About
Baited is a booking platform made for the way fishing actually works — weather, tides, deposits, and a person on the other end. Not a generic tour tool that takes a cut of every trip.
01 Why we exist
Charter captains got handed the same booking software as zip-line parks and walking tours — software that skims a percentage off every booking and has no idea what a tide is. A good season just means a bigger bill. A blown-out forecast means a phone full of refund calls. And the tool that's supposed to save time keeps the captain on hold with a ticket queue instead of on the water.
Baited starts from the opposite place. The deposit is the captain's money, so they keep every dollar of it. The forecast and the tide are part of the booking, because on a charter they decide whether the trip sails at all. And when something needs a human, a human answers. The platform earns its keep by removing work, not by taking a cut.
02 What that means in practice
Each one comes straight from how a charter day runs — the deposit, the weather, the captain's own site, and the person they reach when it matters.
Deposits settle straight to the captain's own Stripe account with a literal $0 per-booking commission held back. The model is one flat subscription, with Stripe's processing passed through at cost — never a marked-up cut of the trip.
Anglers see the live marine forecast and the tide for a date before they lock it in. Fishing turns on conditions, so the conditions live inside the booking flow — not in a separate tab the captain has to check.
When a front rolls in, the captain moves the trip in a tap and the angler rebooks with no re-charge and no refund scramble. A blown-out forecast becomes a calm reschedule instead of a phone full of cancellations.
The booking widget is headless — it drops into the captain's existing site (React, Next, Astro, or plain HTML) and inherits its look. Customers book on the captain's brand, not on a marketplace that owns the relationship.
03 What we believe
Every decision is made for the captain running the business, not the marketplace in the middle. The captain owns the bookings, the customers, the manifests, and the payouts — and the platform surfaces the next action and the day's money without the hunt.
The price is one flat number, the booking fee is a literal $0, and Stripe's processing is passed through at cost. The captain's data and deposits are theirs, plainly. Nothing hidden, nothing skimmed, no junk line items.
Tides, marine forecast, and sea state aren't an add-on — they're built into the booking, the reschedule, and the captain's daily call. A fishing platform that ignores the ocean isn't a fishing platform.
04 What we're building next
Booking is the foundation. On top of it we're building Baited Intel — an offshore fish-intelligence hub that fuses sea-surface temperature, fronts, structure, and the dock's reported catches into one read for the day's run. It's decision support for a captain who already knows the water, never a black-box "fish are here" promise.
05 Where this comes from
Founder's note — placeholder, owner to edit
[PLACEHOLDER COPY — replace before launch.] This is where the founder's origin story goes: the dock, the captain, or the blown-out morning that made the per-booking fee feel absurd. A few honest sentences in the founder's own voice about why Baited got built and who it's for. Keep it plainspoken — a person talking to another person, not a mission statement.
See it for yourself
Founding-operator access is one flat subscription with a $0 booking fee. Or open the live sandbox — the actual widget against a sandbox operator, no account and no charges.