Help & knowledge base

DumpsterVibes is booking and operations software for roll-off dumpster rental, junk removal, and portable toilet companies. You get an online booking page, a driver app, dispatch routing, automatic customer messages, weight-ticket billing, and payments — everything to take a job from booked to paid. It's built and run by a working hauler.

Sign up and connect Stripe (that's where your money lands). While Stripe verifies your business, work through the setup checklist: your business profile, your sizes and prices (or the starter template), your service area, your booking calendar (days open and a daily cap — the standard one is a single press), your sales tax (a rate, or that you don't charge it), and your customer terms & conditions. A wasted-trip fee and a disposal site are recommended too. When every required step is done and Stripe has cleared you, press Go live: your booking page then opens at your own link, plus a Book Now button you can paste on any website. Typical setup takes about 20 minutes. Card payments switch on once Stripe approves your account, on Stripe's timeline.

Starting fresh is fine: your bookings history isn't needed to run day one. What matters is your customers, the cans you have out at job sites, and the balances customers owe you. From your old tool, export your customer list (name, phone, email, address; a balance owed column if it has one), your open rentals or the cans currently out (customer, address, can number, size, the day it went out, the pickup date if one is booked), your open invoices or balances, and your price list (you'll set prices in setup). Then either do it yourself, free, in Tools → Import Your Data: CSV or Excel files, we match the columns for you (Customer Name, Mobile # and so on), show the first rows with any problems before anything is saved, and remember the matching for next time. Each can already out comes in as a rental already delivered, marked Imported, with no delivery stop and no charge, and your availability counts it as out. Balances owed come in as opening balances, and imports never carry the DumpsterVibes fee. Or let us do it: Support → Move My Data. Upload your files to a private area only your company and our team can open (never email them, and never send us your old software's password), add a note about what's missing, and press Start my move. It's free for founding companies; otherwise it's $99, one time, added to your platform fees when the move is done (outside the monthly maximum). If we can't move your customers and cans, there's no charge. If your old system can't export everything, fill in our simple Cans out, Customers or Open balances sheets, or send PDFs, printouts or screenshots: we read the tables out and check every row with you before it goes in. In your first 30 days your drivers can also record a can on site in the driver app (number, size, location and a photo), and you attach the customer from the Confirm imported cans list. Your files are deleted 30 days after the move is done, or straight away if you ask.

Yes. In Settings → Services & Pricing → Enabled Services, turn on Junk removal and turn off Roll-off dumpsters. Your booking page, onboarding, and dashboard adapt to junk-only — you set your load prices and go live with no roll-off dumpster sizes at all. You can also run both from one account.

Yes. Settings → Service Area & Yards → Main & Additional Yards lets you add each depot (address is geocoded). Every yard shows as a home pin on your dispatch map; your primary yard still drives mileage pricing and route mileage.

No. Customers book on your page in a few minutes with no login, and get a private tracking link by email, and by text once you've connected your own text number (until then your team texts from their phones). Nothing to download — that keeps your booking conversion high.

2.9% of each transaction until your month's platform fees reach $79/month in platform fees, then 0.69% on everything after, up to $199 a month in platform fees, however it's paid (card, ACH, Cash App, cash, check, pay on delivery or net terms). Your fee month resets at midnight on the 1st in your company's time zone. No monthly fee, no per-user or per-driver fee, no contract. Unlimited trucks, cans, and staff. On payments made through Stripe (card, bank transfer, Cash App) the fee comes out of the payment itself. On cash, check and other offline payments it's charged to your card or bank account on file once a month. A month with no jobs costs nothing. One exception: a donated rental past your monthly allowance carries the platform fee on what the rental would have cost (nothing once your month's fees reach the maximum). Your DV website is included, on its own free yourcompany.dumpstervibes.com address. A custom domain (like yourcompany.com) is not included: you buy it in your own name and we connect it.

When the owner books a rental as a donation, the customer pays $0. Each company has a monthly allowance of fee-free donations, and the office is shown how many are left before booking one. A donation past the allowance carries the usual platform fee on what the rental would have cost, decided once when it is booked and charged to the card or bank account you keep on file with us, like a cash job. Once your platform fees for the month reach the $199 maximum, donations are free for the rest of that month, however many you book. Nothing that happens later on a donated rental carries a platform fee: extra days, overage, extra charges or a swap, even when the rental runs into the next month. What you bill your customer for those is yours to set.

