Fat Llama no longer exists as a brand. Sweden's Hygglo bought the company in August 2022 and retired the name on November 24, 2025. fatllama.com now redirects to hygglo.com. If a listicle sent you looking for it, this post covers what actually happened, with dates, and which rental platforms genuinely operate in Canada today.
Everything below was checked against live sources in July 2026, and this page is accurate as of July 2026. If you are reading it much later, apply the same skepticism to us that this post applies to everyone else.
What happened to Fat Llama?
Fat Llama was a London startup, founded in 2016, that let people rent out cameras, tools, and gear to strangers with insurance built in. Hygglo, a Swedish competitor, acquired it in August 2022 for about $41.5 million US, ran it as a sister brand for three years, then folded it into Hygglo on November 24, 2025.
The longer timeline, because the dates are the whole point of this post:
- 2016. Fat Llama is founded in London after its founders struggle to rent single use tools for an office renovation. It goes through Y Combinator in 2017 and positions itself as the first fully insured peer to peer rental marketplace.
- 2018. The company expands to New York and raises a $10 million US Series A led by Blossom Capital. For a few years it is the name everyone reaches for when writing about renting out your stuff.
- August 2022. Hygglo, a profitable rental marketplace from Stockholm, acquires Fat Llama for about $41.5 million US. The plan at the time is to keep the Fat Llama name running in the UK, the US, and mainland Europe. Sifted later published a candid account of how bruising the road to that sale was for the founders.
- November 24, 2025. The Fat Llama brand is retired. According to Hygglo's own transition page, fatllama.com moved entirely to hygglo.com, the Fat Llama app was replaced by the Hygglo app the week before, and users can now rent across all of Hygglo's markets: Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, the UK, the US, and Canada.
One genuinely good detail buried in the rebrand: fees went down. Fat Llama charged lenders a 25 percent commission and charged renters a 25 percent fee on top. Hygglo's model is a 20 percent lender commission plus a 10 percent renter fee, though some higher risk categories like cameras keep the 25 percent renter fee.
So this was not a collapse. Nobody lost their listings and no renters were stranded. It was a consolidation, and the service Fat Llama offered still exists, just under a name most Canadian search results have not caught up with.
Why do so many articles still recommend it?
Because most rental app roundups are written once and never maintained. As of July 2026, months after the brand stopped existing, pages across the web still recommend Fat Llama by name, and some recommend platforms that shut down years earlier. Search rankings reward pages that published early, not pages that stayed correct.
The clearest example is AlternativeTo's Fat Lama page, which at the time of writing still describes the service in the present tense as a fully insured rental marketplace. Among its suggested alternatives is Ruckify, a Canadian platform that dissolved in 2021. A page meant to help you find alternatives to a dead brand recommends another dead brand.
This is not really AlternativeTo's fault, and it is not unique to them. The pattern is structural. Side hustle listicles get compiled from other listicles, a writer on deadline copies the same ten app names everyone else lists, and none of those names ever get rechecked against reality. The result is a search results page where the top answers to "fat llama alternatives" are effectively fossils.
The defence is simple and worth making a habit: check the date on the article, then click through to the platform before you plan anything around it. If the article has no date, treat it as old. If the platform's site will not load, has no listings near you, or shows prices in the wrong currency, keep moving. And if what you are actually deciding is whether to rent at all, that math has not changed since Fat Llama's day; our five uses a year rule covers it.
What happened to Ruckify?
Ruckify was Canada's own big swing at this model. The Ottawa startup, founded in 2017, burned through nearly $20 million, tried and failed to acquire Fat Llama in 2021, and its shareholders voted to dissolve the company that December. It still appears in rental app roundups today, five years after it stopped existing.
The details, reported by the Ottawa Business Journal, read like a compressed history of how hard this category is. Ruckify, founded by Bruce Linton and Steve Cody, had announced a plan to merge with Fat Llama that depended on two conditions: achieving a public listing by the end of November 2021, and raising $15 million US to buy out certain Fat Llama preferred shareholders. Neither happened. Linton, who had poured millions of his own money in to keep the company going, put it plainly: they could not get the listing, could not come to terms, and that meant it was over. Shareholders voted to dissolve the company in late December 2021. Eight months later, Hygglo bought Fat Llama instead.
There is no joy in that story, and Ruckify deserves credit for trying to build this in Canada years before it was fashionable. But it is a useful cautionary tale for reading the current landscape. Peer to peer rentals live or die on local density: enough items near enough renters that searches actually return results. Building that density nationally, with venture money, marketing spend, and a payments and insurance stack, is brutally expensive. What tends to survive is either a well capitalized international operator, which is what Hygglo is, or small local services with low overhead, which is most of the rest of the list below.
