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Shopify has no rental feature, and that sentence is truer than it sounds. There is no rental object in the platform, no "returns to stock on this date" concept in inventory, and no rental category in the App Store. Look at where the App Store actually files these apps and you will see the shape of the problem: rentals is a feature filter under Event booking, sitting next to Appointments, Classes, and Reservations.
That taxonomy is a design statement. Shopify's model treats a rental as a booking — a slot in time — not as a unit of stock that leaves and comes back. Which is why every app in this category maintains its own availability calendar outside Shopify inventory, and why the interesting differences between them are not features at all.
They are billing units. Four rental apps, three different units, and no way to compare the prices until you know which unit each one uses.
The short version
- The App Store has no rentals category. Rentals is an Event booking feature filter, alongside Appointments and Classes.
- Product Rentals Pro and FlexCon Rental Booking, Hire meter rentals per month. BTA Appointment Booking App meters bookings per month. IzyRent: Rentals & Bookings meters products and calendar days — not volume at all.
- Because of that, the cheapest app inverts depending on your shape. Five SKUs turning 400 rentals a month: IzyRent Pro is $24.99, Product Rentals Pro's Volume tier is $89.95. Two hundred SKUs doing 30 rentals a month: Product Rentals Pro Starter is $19.95, IzyRent Pro is $24.99.
- IzyRent's free plan is capped at 3 products and 15 days on the calendar. If you take bookings two months out, the free plan is unusable at any volume.
- Charging customers for insurance or damage protection is a Volume plan ($89.95/month) feature on Product Rentals Pro. Deposits/bonds are Premium ($49.95/month) and up on BTA.
- Two of the four carry the Built for Shopify badge: Product Rentals Pro and IzyRent.
Why rental is not a booking, even though Shopify files it as one
An appointment consumes a person's time. When the hour passes, the slot is gone and nothing has to come back. A rental consumes a physical unit for a range, and then the unit returns — possibly late, possibly damaged, possibly to a different location than it left from.
That difference generates four requirements no appointment app has to solve, and they are the ones to test in a demo store:
Availability across a range, not a slot. The app has to know that unit #3 is out from the 4th to the 9th, and block those dates for that unit while leaving units #1 and #2 bookable. Every app here does this with its own calendar; Shopify's inventory number is not doing it.
Buffers. A dress coming back on Monday cannot go out Monday. Product Rentals Pro is the only listing of the four that advertises buffers configured by delivery method — a different turnaround for post versus pickup — plus per-rental buffer overrides. FlexCon lists buffer time between rentals on its free plan.
Deposits and damage. You need to hold value against the item and charge against it afterward. This is where the plan gates are.
Returns as an operational state. Overdue reminders, late fees, and a view of what is due back today. Product Rentals Pro's listing calls this out explicitly ("Monitor Returns and send Reminders"); FlexCon lists "returns due, late alerts" emails.
The four listings, and what each one actually bills for
Product Rentals Pro
Source: Shopify App Store, retrieved September 2, 2026.
Carries the Built for Shopify badge. Rating 5.0 across 50 reviews, all of them five stars. Launched July 25, 2024, developer based in Warwick, WA, Australia.
Four tiers, metered by rentals:
| Plan | Price | Limit | Notable gate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Trial | Free | 10 rentals total, not per month | App badge shown on your storefront |
| Starter | $19.95/month | 50 rentals/month | Removes PRP branding |
| Growth | $49.95/month | 200 rentals/month | Adds SMS, subscription product support |
| Volume | $89.95/month | 500 rentals/month | Charge for insurance/damage protection |
Read the free tier carefully — it is "Limited to 10 total rentals," a lifetime trial allowance rather than a monthly one, and it displays a Product Rentals Pro badge on your store. And note where damage protection sits: if your business model is "rent the handbag, sell the optional damage waiver," that is a $89.95/month line item, not a $19.95 one.
Its differentiator is the buffer system. Default buffers per delivery method plus manual per-rental adjustment is the kind of feature that only exists when the developer has watched a rental business miss a turnaround. The reviews are consistent with that: three of the most recent are dress-hire and handbag-rental businesses in Australia and New Zealand, one of them writing that "the developers know what fashion rental businesses like mine need."
