In the spring of 2024, I was planning a multi-week RV trip with my family. Mapping the route was easy. Finding parks that actually had availability turned into days of work, calling individual campgrounds, getting voicemails, leaving messages, comparing handwritten notes against a spreadsheet. The booking experience for the modern American RVer felt stuck somewhere around 2007.
So I built RVParks.us, a discovery and trip planning platform for the 30,000+ campgrounds across the country. Real photos. Real reviews. A trip planner that understands you've got an RV and need to know if your fifth wheel will fit. It worked. Today, tens of thousands of RVers use it every month to plan trips.
But the deeper I got into the industry, the more I noticed a different problem. The campgrounds themselves, the small, family-run ones that make American RVing what it is, were getting squeezed by their own software vendors.
One operator told me he was paying $4,200 a year for software, plus 3% of every booking. Another was on a 3-year contract she desperately wanted out of. A third said he just used a paper calendar and a Square reader because nothing online was worth the cost.
The two enterprise leaders, Booking Platform A and Booking Platform B, were chasing the big chains and the corporate franchise networks. The independents, the lakefront park your grandparents took you to, the mountain campground a retired teacher couple ran out of love, were getting overlooked, overcharged, or both.
I'm a small-business person at heart. Building RVParks.us was an indie operation. So building software for indie campgrounds felt right. Same audience. Same values. Same belief that a small park deserves great tools without being treated like an enterprise sales target.
Three principles we won't break.
1. Pricing stays public. If you can't see what something costs without booking a sales call, the company isn't on your side. Our pricing is on our pricing page. Forever.
2. We don't take a cut of your bookings. A reservation processed through our software arrives in your bank as 100 cents on every dollar (minus only Stripe's standard processing). We're not a marketplace skimming volume, we're software you buy.
3. The founder reads every message. If you write through the contact form, I personally read it. Sometimes that means I respond at 7am with coffee in hand. Sometimes it's 9pm after the kids are in bed. But there's no Tier 1 support agent in between us.
Who's Sean.
I grew up on family road trips that always ended at small campgrounds. I started RVParks.us as a side project that turned into the largest independent campground discovery platform in the country. Campground Management is the natural next chapter.
I'm not a venture-backed founder racing toward a billion-dollar exit. I'm building two products I believe in, for an industry I love, and I plan to do this for a long time.
If you're an operator considering this software, I'd love to hear what you're worried about. The honest version. Send me a note. If you'd rather talk than type, ask for my number in your message and I'll reply with it.