We went looking for this product.
Nobody had built it.
Vectra GPS comes from the team behind RentalTide, the operations platform for watercraft rental businesses. We spend our working lives on docks and in yards with the people who rent boats, ATVs, and equipment for a living — and that is exactly how this got started.
How it started
RentalTide exists because watercraft operators needed more than a booking calendar. They needed intelligent automation that could scale with the business, built by people who understood the operational mess rather than a generic tool bent into shape. That is the same instinct behind this.
Our operators kept asking the same question: where is my asset, and what happened to it? A boat goes out for four hours and comes back with a scraped hull. A side-by-side is two hours late. A trailer leaves the yard in January. None of that is answerable from a booking record.
So we did the sensible thing first — we went to find a partner. We spent months on calls with GPS vendors, telematics platforms, and insurers. We were ready to integrate somebody else’s hardware and get on with our own work.
Every conversation broke on one of three things.
Nobody measured the right things
Fleet telematics is built around trucks: odometers, fuel cards, driver hours. None of that describes a pontoon on a mooring or a side-by-side on a trail. We wanted engine hours from a boat that has no odometer, impact and rollover on machines that get both, and battery health on assets that sit unused for five months. The answer was always a roadmap.
Nobody priced it for a real fleet
Quotes came back at enterprise rates with an annual commitment and a per-seat licence. A marina with eleven pontoons and a seasonal margin cannot sign that, and a family with one boat certainly cannot. If protecting an asset costs more than the risk it removes, the maths tells you to skip it.
Nobody would let software act on it
Every platform we evaluated ended at a dashboard a human had to watch. We wanted a booking to know which asset actually went out, an insurer to get a report without anyone assembling it, and an assistant to answer "is anything off the dock right now". That needs an open API and a machine-readable interface. We were offered CSV exports.
Any one of those we could have worked around. All three together meant the product we wanted did not exist — so we stopped asking and built it.
What we built instead
A tracker priced so a single owner can protect one boat and a fleet can protect fifty. Sensors chosen for what these assets actually do — impact, rollover, tamper, wire-cut, battery voltage over a winter, engine hours inferred from charging voltage where there is no odometer to read.
Our own gateway, so commands land in seconds over a live socket rather than whenever a third party feels like relaying them. An open API on every piece of it. And, because this is where the industry is going whether it prepares or not, a Model Context Protocol connector so an AI assistant can answer questions about a real fleet instead of guessing.
We also opened the gateway to hardware we did not sell. If you already own JT808 trackers, point them at us. Locking people to our hardware would make us the company we could not find a partner in.
Where it all happens: on the dock with the operators we build for.
There is no separate hardware division and no outsourced support desk. The people in this photo are the ones who answer the phone, wire the demo units, and ship the firmware.
It is also why the guarantee reads the way it does. When the person who sold you the tracker is the person who takes the return, you stop writing clauses designed to make returns hard.
Talk to us — (888) 709-2650How we work
We own the whole path
The tracker, the gateway it dials into, the database, the dashboard, the API. When a device misbehaves at 2am there is no vendor to email — it is our socket and our problem.
We take the risk, not you
Thirty days from delivery, prepaid return label, full hardware refund. We would rather lose a sale than argue with someone about a product that was not right for them.
We are on the dock
We build for operators we can name, in an industry we work in. Every feature here exists because someone running a rental asked for it — usually while we were standing next to them.
Talk to the people who built it
Not a call centre. If you have a fleet, an odd asset, or a question nobody else would answer, we are the ones who pick up.