The four questions that come after the demo. Answered straight.
Nobody signs a management app because the screens are nice. They sign once they know what happens when it goes wrong: whether it touches their insurance, what they are left holding if they leave, what to do when the check will not pass with a customer standing at the car, and who they are actually dealing with. Four answers, and every one of them is checkable.
Who insures the hire, and does this touch my policy?
Nothing changes. Whoever insures your hires today insures them tomorrow, on the same terms, and KeyProof is not part of that arrangement. It is software you run your hires through, not a policy, not a broker and not a party to your cover.
- KeyProof is not an insurer. It underwrites nothing, pays no claim, and never decides who is at fault. You decide what counts as new damage and whether to pursue it, on every hire, and KeyProof records what happened without scoring it. That is a fixed position, not a feature we have not got to yet.
- The Motor Insurance Database is untouched. KeyProof does not write to the MID, does not read from it, and has no connection to it of any kind. Your vehicles and your policy are recorded there by you and your insurer exactly as they are today.
- Your money stays yours. KeyProof is not a payment processor and never holds hire money or a deposit. Take the deposit your own way, or run it through the link, in which case it goes to your own Stripe account and settles to your own bank.
- Your policy sets who you accept, and the link respects it. Where a licence was issued is the first licence question the hirer is asked, and your firm’s setting decides which origins you take: Great Britain only, GB plus EU and EEA, or worldwide with your own check at handover. Some UK hire policies restrict foreign-licence holders. That is a fact about your cover, so the rule is yours to set rather than ours to assume.
- The eligibility checklist is advisory, on purpose. You can set a minimum age, a minimum number of licence years and a maximum points count, and the booking carries them as a checklist, with the age worked out from the hirer’s own date of birth. It advises; it does not refuse. KeyProof never turns a hirer away on your behalf, because whether someone meets your policy is your judgement and your liability.
What a record is actually worth to a claim
When a claim goes in, it usually comes down to three things: who was driving and how you know, whether they were entitled to drive, and what condition the car went out in. A KeyProof record answers all three with dates rather than recollection: an identity check matched to a live selfie, the DVLA licence check recorded as run and when, your own agreement signed and hashed at the moment of signing, and timestamped condition photographs at both ends.
- It can go to a handler without an account. One tap mints a read-only link to a single hire that expires after 7 days. 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. Minting the link is stamped on the hire’s own timeline, and one action revokes every live link on it.
- Your handler does not have to take our word for it. Every printed pack carries the fingerprints it was sealed with, and anyone holding a pack can check them in their own browser, with no account and without contacting KeyProof.
- A hire under an open claim cannot be deleted. While a dispute on a hire is flagged, or a claim or a fine on it is open, the record is held back from the deletion schedule and released only when the matter closes.
What none of that does is decide the claim. A record makes your position provable; whether the insurer pays is between you and them, and no page here will pretend otherwise.
Our insurance is ours, not yours
KeyProof Ltd carries professional indemnity and cyber and data protection cover with Hiscox, in force since 30 July 2026. It backs the work KeyProof does and the systems that hold verification data. It is the company’s own cover and it insures nobody else: not your fleet, not your hires, not your hirers. The amounts and the detail are on the security page. If you ever see a verification supplier let their own indemnity cover stand in for yours, read the certificate.
If I stop paying, or you stop trading, what happens to my records?
This is the question the site has been quietly ducking. Cancel any time is on nearly every page; what it costs you is on none of them. So, plainly.
Cancelling
- Monthly rolling, no minimum term. You can cancel at any time, effective at the end of the month you have paid for. Cancelling does end a founding price permanently, and that is the only thing you lose that you cannot get back.
- Thirty days to take your records out. The operator agreement gives you a 30-day export window after the agreement ends. That window is in the contract you sign, before anything starts, rather than in a support reply after you have asked to leave.
- Then the retention schedule runs as normal. Evidence records are kept for 24 months from the end of the hire and then deleted in full, by scheduled code rather than by anyone remembering. A hire under a flagged dispute, an open or submitted claim or an unresolved fine is held back until that matter settles. Leaving does not delete a hire that is still in an argument, and staying does not keep one past its life.
What you can take out, and what you cannot
Better to be exact than reassuring, because you will find out either way. Today, from inside the operator app, you can pull:
- Your hires and your customers, as CSV. Two files, one tap each, from the Bookings room: each booking with its vehicle, hirer, dates, status, deposit, price, payments and balance, and each customer with their hire count and their first and last hire. Both are built from the list the app has loaded, which is the 100 most recent hires and the 200 most recent customers, so a long-established firm will not get its whole history in one file.
- Your money, as an accounting ledger. A dated CSV of hires, extras, recharged fines and logged costs, for a month, the last twelve months or everything, with a blank VAT column for your bookkeeper. It reads up to 500 hires, and when it reaches that it says so in the file rather than quietly handing your accountant a short total.
