How KeyProof works,
answered.

One tap pulls the full record: verified ID, signed agreement, before-and-after photos, the timeline. Hand it to your insurer or use it to back the charge on your deposit. You’re never stuck on your word against theirs. You decide what counts as new damage, every time: KeyProof records the before and the after and never scores them.

Your choice, per booking. Take the deposit the way you do now, cash or your own card machine, or let the link place a refundable hold on the hirer’s card like a hotel. The hold runs on your own Stripe account and settles to your own bank: KeyProof is not a payment processor and never sits between you and your money. Either way it is recorded alongside the verified ID, signed agreement and photos, so if there’s damage your proof sits right next to the deposit you’re charging against.

Yes, that’s one of the strongest things it does. Log the fine against the booking and the record already knows who had the car at that time, with their name, date of birth, address and signed agreement. To pass a fine on you generally need a signed agreement naming a verified person, with hire dates that cover the contravention; the notice itself sets the exact requirement. The record carries those details, so you can recharge the hirer or ask the issuing authority to transfer liability, and track it through to recovered.

Yes. One tap on the record mints a read-only link to that one hire: no account, no login, and it expires after 30 days. It carries the identity result, the licence check, the signed agreement and the photos. The DVLA share code never appears on it and the hirer’s contact details are withheld, because your insurer’s counterparty is you, not your hirer. Creating the link is stamped on the booking’s own timeline, so sharing is part of the chain of custody rather than something that happened off the record, and if a link goes to the wrong address you can revoke every live link on that booking at once.

No. A hire is held back from the deletion schedule for as long as a dispute on it is flagged, an insurance claim on it is open or with the insurer, or a fine on it is unresolved. The hold has no fixed length and nobody has to remember to apply it: it is read live from those three states, so it lifts by itself the moment the argument ends. A deletion attempted against a held hire is refused and tells you why.

No. Keep using Instagram, WhatsApp, cash, whatever you do now. KeyProof sits alongside it and captures the proof. Nothing about how you take bookings, payment or deposits has to change.

Rental management platforms move how you run the business onto their system, priced for fleets and onboarded over weeks. KeyProof keeps your own channels and your own agreement: hirers still reach you in your DMs, and you take payment and deposits the way you choose. Behind that it runs the calendar, your fleet’s dates, the money on each hire and one sealed record per hire: verified ID, licence check, signed agreement and condition photos. Live the same day.

No. It’s a link in the chat you’re already in. They complete it in the browser on their phone, then they’re back in the conversation. No app, no account.

Any of them. Run it from your phone, tablet, or computer in the browser, and install it like an app if you want. Your hirer only ever needs their phone.

Yes. Add your team with their own logins, so every handover they do lands in the same place, under your firm.

Yes. Alongside the proof, KeyProof runs an availability calendar per car, refuses an overlapping booking unless you explicitly confirm the clash (and writes the override to the hire’s timeline), keeps a record on every customer, and tracks the hire price, payments and balance on each booking. You can also subscribe your Google or Apple Calendar to a read-only feed of your hires. You still talk to hirers in your own channels, Instagram, WhatsApp, phone; KeyProof keeps the operation behind it straight.

Yes. Every vehicle carries its own status: MOT from the DVSA record, plus insurance, service and ULEZ, with a service log and a document vault for the paperwork (V5, insurance schedule, MOT certificate). KeyProof warns you before an insurance or service renewal is due, so a car never quietly goes out with something lapsed.

Yes. KeyProof records rate cards, invoices, deposits, fuel, mileage and running expenses against each car, then totals them into profit per vehicle and how many days it was out on hire. The car that looks busy but loses money stops hiding. KeyProof never touches the money itself; you take it your own way.

Yes. A hirer who caused a problem goes on your own private blocklist so they cannot quietly book again. It is your list, kept to your firm, never shared or sold. You can see the full management side on the product page.

Not long, because there is nothing to install and no new system to learn: KeyProof works through a link you send your hirer. While the founding cohort is open it is a session rather than a project. One of the founders puts your cars, your rates and your own agreement wording in with you, then walks your first real hire through the link start to finish while you watch. You can be live the same day.

Yes, and it costs nothing extra. Once your account is set up you get a public KeyProof page at your own address, plus a badge you can put on your site or in your Instagram bio, that states you verify hirers through KeyProof. Be clear on what it is: it states what you do. It is not a certification, KeyProof does not vet, approve or rate your firm, and the page says so itself. It carries no hirer data and no booking numbers, just your firm and the fact that you run the checks.

We make no promise on your premium: what you pay is between you and your insurer or broker, and anyone who guarantees a discount is guessing. What KeyProof gives you is the thing insurers and claims handlers actually ask for after an incident: dated proof that you verified the hirer’s ID and licence, captured the car’s condition at both ends and had the agreement signed. A firm that can produce that on every hire is an easier risk to write and an easier claim to defend than one relying on a photocopied licence in a drawer. Whether it shows up at renewal is your insurer’s call, but it is exactly the evidence the conversation turns on.

