Questions
Questions campground owners ask before buying.
If the answer depends on your property, I will say so.
Is PineRoster a reservation system?
No, and that is the point. PineRoster manages seasonal sites, guests, agreements, payments, inquiries, and waiting lists. Night-by-night availability and online transient reservations are a permanent non-goal: if your campers check out Sunday morning, buy a reservation system. If the same camper sits on site 4 all summer, this is the right tool.
What does the $60 a month cover?
Three things on one bill: your public campground website, the hosting both it and your management software run on, and the software itself. There is no second hosting bill and no separate account for you to open. Inside that: server and security upkeep, the regular updates the machine underneath needs. The email your website and software send, payment reminders included, kept working. Software upgrades: new versions of the engine are pushed from my server, so improvements arrive without an upgrade fee or a conversation about which version you are on. And small website updates along the way, under a rule I actually run on: if a change takes me less time than writing the invoice would, it is not a billable task. What it is not is a licence: you are not paying for permission to keep using PineRoster, and there is no per-site charge, no charge per person in the office, and no percentage of your revenue. The number does not move as sites fill or staff are added. Outside services stay in your name and are billed by whoever provides them, so domain registration, email delivery and card processing are named separately with real numbers in the quote. Bigger pieces of work, a multi-page site rebuild included, get quoted when you want them.
Does PineRoster include a campground website?
Yes, in most cases I build you a new mobile-friendly campground website along with the private management area; it can cover amenities, policies, directions, photos, and contact information. If you already have a website you want to keep, that works too: PineRoster goes on a subdomain of your domain, your site stays where it is, and the project is priced accordingly.
I keep everything in a spreadsheet, or a binder. Can you get it in?
Usually, yes. Send the spreadsheet, or photos of the binder pages, and I will tell you what comes across cleanly and what needs a decision first. Messy is normal: inconsistent site numbers, two spellings of the same family, rates living in a notes column. You do not have to tidy it up before we start. Sorting that out is part of setup, and the effort is named in the quote instead of promised blindly. What you should not do is retype three years of history by hand.
How long does setup take? Can it be ready before the season opens?
It depends on how many sites you have, how clean the current records are, and how quickly we can get the property map right, so you get a date range with the quote rather than a generic promise. Tell me your season opener in the first conversation. If a launch before that date is not realistic, I will say so before you pay anything, not after.
Who owns the campground data?
You do. Your records are ordinary files you can copy and open, not rows in a database only I can read, and CSV exports are built in: your guest roster, and payments for any date range at tax time, if you want them in a spreadsheet. They sit on the hosting included in your monthly package, and you can have a full copy of the folder any time you ask for one. I use your records only to run and support your installation. Leaving does not mean starting over. Being readable by you does not mean being readable by the internet: every stored file, backups and archives included, is written so a web server returns nothing at all if somebody requests it directly by name. That protection travels with the files rather than depending on a server configuration file, which matters precisely because you are allowed to take them somewhere else.
What happens to my campground if you stop doing this?
It moves. PineRoster is ordinary PHP on ordinary web hosting and your records are plain files rather than rows in a database only I can read, so the whole system lifts onto a normal shared hosting account and runs there. Ask me for a copy of the folder now, while everything is normal, and keep it somewhere of your own. That is the whole point of asking early: a copy you already hold does not depend on my being reachable later. What the software will never do is phone home or check a licence with me, so nothing in it expires from my end.
Who owns the domain name?
You do, and I would rather you insisted on it. Normally you register it yourself, in your own name, and you keep the login. If that sort of errand is not your thing I will set it up for you, but it goes in your name and the account stays yours. This is a rule across my whole web-design practice, not something specific to campgrounds: your domain is your business name, and handing it to your web developer means one person can take your address away from you. I could turn out to be a bad guy. I could also get hit by a bus. Neither should be able to cost you the name your guests already know.
Where is PineRoster hosted?
On my server, alongside the other sites I look after, and that hosting is part of the $60 a month rather than a separate account you open. The reason it works that way is speed: when a bug turns up or an improvement is ready I can push it to your park the same day instead of coordinating access through somebody else’s hosting account. It is still just ordinary PHP on ordinary web hosting, not a locked vendor cloud. Nothing is tied to my machine in particular, so if you ever leave, the whole system lifts onto a normal shared hosting account and runs there without losing anything.
Will it work on a phone or tablet?