- Any single hire, as a printed pack or a share link. The full record for one hire prints as an incident pack, and any hire can be sent out as a read-only link that expires after 7 days.
- Everything your firm holds, as one uncapped file. The full-firm export: every booking, timeline event, named driver, fine, claim and customer note, in one JSON file with no row limit. It has no button in the app yet: while signed in as the owner, open keyproof.co.uk/api/fleet/export and the file downloads. Staff logins are refused.
- What there is not: one button that archives every sealed record and its photographs. The CSV and JSON exports carry the rows, not the condition photographs, and the pack is printed one hire at a time. If you want every photograph off the system, that is currently a hire-by-hire job. We would rather tell you that than let you find it out in your last week.
If KeyProof stops trading
A fair question to put to a company incorporated in July 2026 with two people in it, and the honest answer has two halves.
- The thing you would most fear losing is not held by us in the first place. Photo ID and the live selfie are collected and held by Stripe as the regulated provider. KeyProof stores the result of the check, never the images. There is no folder of passports and licences here to be stranded, which is a design decision that happens to answer this question.
- The agreement covers insolvency by name. Either party may terminate immediately on the other’s insolvency, and the same 30-day export window applies on any termination.
- What we are not going to claim. There is no escrow, no third-party data trustee and no guarantee from anyone else that your records would survive us. What there is: an export you can run yourself this afternoon, a written export window, and a company you can look up. Take a copy at the end of every month and the question stops being ours to answer, which is the version of this we would actually defend.
It is Saturday morning, the check will not pass, and they are standing at the car.
Not the customer who refuses. The one who is willing and cannot: the licence that will not photograph, the older customer who is not fluent with their phone, the person who has already tried three times while you watch. It happens, and there is a path through it that does not involve lying to the record.
- It is almost always the photograph, not the person. Glare on the plastic, a cut-off corner, a shot taken at an angle. Ask them to lay it flat in good light with all four corners in frame and go again.
- There is no attempt limit and no lockout. They can try as many times as they need. Going very fast can hit a rate limit for a few minutes, and that clears by itself.
- Nobody can tell you why it failed, including us. The provider returns one state, could not be completed, and KeyProof never receives the document or the selfie. So assume a capture problem, because that is what it nearly always is.
- Nothing has been charged. While the identity check is unresolved the rest of the check-in is not offered: no verification fee has been taken and no deposit hold has been placed. A failed check costs the hirer nothing.
- A returning customer has a shortcut. If they have hired from you before and that check is still inside your reuse window, their link offers their previous check. The record then carries the original check’s date, never today’s, so it reads honestly.
If you hand the keys over anyway
That is your call, and the product will not stop you. A tool that blocks at the forecourt does not stop the hire, it stops the record, and an honest imperfect record beats none. What it will not let you do is make that decision quietly.
- It asks you why, and it will not take a shrug. Moving the hire out of Sent and into On hire is refused until you type a reason. Write one a stranger could act on: which documents you inspected in person, how many attempts, whether they are a regular.
- The gap is written down, not painted over. An event goes on the hire’s timeline naming what is missing and quoting what you typed, and it prints on the pack. Nothing is fabricated to fill the space: no signature, no identity result, no licence check.
- Your photographs still count. Condition capture is yours and is unaffected by any of this. A hire with photographs at both ends and a written reason is a long way from a hire with a WhatsApp thread.
The best version of this problem is the one you never have: the link is a web page, no app and no account, and it is meant to be sent ahead so the checks are done before anyone is standing in a car park in the rain. The path above exists because that is not always how the morning goes.
Who are you two?
The rest of the site says “the two of us” a lot and never gets round to the names. There are two of us, we are not a department, and you will be dealing with one of us directly.
- Hadeed Iftikhar, co-founder. The commercial side. He grew up around East London’s hire firms, and the reason this product is built around a link dropped into a DM rather than a platform to migrate onto is that he has watched how these firms actually take a booking. If that is your patch, what the crossings cost you when a hire goes wrong.
- Khalid Mohamed, co-founder and CTO. Builds and runs the product: the code, the infrastructure, and the data protection work behind it. The impact assessments, the retention schedules and the deletion crons on this site are his, which is why they are mechanisms rather than paragraphs.
Neither of us is going to appear here in a stock photograph beside a job title. What we will do is put the things a stranger can verify in one place, which is the register on the security page: the company number at Companies House, the ICO registration, the insurance, every sub-processor we use, and a seal on any record that anyone can check themselves.
And the part we are not going to bury: no hire firm has signed KeyProof yet. The founding cohort is open, which is why you can still get a founder on the phone about a licence photograph that will not scan, and why the roadmap moves when a founding firm asks it to.
Ask us a harder one.
We would rather answer it now.
If there is a question about your own fleet, your policy or your handovers that this page does not cover, put it to us and we will answer it straight, including where the answer is no.
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