Rental management made simple for construction companies

Year

2020

2021

Industry

ConstructionTech

About the project

IronUp is a project management tool and a marketplace for construction companies to oversee all rental machinery and equipment from different suppliers.

Instead of keeping records in notes, construction companies can manage equipment in one web or mobile app — searching for suppliers of different equipment types, adjusting how many rental days are needed, checking costs, and reviewing contract conditions. Base Blocks developed the entire backend for this platform.

Development

Problem

Construction companies needed a single, reliable way to manage rental equipment from different suppliers—without relying on notes and manual tracking.

Before IronUp existed, construction companies, back office teams, and equipment suppliers faced significant challenges:

No centralized way to find and manage equipment.
Construction companies had no specialized marketplace to search for suppliers or leave requests for the equipment they needed.
No way to forecast rental pricing. 
There was no mechanism to estimate equipment pricing based on supplier region, lease term, or urgency, making it harder to plan and budget for rentals.
No centralized way to manage rental equipment. 
Managing already-leased equipment—extending or reducing rental terms, revising contracts, tracking equipment condition—relied on notes instead of one intuitive system.

Our process

Base Blocks partnered with IronUp to build a stable backend system for construction companies, back office teams, and equipment suppliers.

We built a backend system designed to work predictably across all three user groups, with code kept flexible enough to change or extend as priorities shifted over time.

What we built

01

Backend & infrastructure

We built a specialized marketplace where construction companies can leave requests for equipment and search for suppliers, along with an intuitive management system for already-leased equipment — covering term extensions or reductions, contract revisions, and equipment condition records. We also built a mechanism for forecasting equipment pricing based on the supplier's region, lease term, and urgency, with code built flexible enough to change or extend over time. Built with Spring (Boot, Data, Cloud), Hibernate, and PostgreSQL, with Auth0 for authentication and AWS (S3, Beanstalk) for infrastructure.

Results

IronUp turned scattered, note-based equipment tracking into a single backend system that works predictably for construction companies, back office teams, and equipment suppliers alike.

The specialized marketplace gave construction companies a direct way to find suppliers and request equipment, while the management system brought term extensions, contract revisions, and condition tracking into one place. The pricing forecast mechanism added a layer of predictability that didn't exist before, helping companies plan and budget rentals based on region, lease term, and urgency. Because the code was built to stay flexible, IronUp can keep changing and adding functionality as its priorities evolve.

We worked for Base Blocks over a fairly significant period of time - 6 months or so. We partnered with them specifically for back end development. Their team reported to our backend developer. They were great to work with - collaborative, skills matching as promised. I'd recommend the team to anyone looking for a strong development partner.

Garrett Schemmel

CEO at IronUp

Our approach

Building IronUp's backend meant working directly inside the client's team. Two engineers from Base Blocks joined IronUp's team, implementing the full functionality while also proposing the logic for forecasting rental prices across different equipment types. The entire system went from concept to finished product in eight months, helped by a client with prior experience managing technical teams and clear priorities from working in the construction industry.

Given the platform's reliance on marketplace functionality, equipment tracking, and price forecasting, we chose a technology stack built for a stable, predictable backend.