hitting a wall trying to build rental availability logic in bubble

hey guys,

need some advice from people who’ve tried building rental / booking apps with no-code.

i’m working on a small rental platform for party tents and catering gear. the front end is fine, the ui looks decent, and the basic booking flow wasn’t too hard.

but the inventory logic is killing me.

normal ecommerce is easy enough. someone buys something, stock goes down.

rentals are a mess.

i need to deal with date ranges, overlapping bookings, return buffers, cleaning time before an item is available again, and making sure the same tent or gear set can’t be booked twice for the same weekend.

i tried handling it inside bubble with database rules and searches, but it’s starting to feel slow and fragile. every time i fix one edge case, another one pops up.

stripe deposits are another annoying part. normal payments are fine, but security deposit holds / releases don’t feel clean with the usual setup.

for people here who’ve built rental or asset booking apps, did you actually build the availability engine yourself?

or did you use some dedicated rental backend / booking engine and just build the front end around it?

at this point i’m wondering if i’m being stubborn trying to build all the rental logic from scratch.