The app requests Shopify Functions access for delivery customizations, cart transforms, and cart and checkout validations — which is how a modern rental app enforces "you can't check out with these dates" at checkout rather than in a theme script.
IzyRent: Rentals & Bookings
Source: Shopify App Store, retrieved September 2, 2026.
Also carries Built for Shopify. Rating 4.8 across 121 reviews — by a wide margin the most-reviewed rental-first app here. Developer SPEAZ, based in Sarcelles, France. Launched February 4, 2021, the oldest of the rental-first three.
Two tiers, and this is the important part: neither one meters volume.
| Plan | Price | Limits |
|---|---|---|
| Free Plan | Free | 3 products, 15 days on calendar |
| Pro Plan | $24.99/month | Unlimited products, unlimited days, adds reminders |
So the free plan fails on catalog size and booking horizon, not on how much you rent. A single-item rental business could run a hundred bookings a month on the free plan — as long as nobody books more than 15 days ahead. Conversely a wedding-dress business taking reservations six months out is on Pro from day one, at any volume.
The other distinguishing feature is the iCalendar sync: Google, iCloud, Outlook, AirBNB, and any iCalendar source. If your units are also listed on a marketplace, that two-way blocking is the thing that stops a double-booking, and it is on the free plan.
One caution, and per our house rule this is a single review rather than a pattern: on August 31, 2026 a US merchant who had used the app for over three years left a one-star review reading "lots of bugs! not working with rental days period." The developer replied the same day saying they had checked the store and the rental-day feature was working, and asked for a video. We cannot adjudicate it. It is worth knowing that the app's rating distribution is 95% five-star with three one-star reviews, and that this is the visible one.
FlexCon Rental Booking, Hire
Source: Shopify App Store, retrieved September 2, 2026.
The newest of the group — launched July 28, 2025, developer FlexConversion in Hanoi, Vietnam. Rating 5.0 across 22 reviews, no Built for Shopify badge. Two tiers only:
| Plan | Price | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | 10 rental orders/month, POS and in-app manual rentals, buffers |
| Growth | $19.99/month | 100 rental orders/month, availability calendar view, tiered duration discounts |
Two things stand out. First, the free tier is genuinely operational rather than a trial: 10 rental orders per month, with buffers and manual rental creation via POS included. If you rent out a handful of items a month, this is a real free plan.
Second, the ceiling is low. Growth caps at 100 rental orders/month and there is no published tier above it. A business doing 300 rentals a month has to ask what happens next, whereas Product Rentals Pro publishes up to 500 and IzyRent does not care.
It is also the only one of the four listing seven interface languages (English, French, Italian, Chinese Simplified, German, Spanish, Dutch), and it lists tiered/volume duration discounts — rent for a week, pay less per day — as a Growth feature. That is a rental pricing primitive the others do not name.
The reviews are recent (April–June 2026) and, notably, almost all of them praise the same named support person. That is characteristic of a young app with a small team: excellent responsiveness now, unknown at scale.
BTA Appointment Booking App
Source: Shopify App Store, retrieved September 2, 2026.
The general-purpose booking app that also does rentals, and the oldest app in this article by more than eight years — launched May 29, 2012, developer BTA Commerce in Lagrange, GA. Rating 4.7 across 391 reviews, no Built for Shopify badge.
| Plan | Price | Limit | Notable gate |
|---|---|---|---|
| FREE | Free | 10 bookings | No product limit |
| LITE | $25/month (or $250/year) | 50 bookings/month, 1 staff | POS support, Google Calendar |
| PREMIUM | $49.95/month (or $499.50/year) | 350 bookings/month, 10 staff | Deposits/Bonds, SMS, BYO SMTP |
| BUSINESS | $110/month (or $1,100/year) | 1,000 bookings/month, 20 staff | API access |
Annual billing saves 17% on every paid tier, which none of the rental-first apps offer.
For a rental business the relevant gate is Deposits/Bonds at Premium. If your entire reason for adding an app is to hold a bond against a $2,000 camera, BTA's entry price is $49.95/month, not $25. Its strengths are elsewhere anyway: staff accounts, group bookings, Zoom, recurring booking subscriptions with waivers, and by far the deepest review history in this comparison — including merchants at four and five years of continuous use.