Yes. No platform fee on anything booked in your first 60 days after you sign up — judged by when a job is booked, so one booked inside the trial for a later date stays free — rentals, junk or portable toilets. Settings shows the last free day. Card processing is Stripe's, paid by you on your own Stripe account, and separate from the platform fee.

Yes — an optional Settings toggle adds a disclosed card fee, shown as its own line. It applies to credit cards only: there is no fee on debit or prepaid cards, or on a bank transfer (ACH). It is capped at 3% of the payment and never more than Stripe charges (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction) — set it lower any time. Check your state's rules before turning it on, since some states restrict surcharges.

Yes. In Settings → Service Area & Yards, open “What we offer here” on any ZIP. Untick a roll-off dumpster size, compactor, junk load or toilet unit and online booking stops offering it at addresses in that ZIP; the customer is shown what is offered there instead. Your office and drivers see a warning and can still book it, recorded with their name. “Extra here $” gives one size its own extra for that ZIP, folded into the price like the area's in-can $ (blank keeps the area's). Save to that ZIP, or to every ZIP in its city or county. Your website's city pages and ZIP check show those prices.

Record the check number if you like, so everything stays on the books. Mark a cash or check job paid in the office and the platform share accrues on your dashboard. That money never passed through Stripe, so it comes out of your next customer card and bank payments, never more than half of any one payment, with no processing added. If nothing has been collected from you for 30 days, what you owe is charged automatically, once, to the card or bank account you keep on file with DumpsterVibes (Tools → Platform Fees → Billing). The processing on that charge is yours and is added on top (2.9% + $0.30 on a card, 0.8% (at most $5.00) on a bank account); it doesn't count toward the monthly maximum. A balance under $5.00 isn't charged; it carries forward until it reaches $5.00. If that charge fails, it isn't retried on its own: DumpsterVibes contacts you. Want it settled sooner? Press Pay under Platform fees any time.

Each payment is made on your own Stripe account and pays out to your bank on Stripe's standard schedule (typically about 2 business days). You pay Stripe's processing fee on your own account. DumpsterVibes takes only its small platform fee, as part of each payment — no invoices to chase. Fees on cash and check jobs are charged to the card or bank account you keep on file with us (Tools → Platform Fees → Billing), with that charge's processing added.

Settings → 'Open my Stripe dashboard' — payouts, disputes, bank details, tax forms, all of it. Your Stripe account is yours, with its own Stripe sign-in; DumpsterVibes just connects to it. An older connection made before October 2026 has no sign-in of its own and opens straight in from that button until you reconnect.

The platform follows the same steps every time. 1) A card is declined: the customer gets their pay link by email, and by text once you've connected your own text number (until then your team texts from their phones), and the charge lands in Failed payments (Invoices → Failed payments); your office is alerted once, and it stays on your weekly summary until it is resolved. 2) Automatic retries: a soft decline (like insufficient funds) is retried on the card up to 3 times — 1, 3 and 7 days after the decline, between 10am and 5pm your time. A lost, stolen or blocked card is never retried, and neither is a charge the customer has a pay link open for. 3) Reminders: the customer is reminded 3, 7 and 14 days after the decline (email, plus a text within your texting hours once your own text number is connected), each with the pay link; net-terms invoices get a reminder 3 days before due, on the due date, then 7, 14 and 30 days late. Every send is on the customer's message log. 4) Your office can press Retry card, or Charge another saved card, on the Failed payments row or the booking's charges. 5) At 30 days unpaid the row says Consider write-off. 6) Write off asks for a reason (required), puts the charge on a bad-debt invoice in one step and takes it off the chase list; the write-off report (Reports) prints the reason. If QuickBooks is connected and the money was posted there as an open invoice, the write-off posts as a credit memo on your chosen bad-debt item. 7) Reinstate (Invoices → Bad debt) puts it back as owed, reverses the QuickBooks write-off, and the customer can pay the invoice normally. Every step stops by itself once the balance is paid, voided, marked not owed or written off. Retries and reminders are on by default and can be changed or switched off under Settings → Payments & Invoicing → Unpaid Balances. Optional, off by default: a monthly administrative fee, a monthly finance charge (a percentage, never compounded, with an optional cap), a returned-payment fee, and blocking online booking for a customer who owes more than an amount you set. Fees are printed in your customer terms and on every invoice and pay page, and only apply to balances created after the customer accepted those terms. State laws limit late fees — your rates are your responsibility.

