHub across several million users, found that showing fees late reduced completion at the final step but produced more revenue per session overall, because the lower sticker price pulled more people in. That result cuts against the obvious argument, and any vendor telling you otherwise, including us, is guessing.

The one survey number worth knowing is from Baymard Institute, retrieved August 2026: 40 percent of US online shoppers say they abandoned a checkout in the last three months because extra costs were too high. That is shoppers self-reporting, not the share of abandoned carts caused by fees, and almost every blog post you will see gets that distinction wrong.

So the case against a renter-paid fee is not a conversion claim. It is simpler than that. It is money that leaves your renter's pocket at your checkout, forever, and you never see it in your own numbers.

The contract, which matters more than the rate

Two things to check before you sign anything in this category.

Notice period. FareHarbor's terms provide for 15 days' notice to leave. That is short and it is in your favor. Peek Pro, by contrast, auto-renews, and getting out requires notice 30 days before the renewal date. Diary that date the day you sign.

What you can take with you. Ask specifically whether you can export your customer list, your booking history and your signed documents, in what format, and whether it costs anything. Get the answer before you need it.

Where FareHarbor is genuinely strong

If you also sell tours, or you rely on online travel agency channels to fill capacity, FareHarbor's distribution and its integration footprint are real advantages that a cart-only platform will not match. The account management model has historically been a selling point too, though that has been unbundled and websites are now a paid item, and the Trustpilot rating sits at 3.8 with support complaints running through July 2026.

None of that is a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to know what you are buying it for.

FareHarbor pricing questions to ask before you sign

1. What is the exact percentage, in writing, and what is it applied to?
2. Does it apply to add-ons, delivery fees and taxes, or only the base rate?
3. What happens on a booking I enter myself over the phone?
4. Who is the merchant of record, and whose payment account do funds land in?
5. What is the notice period, and does the contract auto-renew?
6. What can I export if I leave, in what format, and at what cost?
7. What is the price on renewal, and how much has it moved in the last two years?

Number seven catches more people than the rest combined.

The line item nobody quotes you on

Every platform in this category prices the booking. None of them price the cart.

That sounds like a semantic point and it is not. A tours platform models a departure: a time slot, a headcount, a guide. A cart rental is a specific vehicle, leaving on a date, coming back with a condition record attached to it. When you buy booking software priced per booking, you are buying the first model and then doing the second one yourself, in a spreadsheet, for free, forever.

So when you compare quotes, put a value on the work that stays with you. Ask each vendor whether the price includes a per-vehicle record with year, make, model, VIN and plate. Whether the platform can hold a condition log against a specific cart across rentals. Whether it can put your state rental surcharge on the invoice as its own labeled line rather than folding it into the rate. Whether a rest day between rentals can be enforced on the calendar rather than remembered.

If the answer is no, the software is cheaper than it looks on the quote and more expensive than it looks in August.

Ask what happens to your phone bookings

Half the bookings on a small cart fleet start as a phone call. Somebody's rental house has four adults and a stroller and they want to know if the six-seater is free on Saturday.

Find out, specifically, what a percentage or renter-paid fee does to that booking when you key it in yourself. Some platforms charge the same rate on a manually entered booking. Some charge nothing. Some charge you rather than the renter, which is the same money moving to a different pocket.

This one detail can swing your annual cost by a third on a fleet where the phone still does most of the work, and it almost never appears in a comparison table.

Questions operators ask

How much does FareHarbor cost per booking? FareHarbor does not publish a rate. The widely repeated 6 percent figure is an unconfirmed estimate, not a published price. Ask for your number in writing before you sign.

Is FareHarbor really free? Free of a monthly software fee, yes. The cost is charged to the person making the booking and retained by FareHarbor, so it is paid rather than avoided.

Who pays the card processing fees? You do, in every model. You are the merchant of record on FareHarbor, so processing runs in your name and comes out of the money that reaches your account.

Can I cancel FareHarbor? Their terms provide for 15 days' notice. Confirm the current terms yourself and ask what you can export on the way out.

Is a flat subscription always cheaper? No. Below a certain booking volume a percentage model costs less. Run your own season through both before deciding.

Where we land

We chose a flat subscription for our own product because we got tired of a number we could not predict and could not see. Greenlit is $49 a month, it runs on your own Stripe or Square account, and we will never add a service fee to your renter's bill.

That is a position, not a proof. The useful conclusion about FareHarbor pricing is not a number at all: it is that you cannot get one from the internet, so get yours in writing, run your own arithmetic, ask the seven questions above, and pick the model that fits the size of the season you actually have.

We wrote four companion pieces in this cluster: a head-to-head on Peek Pro vs FareHarbor for a small rental fleet, a roundup of FareHarbor alternatives for cart and LSV rentals, what to check in a Peek Pro renewal clause, and the per-booking math on Checkfront.

If you take one thing from this page on FareHarbor pricing, take the habit: get the rate in writing, and run it against your own season before you sign.

Prices and terms in this piece were checked in August and September 2026 and vendors change them without notice. Verify anything here against the vendor's current documents before you sign. Greenlit is booking and fleet software for golf cart and LSV rental companies, built inside Welaka Golf Carts. See what it does.