Yes. The public website and management screens are designed for modern phones, tablets, and desktop browsers. A larger screen is still more comfortable for detailed map setup and bulk record work.
Can my spouse or my manager use it too, or is it just me?
Yes, and that is most of the point. A system only the owner can open does not fix a campground that lives in one person’s head. Everyone who works the office can have their own username and password in one of two roles. A Manager does the day-to-day work, payments and deletes included. An Administrator does all of that plus settings, staff, software upgrades, CSV imports and recovery restores. A single shared password still works if that suits your office better. Be clear on what the roles are not, though: both see the same dashboard and the same guest records, so this is a fence around the administrative and destructive actions, not a privacy wall between your staff and your campers. Money actions are deliberately left open to managers, because taking a cheque at the desk is the Saturday job, and a gate people have to route around just teaches everyone to share the owner’s password.
Can my campers see what they owe without calling me?
Yes. You can generate a private link for any renter and text or email it to them. They open it and see their own account: which site they are on, what they are paid through, how many months that site is behind and what those months come to, an installment schedule if they have one, and a dated history of the charges and payments on the account. After you switch online payments on and connect Stripe, the page can also show a button that carries them to your payment form with the amount already filled in, paid by card, or by bank transfer if that is switched on in your Stripe account. There is no account to create, no app to download, and no password for them to forget, because the link itself is the key. That was a deliberate choice. Campers were never going to sign up for a campground login, so anything with a sign-in would have gone unused. Three practical notes. The link does not go stale: it still opens months later, and handing the same camper a second one leaves the first still working, so a link you texted in May is not dead in September. When you do want them gone, one action cancels every link that account has; editing a guest’s name, address, email, or phone cancels them too, on purpose, so a record that changes hands does not leave an old link open behind it. And a link is stored only as a fingerprint, never in a form anyone can read back, so it cannot be shown to you a second time: copy it when you create it, or just generate a fresh one. The page itself shows a first name, the site, and money. No full name, phone number, address, or notes. It cannot reserve anything; when card payments are enabled, paying happens on a separate secure page.
A camper is three months behind. What does PineRoster actually do about it?
It asks for all three months, and it counts them from that site’s own paid-through date rather than from today. The amount uses that site’s real monthly figure, base rate plus whatever add-ons are active on it, so a site with a second vehicle and a shed on it is quoted at what that site actually costs. If the same guest rents two sites, each one is listed with its own months and its own amount, and then totalled. That number is what shows on their private balance page and what the payment button carries over. What matters more is where the money lands: a payment retires the oldest month owed and walks the paid-through date forward from where it really stood, instead of restarting the clock at the day the payment arrived. Somebody who pays three months is caught up; the missed months are not quietly written off. Autopay works the same way, so a camper who fell behind and then enrolled gets pulled forward one month per run rather than paying for the current month forever while the gap sits there. The self-service side reaches back two years, which covers any realistic seasonal gap. Older than that and it stops being a button on a web page and starts being a conversation you should be having anyway. It runs the same distance forward for the opposite camper: somebody with nothing owed can choose one to twenty-four months on their own page and pay that far ahead, which is how the family who likes to settle the whole season in April does it. The order is not negotiable, though: a statement with anything outstanding refuses a pay-ahead outright, so nobody buys next season while this one is still owed. Autopay is not a pay-ahead switch either; it keeps taking exactly one month per run. Cheques and cash still go in by hand, the way they always have.
The same families come back every spring. Do I have to re-enter them?
No. When you assign an open site, you can search your past seasonal guests by name and link the new agreement to the record you already have, so their payment history, notes, pets, and vehicles carry forward instead of starting a duplicate. On a numbered site, PineRoster also lists who has stayed there before, with a one-click way to bring any of them back.
What happens when I need help or a change?
Contact Ben directly. Small fixes, new features, map changes, or additional website work are discussed and scoped based on the actual request. There is no anonymous support queue pretending every change is included forever.
Is the live demo using real campground data?
No. Whispering Pines Campground and every guest in the demo are fictional. The demo resets itself back to its seed data every few hours, so anything you change stays put while you are looking around and does not last. Payment processing and email delivery are switched off. Click anything, but do not type in real personal information.
Who is PineRoster for?
It is aimed at established campgrounds in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota that rent sites by the season or by the month and need a clearer shared system, not a nightly-booking platform. Those are the states I know and can drive to.
Still have a specific question?
Send it in plain language.
You will get a straight answer from Ben.