Flag a customer as 'invoice' terms on any of their bookings. Their jobs then skip card-at-booking; at month end (or anytime) merge their bookings onto one invoice — or hit Batch-invoice to bill every net-terms customer at once. They pay the invoice link by card by default — you can enable bank transfer (ACH) for an individual customer from their profile — or you record their check.

Yes — the special pricing matrix sets per-size prices for any customer (contractors, municipalities). Their pricing applies automatically whenever they book, on every channel.

Card payments on your bookings are screened automatically by Stripe's fraud tools. The booking checkout collects the customer's billing ZIP and card security code (CVC), and by default a card that fails either check is declined. You can turn either rule off under Settings → Payments & Invoicing; if you do, you accept the added risk. Screening cuts fraud but can't catch everything, and card networks don't verify the cardholder's name. You're the settlement merchant, so disputes and chargebacks on your sales are yours, and DumpsterVibes isn't liable for fraud on them (Terms §14). Suspicious order? Message us from Support. Reviewing odd orders and checking identity at delivery stays with you.

A customer books online and pays; the booking confirms itself, the delivery job lands on your driver's Today list, the customer is updated at every step by email, and by text once you've connected your own text number (until then your team texts from their phones), weight tickets settle overage billing, and money lands in Stripe. Your dashboard is Dispatch, Map, Bookings, Inventory, and Reports.

Settings gives you a Book Now snippet — paste one line of code on any site (yours, Wix, WordPress, a Facebook button) and it opens your booking page as an overlay. Or just share your booking link directly. Both come with every account — no website plan or surcharge needed.

Customers → Blocked from online booking (top of the page). Add their phone, email, name, or address and they'll see a 'please call us' message instead of a checkout. You can still book them manually from the office if things get resolved.

Every booking shows Job economics: what you collected, minus dump costs (weight-ticket disposal deducts automatically), minus any expenses you or your driver logged — fuel, labor, landfill fees on junk. Amount earned, in green or red.

Reports → Sales tax & tax packet: pick any date range and download everything — bookings, charges, expenses, weight tickets, mileage, platform fees — plus a QuickBooks-ready journal with income positive and dump costs negative. Your accountant gets one clean folder.

Turn it on in Settings and load your price table. Customers book with an estimated load size; your crew builds the real price at the curb, the customer signs it on the driver's phone, and the card on file is charged — never more than what they approved. You can require a deposit or place a hold for the full estimate.

Hold mode reserves the full estimate on the customer's card at booking without charging it. At the job you capture exactly the signed final — never more than the hold. Good protection on bigger junk jobs; card holds last about 7 days, so it fits jobs booked within a week.

Yes — your crew re-quotes on the spot with the same price table the customer saw online, the customer approves and signs, and the job proceeds. Nothing is hauled or charged until they've signed the number.

They can send a request, but they don't pay online. With portable toilets turned on, your booking page takes porta requests (a Portable toilets tab, or the whole page for a porta-only company) where the customer gives the site, the dates, how many standard, ADA and hand-wash units, and how often to service them. Your team gets a text, the request lands under Availability → Portable toilets → Requests, and you call the customer to confirm units, schedule and price, then book it from the office. Nothing is charged or held online.

A Today list in the exact order the office set — deliveries, pickups, junk jobs, dump runs, and yard returns — every stop has its own Go button: one tap to navigate, one tap to open. Stops complete with a can PIN and photo; junk jobs collect the customer's signature on the final price before charging. On pickups, deliveries (porta too) and junk jobs, Restart this task is in the stop's Task menu.

Dispatch (from your Overview page) shows the day as color-coded tiles — deliveries green, pickups amber, junk orange. Reorder them, drop in landfill runs and yard returns, or hit Optimize to auto-order the day shortest-drive-first from your yard. Save, and your driver's phone runs it in that order.

Yes, when your driver taps Navigate and chooses to notify the customer. We ask Google for live traffic on that one drive and apply it to the truck's own road time, so Dispatch and the task show "ETA 10:42 AM (with traffic)", the stops after it in that driver's order, up to the next landfill or yard trip, get times that carry the same delay (nothing is re-ordered), and when the driver's phone shares its location the customer's on-the-way text says about how many minutes away the truck is. A second tap within 10 minutes reuses the first reading. If Google can't answer in time, the ETA comes from our own road map and shows without "(with traffic)". Only the two map points are sent to Google, never a name or address. The maps app your driver uses has its own live traffic.

Yes. Mark Saturday as a no-pickup day: deliveries keep running, but pickup scheduling automatically avoids it.

