Hacker News Reader

Comment by hrktb | Hacker News Reader

I think the worst part is, even reading all the legalese, one can come under the impression it’s a legit company that tried to cover their users and will genuinely help in case of trouble.

View on HN

"Please note, however, that the insurance accepted on KitSplit is industry standard equipment rental insurance and does not cover some rare instances, such as if a renter commits fraud. These instances are extremely rare on KitSplit and happen less than 0.1% of the time, but we recommend that owners get their own annual policy with voluntary parting coverage in addition to the insurance provided by the renter."

Seems pretty clear to me that you are not in fact covered.

An interesting note here: 0.1% is 1 out of every 1000. This is not a insubstantially small number. This becomes even more alarming if it is rentals rather than “vetted parties”.

Seems like they should have a better process for this not so rare case.

For extra interest... 70 * 1000 / 3500 is 20, so assuming this person was to repeat their involvement and to replace any stolen cameras then they'd end up losing about 5% of their earnings through KitSplit to theft, that's a pretty atrocious rate and seems likely to be tied to why the company is so deadset against investing time into equipment recovery.

Taking that number at face value, it means that total revenue for renting 3500 USD worth of gear for 70 bucks a pop 1000 times is, statistically, 7000 USD. If KitSplit takes 22%, that leaves 5850 USD, and since the expectation is to lose the gear, that leaves 2350 USD in expected profit. Which is, I think, rather less than their users expect.

Edit: whoops, total revenue should be 70 k. Kind of a different result.

I wonder what % of dollars it is. Since they mentioned >$200k instances...

> some rare instances, such as if a renter commits fraud

That's still super weasely. Why not say: "if the renter fails to return your equipment?"

Oh, because that's horrifying and will scare everyone away.

And they brought up the 0.1% multiple times. The other person that also got scammed on SplitKit got the same canned response. Makes you wonder how much it actually happens if they have a canned response ready.

For the same reason they call getting robbed "voluntary parting"

What a laugh, hopefully I don't get "involuntarily punctured" during a "voluntary parting" gone wrong.

I wonder if that 0.1% number is legit.

If so, it seems like KitSplit could just tack a few bucks onto the fee and cover these types of thefts.

Assuming a $5K mean price and 0.1% incidence, that would be a $5 fee / rental to cover the expected loss.

Sure, the contract is clear, but according to the blogger the marketing site intentionally misleads by answering a specific question about voluntary parting by conflating the issue with rare damage so they can finish by indicating that they will "work with insurance companies to promptly fix or replace your item"

There's literally no reason other than intent to deceive customers to answer the question in this way

Reply on news.ycombinator.com