BoaterOS grew out of Fish Tale Boats · Fort Myers, FL · 3 locations — a working Gulf Coast dealership that was running its inventory, leads, and service across half a dozen disconnected tools and a legacy platform built in another era. Reps re-keyed the same buyer three times. The website never matched the showroom. Service margin lived in a spreadsheet nobody trusted.
So we built one backend that every hull, buyer, and work order could live in — and ran the whole dealership on it. When it worked at Fish Tale, other dealers asked for the same thing. BoaterOS is what we hardened to give it to them.
We are still a small, senior team of engineers, marine operators, and dealer-marketing people. Every one of us has either sold a boat, migrated a dealership, or shipped the code that runs one. That is the bar for working here.
"We never wanted to sell software. We wanted to run a dealership well — then let other dealers run on what we built."
Open-source tech you can trust, software shaped to the boating industry, and marketing that actually converts. Most platforms get one. We refused to ship without all three.
Marine retail is one of the last industries still stitched together by fax-era software and spreadsheets. Our mission is to retire that — to give every dealer a backend as good as the boats they sell, without an IT department to run it.
Every roadmap call gets weighed against one question: does this help a dealer sell or service a boat today?
We fight complexity. If a feature needs a manual, we redesign it until the principal can read it at a glance.
No vanity metrics. We measure results the way a CFO would — by close rate, margin, and time saved.
Switching off legacy software should never cost you a record. We do the heavy lifting, every time.