Your driver picks the truck and punches the odometer at rollout and day's end. It feeds a per-truck mileage report and a year-end CSV your accountant will actually like — plus DOT inspection and driver medical-card reminders.

Booking confirmation, day-before reminder, driver-on-the-way with live truck tracking, receipts, and rental-end reminders — and every one names your company. They send from your own Twilio number once you connect it in Tools → Connected Services → Your Text Number; Twilio bills you directly and your number needs its own carrier (A2P 10DLC) registration. Until you connect one, you text customers from your phones: Notify opens Messages with the text written, and the automatic texts are not sent (the emails still go). Replies to your number land in Dashboard → Inbox.

When a customer texts your company's number, the conversation shows up in Dashboard → Inbox and on the customer's page as a thread. Reply by typing a short service message about their order, visit or bill, or pick a ready-made template. Typed texts go from your own number (or open Messages on your phone if you have none), only to customers who agreed to texts, never after a STOP, and never for offers or promotions — those need marketing consent and carrier approval.

First, Tools → Connected Services → Your Text Number: with no number of your own, automatic texts are not sent, and once connected, Check my setup shows whether replies reach you and whether your carrier (A2P 10DLC) registration is approved — carriers block unregistered business texts. A customer who replied STOP gets no texts until they reply START, and one who left the text-consent box unticked at checkout gets none either. Automatic texts also wait for daytime on the customer's own clock; if we can't tell their time zone, confirm it on their page. Also check the number on file is a mobile number.

If a customer replies STOP, texting to them shuts off immediately and — by law — only they can turn it back on by replying START. The platform enforces this automatically, keeping you clear of TCPA trouble.

Set your default rate, then override per zip for city/county differences. Flag tax-exempt customers (municipal, nonprofit) on their profile, and bookings your office or a driver enters for them carry no tax. The online checkout still charges tax, because a guest checkout can't prove who is booking — so book exempt customers from the office. Every booking snapshots its rate for clean records.

Yes — Settings → Branding lets you upload your logo and pick a brand color. It carries across your dashboard, driver app, and the header of your booking, status, and pay pages.

Not on your pages, documents or messages. Your booking page, its forms and town pages, the status, pay and card pages, invoices and receipts (on the web and as PDFs), the customer portal, and the emails and texts your customers get carry only your company's name, logo and colors: no DumpsterVibes name, logo or credit, and nothing to switch on. Each of those pages links an accessibility statement written in your company's name. The addresses of those pages are on dumpstervibes.com, since that is where they are hosted, and the website we build for you shows no DumpsterVibes credit. At checkout, next to the signature, customers get links to the booking platform's Terms and Privacy Policy, because they agree to them as they sign. The DumpsterVibes driver and customer phone apps keep their own name.

Yes — flip 'List my company in the marketplace' in Settings and you appear at dumpstervibes.com/find, where customers search their ZIP and see the local companies that serve them, closest first, with a link straight to your booking page. It's free and optional.

Yes, two ways. Build it yourself for free: Tools → Website & Booking → Your DV Website makes a full website on a free DumpsterVibes address, filled in from your settings, that you edit yourself. Or have it done for you: we write and set it up, you approve it, and the paid website plan starts only then (see the Websites page for the price). Keeping your own site instead? The Book Now button is included with every account.

