Drills, ladders and pressure washers lent by the hour from a society locker
TL;DR Lendcove puts a smart locker of good-quality tools inside a gated housing society. Residents book a drill, ladder or pressure washer in the app, open the locker with a code and return it the same day. The society hosts it for a revenue share, and residents pay per hour or monthly.
Most flat owners need a hammer drill a few times a year - to hang a TV, put up curtains or fix a shelf. Buying one means another box in an already cramped loft. Calling a handyman for a ten-minute job costs a visit fee and a wait. Borrowing from a neighbour works only if you know one who owns the right tool and happens to be home.
There's a lot of demand packed into small areas. The biggest society app alone says it serves more than 30,000 communities and 6 million homes across 50-plus cities[1]. Yet the big Indian rental brands stick to furniture, appliances and electronics, and the one I checked lists no tools at all[2].
The seed pictured neighbours renting tools to each other and I changed that. Peer-to-peer lending of a ₹3,000 drill earns the owner very little, and the borrower takes on trust and damage risk with a stranger. Sharing schemes that leave goods with the public can also lose stock fast - one Chinese umbrella-sharing service lost almost all of its 300,000 umbrellas within weeks in 2017[3]. So Lendcove owns the stock and keeps it in a locker that only it controls.
Each locker holds 25–40 tools chosen for that society, think drills with bit sets, a stud finder, folding ladders, a pressure washer, a carpet cleaner, a tile cutter and garden kit. You book through the app, pay a refundable hold and get a one-time code. Every tool comes back to a slot that reports its return, and a technician visits weekly to clean, charge and swap worn parts. Short how-to videos come with each booking, because the tool alone doesn't finish the job.
Residents pay, in two ways. It's per booking (my assumption is ₹99–299 for four hours, depending on the tool) or a monthly plan of ₹149–249 for frequent users. The society pays nothing. It gives up a corner of the clubhouse or basement and takes 10–15% of revenue, which RWAs can show members as a small income line. Facility managers in large societies are a second buyer for heavier gear.
Self-service lockers for borrowing things now run at scale elsewhere - one UK lending library of tools had about 34,000 members across 23 locker sites by September 2025[4]. In India, society management apps have trained residents to book clubhouses and pay dues on their phones, so booking a tool needs no new habit.
I found no published figure for tool rental to households in India. The narrowest sound number is the base of homes already living in managed, app-run societies, which is more than 6 million on one platform by its own claim[1]. Adjacent: that London operator grew from a 2014 grassroots experiment[5] to a 23-site network[4]. Treat both as signals that people will rent tools, not as a market size.
Hardware shops in some Indian cities rent heavy tools, mostly to contractors, with cash deposits and no booking. Consumer rental platforms rent furniture and appliances, not tools[2]. A Dutch platform runs neighbour-to-neighbour rental of tools and party gear[6]. One UK operator runs the operator-owned locker model in the UK[4]. Nobody I found runs tool lockers inside Indian housing societies.
| Difficulty | Moderate (37/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹40–75 L |
| Time to launch | 4–6 months |
The locker and the app are bought or built quickly. The hard parts are utilisation and upkeep. Each locker has to earn back its tools within a year, so you must pick tools that get booked every week. Damaged and unreturned items need a fair, fast deposit process, and weekly servicing across many societies is a field-operations job through and through.
No special licence here. We found no permit needed to rent hand and power tools to residents, so you only need the baseline.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI make the final call on charging a resident for damage. A person should look at the evidence first.
Want to work out the AI layer for Lendcove? Talk to Yash →
I like this for a founder who enjoys running physical operations and can sell to RWA committees. If you want a pure app business then it's a poor fit. Before you buy 20 lockers, prove that one 500-flat society books at least 40 times a month for three months running.
Plan for roughly ₹40–75 L, mostly for lockers, tools, the app and a field team to service them.
We found no sector licence. You need company registration, GST once you cross the threshold, a Shops and Establishments registration and DPDP compliance for resident data.
Yes. A UK operator already runs locker sites, and the model fits wherever people live in dense apartment blocks.
The free Lendcove validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the data and platform rules checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for residents and RWAs, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Lendcove or something close to it? The make-or-break work is choosing tools that get booked weekly and keeping every locker serviced, and I help founders test exactly that kind of thing. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.