CrewJar
A cashless tipping platform for crew-based businesses. Charters, tours, dive shops. Built around how crews actually run, not how HR software thinks they should.
- StatusLaunched April 2026
- ScopeSolo, end-to-end product
- Timeline~3 weeks concept to ship
- UseLive with Sailing Saugatuck; open to operators
Cash is dying, but the workarounds are worse. Customers ask to tip cashlessly; every alternative creates a new mess.
At Sailing Saugatuck, the crew of Serenity started getting the requests last season. Venmo worked until it didn't: one person collecting, one person divvying, one person eating the tax bill at year-end. The handful of products built for “crew tipping” had bad UX or assumed a fixed roster, which is not how charters, tours, or guided trips actually run. These businesses are dynamic. People swap in and out across sessions, often the same day. Nobody had built the primitive: a tip flow that knows who is working today.
Cashless tips in by QR. Splits and payouts handled automatically. Built for crews who change every day.
CrewJar is a SaaS platform for any business that runs on tips. Operators set up crews and sessions in a dashboard. Crews onboard with a magic link and get paid directly via Stripe Connect. Guests scan a QR on the boat, the bus, the dock, the trailhead, and tip in under ten seconds with Apple Pay. The platform handles the splits, the fees, the tax paperwork, and the edge cases. Sailing Saugatuck is the first deployment; sign-ups open at crewjar.com.
Built with- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Supabase
- Stripe Connect
- Tailwind
Simple on the surface. Flexible and powerful underneath. A tip moves through CrewJar seamlessly, from setup to scan to payout.
The guest.
Scans the QR. Taps an amount. Apple Pay. Done in ten seconds. No app, no account, no signup.
A guest on a boat with patchy LTE has about ten seconds of patience. If you ask them to download anything, you lose the tip.
The operator.
Sets up crews and sessions in a dashboard. When the day's crew shows up, the operator picks who's working and starts the session. The QR knows who to pay.
Most operators run a small business with a thousand other things to do. The product can't add work to their day.
The crew.
Onboards once with a magic link and a Stripe account. After that, tips land in their bank, weekly. No collecting, no divvying, no end-of-year tax pain on one person's 1099.
This was the original problem. Solving it is the whole point.
Behind the curtain.
Underneath the simple surface: integer cents end-to-end, idempotent Stripe transfers, an append-only ledger, splits that always reconcile to the cent.
The kind of rigor a payments product needs but the user never sees. More in the appendix.
Launched April 2026 with the crew of Serenity, and ready for other operators from day one. Free for operators to sign up and use, the 4.9% platform fee rides on top of the tipper's total by default, so the product earns without costing the operator anything.
§ Stack and specifics for the builders in the room
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