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Code by Pawpu

2026

RentaraH

Philippines car and motorcycle rental marketplace — search, book, and host in PHP.

Lab · Solo founder · product & engineering (Momentra Labs)

Written by Al Beltran (Al Andrew Paul Beltran), Software Engineering Lead.

Open live site Repository

Desktop, tablet, and iPhone 16

01 · The problem

Trip rental in the Philippines often means opaque rates, mixed listing tools, and no single place to compare cars, motorcycles, scooters, and big bikes with a clear host flow.

RentaraH is a peer-to-peer vehicle rental marketplace Al Andrew Paul Beltran (Al Beltran) designed and developed as founder of Momentra Labs. Renters search cars and two-wheelers by area and dates, compare PHP daily rates, and book verified hosts. Hosts can list a vehicle and earn. The public customer app is at rentahub2026.github.io.

02 · My role

Solo founder · product & engineering (Momentra Labs)

03 · The result

Shipped a React + TypeScript customer marketplace with browse, map, host listing, and booking flows. Backend and admin live in sibling repos; the public web app is the Momentra Labs customer surface.

04 · Architecture

  1. 01

    Customer web SPA (React, Vite, TypeScript) at rentahub2026.github.io

  2. 02

    Express + Prisma API in a sibling rentarah-api service

  3. 03

    Operations console in a sibling rentarah-admin app

  4. 04

    End-to-end founder ownership of product and engineering

The story

The constraints
Philippines-first rental flow. Public customer app on GitHub Pages. API and admin live elsewhere.
The hard part
A marketplace is a shared ledger. Availability cannot be a private notebook — that lesson is also in the postmortems.
The trade-off
Splitting web, API, and admin keeps the Pages demo honest about what it hosts. It also means three repos to keep in step.
What broke
Not a published outage. The constraint that hurt was treating listing search as if it were a brochure.
What changed
The public customer surface is live. Hosts and renters share one booking story.
What I would do differently
I would keep the split. I would not sell offline-first as a default for vehicle inventory.

Diagram

Sanitized architecture. Hover is optional — tap or focus a box.

Renter / host

Purpose
Search, book, or list in PHP.
Trade-off
One SPA for both roles.
Scale
Pages can only host the customer UI.

Implementation

  • Search cars, motorcycles, scooters, and big bikes by city and dates
  • Clear PHP daily rates and host booking flow
  • Map explore and become-a-host listing path
  • Public demo at rentahub2026.github.io

Challenges & outcomes

Challenges

  • Keeping a Pages-hosted customer app separate from API and admin
  • Designing a Philippines-first rental flow without a generic listing clone

Outcomes

  • Public customer marketplace live at https://rentahub2026.github.io/
  • Shipped as a founder-owned Momentra Labs product, not a client case study

Lessons

  • Marketplace products need a public URL so people can try the actual flow
  • Splitting web, API, and admin keeps a GitHub Pages demo honest about what it hosts