Your website works on a free address like yourcompany.dumpstervibes.com. An address of your own, like smithhauling.com, looks established, fits on trucks and cards, and is yours for good. You buy it in your own name from a domain company (DumpsterVibes sells no domains and earns nothing on them), then connect it here. About $12 a year and 15 minutes. Step 1, pick a name (5 minutes): • Short and easy to say on the phone: smithhauling.com beats smiths-roll-off-dumpster-rentals-llc.com. • Spelled the way people hear it: no numbers or odd spellings ("4U", "Xpress"). • No hyphens: people forget them. • A .com if you can get it. If it's taken, add your town (smithhaulingmacon.com) or a word (smithdumpsters.com, gosmithhauling.com). Use .net or .co as a last choice. • Make sure the name isn't another company's brand name or trademark. Step 2, buy it (5 minutes, about $10–20 a year) at any of these: Cloudflare Registrar (about $10–11 a year), Porkbun (about $11–12 a year), Namecheap (about $11–16 a year), Squarespace Domains (about $20 a year). 1. Type your name into the search box at the domain company and pick the .com. 2. Choose 1 year and turn on auto-renew, so you never lose it by accident. 3. Keep privacy (WHOIS protection) on. It's free at all four, and hides your home address and phone from the public list of owners. 4. Say no to the extras: hosting or a website builder, an "SSL certificate", premium DNS, SEO tools. Your website, its padlock and its hosting come with DumpsterVibes. Email is optional and separate. 5. Use your business email and a strong password, and turn on two-step sign-in. This account controls your website address. 6. Pay. The name is yours within a few minutes. Watch the renewal price: some companies charge $1–5 the first year and $20–30 after. Step 3, connect it (5 minutes, then a short wait). In your dashboard: Tools → Website & Booking → Your DV Website → Your website address. 1. Here, under Your website address, type your new name (for example smithhauling.com) and press Connect my domain. 2. We find where your domain is managed and show the exact two or three records to add: a CNAME for www, sometimes a TXT that proves the domain is yours, and a forward from the bare name to www. 3. Open your domain company in another tab and add them. Copy and paste each value exactly: one typo stops it working. 4. Come back and press Check again. Most domains connect within 5–30 minutes; some take a few hours, rarely up to 24. 5. When it says Live, your website is on your own name. The padlock (https) is set up for you. Where to add the records: Cloudflare Registrar: Open your domain, then DNS → Records → Add record. For the CNAME, click the orange cloud so it turns grey (DNS only). Forward: Rules → Redirect Rules, sending the bare name to https://www.yourname.com. Or ask us and we'll walk you through it. Porkbun: Domain Management → your domain → DNS, then add each record. Forward: URL Forwarding on the same domain. Namecheap: Domain List → Manage → Advanced DNS → Add new record. Forward: Add a URL Redirect Record for @ on the same Advanced DNS page. Squarespace Domains: Your domain → DNS → Custom records → Add record. Forward: Domain forwarding for the bare name. What doesn't change: • Your email. We never touch your email records (MX, SPF, DKIM); we only ask for the records above. • Your free address keeps working and forwards to the new name, so links you've shared and your Google listing carry over. • Your booking, prices and texts keep working with no changes. If it doesn't connect: • Still waiting after an hour: Check the CNAME value for a typo. On Cloudflare, make sure the cloud is grey (DNS only). • "Domain points somewhere else": An old www record is still there. Delete it and keep only ours. • The bare name (without www) doesn't open: Add the forward from @ to https://www.yourname.com. • You bought the domain years ago and don't know where: Search the name on lookup.icann.org to see which company holds it, then use "Forgot password" there. • Stuck at any point: Message us from Support with your domain name and we'll tell you exactly what to change. Optional: for you@smithhauling.com, get email from Google Workspace (about $7 per user a month) or Microsoft 365 (about $6). They walk you through adding their records; those don't affect your website.

Only you, until you publish it. A website made with Create my website (Tools → Website & Booking → Your DV Website) starts private: visitors to its address see "This website isn't published yet", and search engines are told not to list it. You and your admins see the real site by pressing Preview my website or opening the editor. When it's ready, press Publish my website and it goes live for everyone; Unpublish makes it private again. A done-for-you site stays private until you approve it.

Yes — every account on DumpsterVibes uses it: owners, office staff, drivers on the app and the web, and platform admins. Pick an authenticator app (the strongest), a code by text, or a code by email if texts don't reach you. You'll be asked on a new device; tick 'Trust this device' and that phone or computer won't ask again for 30 days. Payout changes, giving money back to a customer, team and role changes and webhook secrets ask for the code again. Save the recovery codes you're shown at setup. Lost your phone? Use a recovery code, or ask your owner (Team → the person → Reset two-factor) or DumpsterVibes support to reset it. Your customers never need an account or a code.

From Support → Cancel account (owners only). There's no contract. Requesting cancellation starts the clock right away: you keep full access for 30 days to export your records, then the account is suspended for 15 days, then its working data is wiped. Any platform fees you still owe are charged at once to your card or bank account on file (or your Stripe balance, if that's how you pay platform fees). Press "We're staying" during the export window to undo it; after that, support can still reinstate the account until the wipe. We'd love to hear why in the suggestion box first.

We build and test to WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the standard used for the ADA. On the dashboard, your name → Accessibility changes text size, contrast, link underlines, button size, font and motion for that browser; your booking page and customer status page have the same menu, and the phone apps follow the phone's own accessibility settings. Our accessibility statement at dumpstervibes.com/accessibility says what it covers, what we know is not perfect yet, and how you or a customer of yours can get help.

Support has a direct message thread to the people running the platform, plus a suggestion box — many features in here started as one of those. Email works too. A real person answers, because a real person runs this.