A flat £4.99 verification fee, paid by the hirer when they check in, covers their identity check, so it costs you nothing per hire. The licence check is separate and free: it is your own check of the hirer's DVLA share code on gov.uk.

The £4.99 verification fee is the hirer’s, and it is shown to them plainly before they pay, so it is never a surprise later. It covers their own identity check; the licence check is separate, free, and yours to run on gov.uk. You never pay it and you never chase it: if a hirer will not pay it, they do not complete the identity check, and you decide from there whether the keys move, exactly as with any hirer who will not verify. Because they agree to it up front, before a penny is taken, there is nothing to dispute after the fact.

KeyProof's private beta opens in November, ahead of its public launch in January 2027. The founding operators in the beta use the platform free until then, and their hirers pay their own £4.99 verification fee at check-in, as they will after launch. Plans and prices are published at launch.

No, and that is deliberate: there is no lesser version to be on. Every hire, on every car, runs the full evidence standard. The condition record is a set of 6 shots, taken at handover and again at return, and the car is not marked out until the set is complete; an override is written on the record. The hirer initials the extra hire terms one by one before they can sign: the mileage cap, no track use, the agreed territory and the damage excess. And the agreement is hash-sealed at signing with every photo timestamped. The one thing you set per car is the default deposit: give a high-value car a higher default and every booking on it starts from that figure.

Yes, on any booking and on every tier. Log each named driver against the hire with their licence details, so the record matches who was actually allowed behind the wheel rather than just the person who paid. To be exact about what that is: you check the extra driver’s licence at handover as you do now and record them, and KeyProof does not run its own check on them. The ID and licence checks in the link are for the hirer who books.

The records are yours and you can export them whenever you want. The part worth knowing is that KeyProof does not hold your hirers’ identity documents at all. The photo ID and the selfie go through Stripe as the regulated provider: Stripe holds the document and matches the face to it, and KeyProof stores the pass-or-fail result and a session reference, never the passport or licence image. So there is no folder of ID for you to protect and none for us to lose. KeyProof Ltd is registered with the ICO and carries its own professional indemnity and cyber cover with Hiscox, and every third-party service in use is listed publicly with what it handles and where.

Built to UK GDPR. You’re the data controller for your hirers’ data, and KeyProof acts as your processor under a data-processing agreement. We handle ID and licence data only to run the identity check, capture the share code and keep your record, nothing else.

It is minimised to what the check needs, and deletion is not a policy somebody remembers, it runs on scheduled code. A DVLA share code (or a declared non-GB licence number) is erased 30 days after signing. The whole booking record is deleted 24 months after the hire ends. The one exception is an evidence hold: while a dispute on that hire is flagged, or a claim or a fine on it is still open, the record is kept back from the sweep and released automatically once it closes, so nothing disappears in the middle of an argument and nothing outlives it. You can also export or delete any record yourself.

No, never. Take money your own way, cash, bank transfer or your own card machine, or run the deposit and the hire fee through the link, in which case they go direct to your own Stripe account and settle to your own bank. KeyProof is not a payment processor: it records the price, the payments and the deposit against the booking so your figures sit next to your proof, and it never holds a penny of yours.

Yes, and here is exactly what that gets you. From Bookings, one tap each gives you a bookings CSV and a customers CSV, built from the list the app has loaded, which is your 100 most recent hires and 200 most recent customers. From Money, a dated accounting ledger for a month, the last twelve months or everything, reading up to 500 hires and saying so in the file if it reaches that. Any single hire prints as a full record pack, or goes out as a read-only link that expires after 30 days. What there is not yet is one button that archives every sealed record and its photographs at once, so a full clear-out is a hire-by-hire job today. Hirer check-in data also deletes on its own schedule, so you are never holding sensitive data longer than the hire needs. The full position, including what happens when you cancel, is at keyproof.co.uk/the-hard-questions.

A fair question to ask a young company, and the answer is that you are not trusting us to still be here to get your data back. Your records are yours: export your bookings, customers and accounting whenever you like and keep your own copy. KeyProof never holds your hirers’ identity documents in the first place, Stripe does as the regulated provider, so there is no folder of passports and licences here to be stranded. The operator agreement lets either side end it on the other’s insolvency, and every termination carries the same 30-day window to export. What we will not claim is an escrow or a third-party guarantee, because there is not one. Take a copy at month end and the question stops being ours to answer. Set out in full at keyproof.co.uk/the-hard-questions.

No, to both. KeyProof is not an insurer: it underwrites nothing, pays no claim and never decides who is at fault. It has no connection of any kind to the Motor Insurance Database, so your vehicles and your policy sit there exactly as they do today, recorded by you and your insurer. What it changes is what you can prove: who was driving and how you know, that the licence check was run and when, your own agreement signed and sealed, and timestamped condition photos at both ends, in one record you can send to a handler on a read-only link. Your own cover and its terms stay between you and your broker. KeyProof carries professional indemnity and cyber insurance of its own, which backs KeyProof’s work and insures nobody else. The longer answer is at keyproof.co.uk/the-hard-questions.