Its rating distribution is also the most honest-looking of the four: 87% five-star, 4% one-star. The recent one-star we read was a theme-compatibility complaint on the Horizon theme with a disputed resolution, which is a useful reminder that a calendar widget lives in your theme and theme upgrades break widgets.
The cost table nobody publishes
Same work, two different shapes of rental business. Prices as listed September 2, 2026.
Shape A — fashion rental: 5 SKUs, 400 rentals/month, bookings taken 3 months ahead
| App | Required plan | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| IzyRent | Pro | $24.99 |
| Product Rentals Pro | Volume (500/mo) | $89.95 |
| BTA | Business (1,000/mo) | $110 |
| FlexCon | No published tier above 100/mo | — |
Shape B — equipment library: 200 SKUs, 30 rentals/month, bookings taken 2 weeks ahead
| App | Required plan | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Product Rentals Pro | Starter (50/mo) | $19.95 |
| FlexCon | Growth (100/mo) | $19.99 |
| IzyRent | Pro (free plan caps at 3 products) | $24.99 |
| BTA | LITE (50/mo) | $25 |
The ordering completely inverts. Nothing about the feature lists predicts this — it falls out entirely of which unit each vendor decided to count. Before you compare features, count your rentals per month, your SKU count, and how far ahead customers book. Those three numbers pick your app.
Add one more number if damage protection matters: charging for it costs $89.95/month on Product Rentals Pro and $49.95/month on BTA, regardless of your volume.
How to choose
High volume, small catalog, long booking horizon → IzyRent Pro. Unlimited on both axes for $24.99, Built for Shopify, and the AirBNB/iCalendar sync if your units are cross-listed. Test the rental-day handling in the demo store before committing, given the one-star review above.
Fashion or high-value rental where turnaround and damage are the business → Product Rentals Pro. The delivery-method buffer system is the most rental-specific feature anyone in this category ships, and the review set is almost entirely dress-hire and handbag businesses. Budget for the tier where damage protection lives if you charge for it.
Small monthly volume, want a real free plan → FlexCon. Ten rental orders a month for free including POS-created rentals is the most generous starting point. Confirm what happens above 100 rental orders/month before you grow into it.
You need staff scheduling, group bookings, or waivers alongside rentals → BTA. It is a booking platform that also rents, with fourteen years of history and 391 reviews. Price it at Premium if you need bonds, and test your theme.
Do not try to do this with variants and inventory alone. Shopify's inventory number does not model an item that leaves and returns. Every merchant who tries it discovers it at the first double-booking.
What we could not confirm
- Whether Product Rentals Pro's "10 rentals" free tier resets monthly. The listing says "10 total rentals," which reads as a lifetime trial; we could not confirm from the listing alone.
- What FlexCon offers above 100 rental orders/month. No tier is published.
- How each app behaves across multiple Shopify locations for the same SKU. All four list multi-location or location access, but the listings do not describe per-location availability logic.
- Whether any of these can place a card hold (authorization) for a deposit rather than charging and refunding it. The listings say "deposits" without specifying the mechanism, and the mechanism decides your customer's experience.
References
- Product Rentals Pro — Shopify App Store
- IzyRent: Rentals & Bookings — Shopify App Store
- FlexCon Rental Booking, Hire — Shopify App Store
- BTA Appointment Booking App — Shopify App Store
- Built for Shopify — Shopify App Store
All pricing, ratings, and review counts retrieved September 2, 2026.
Shop Pay Installments is free to activate, needs no app, and Shopify never publishes what it costs you — the rate is visible only inside your own admin. It also refuses Capital One and Chase credit cards, restricts monthly plans to debit cards only, excludes gift cards and subscriptions, and can't be turned off for individual products. Affirm can suspend your account for being password-protected, for having a non-English storefront, or for being primarily B2B. And Shopify's Getting paid page says disputes appear in your admin while its FAQ says they don't. If you fail the eligibility gates, the alternative is on-site messaging apps from Klarna, Afterpay, Sezzle, Zip, and PayPal — a category rated between 1.0 and 3.2 stars. Researched September 2, 2026.