What can Canadians actually use now?
Hygglo runs a live Canadian site, and several homegrown options operate here: The Good Neighbour, Curba, nonprofit tool libraries, plus the informal routes through Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace. Each option in the table below was checked in July 2026. Fees are what the platforms publish; where they publish nothing, the table says so rather than guessing.
| Platform | Where it operates | What it covers | Fees |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hygglo | Canada wide site, plus the Nordics, UK, and US | Almost anything: cameras, tools, trailers, party gear | 20 percent lender commission plus 10 percent renter fee |
| The Good Neighbour | Cities across Canada | Tools and equipment | Not published on its site |
| Curba | Canada | Cameras, bikes, tools, outdoor gear | Not published on its site |
| Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace | Everywhere in Canada | Whatever people post; rentals are a small informal corner | None for basic listings |
| Toronto Tool Library | Toronto | Tools, from carpentry to welding | $85 a year membership, small maintenance fees on some tools |
| circld | Toronto and the GTA | Tools, gear, and everyday items | None. Free to list, no commission |
A bit more on each, honestly.
Hygglo Canada is the most direct answer to "what replaced Fat Llama," because it is literally the same company. The Canadian site is live, with listings priced in dollars, recent rental activity, and a default view centred on Toronto. Payments and insurance run through the platform, which is exactly what some renters want and what the fees pay for. Canada is a newer market for Hygglo than its Nordic home turf, so check what is actually listed near you before assuming the selection matches what the brand promises.
The Good Neighbour is a Canadian tool rental app that has been around long enough to earn coverage from CTV Atlantic, and its site lists regional support teams in Alberta, Nova Scotia, and British Columbia. Owners set their own rates by the hour, day, week, or month. Its fee structure is not published on its site, so ask before you book.
Curba pitches itself as a peer to peer rental marketplace for everyday items across Canada, covering cameras, bikes, tools, and outdoor gear, with verified users and bookings handled through the platform. Like The Good Neighbour, it does not publish its fee structure on its public pages, so the honest entry in the table is "not published" rather than a number we made up.
Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace are not rental platforms, but they are where a lot of Canadian renting quietly happens, because that is where the people are. There is no structure, no review process, and no record beyond your messages, so everything depends on your own judgment. They remain the benchmark for liquidity that every dedicated platform, ours included, is chasing.
Tool libraries are the option listicles always skip because there is no app to affiliate link. The Toronto Tool Library is a nonprofit running since 2012: $85 a year for borrowing from thousands of tools for up to seven days at a time, from its location on Spadina Avenue. If your rental needs are strictly tools and you live near a branch of any city's tool library, this is likely the cheapest option on this page, and the five uses rule math gets even easier in its favour. We priced its pressure washer against the store counter, the checkout aisle, and the neighbour down the street in the pressure washer post, and the library wins outright if you already hold a membership.
Where does circld fit?
Full disclosure, circld is ours, so read this section knowing exactly who wrote it. It is a new peer to peer rental marketplace for Toronto and the GTA. Listing is free, there is no commission, and circld does not process payments. You find an item, agree on price and dates in chat, and pay the owner directly.
The bet is different from Hygglo's, and it is worth being plain about the tradeoff. Hygglo mediates the payment and provides insurance, and charges 20 plus 10 percent for that service. That is a fair trade and some people should take it. What circld does instead is keep the transaction direct and free: no payment processing, no insurance, no held deposits, no cut of what you agree on. Every listing is reviewed before it goes live, and the practical ways to protect yourself in a direct rental, deposits you arrange yourselves, condition photos in the chat, meeting sensibly, are covered on the about page.
If you are in Toronto or the GTA and want to see whether the density is there for what you need, browse what people near you are listing, or start from a worked example: every way to rent camping gear in Toronto prices the neighbours against the shops, the gear libraries, and the park outfitters. If you are on the other side of the trade, sitting on gear that Fat Llama era listicles once promised would make you rich, start with the honest math in what your idle gear could actually earn, get a price estimate from the what is it worth tool, and the hosting guide covers what listing involves.
Whichever platform you land on, the lesson of this whole saga is the one at the top: brands in this category change hands, merge, and disappear faster than the articles about them get updated. Check the date, click through, and trust what is actually listed near you over what a 2022 listicle remembers.