Hostfully alternatives: comparing per-property pricing models

Two pricing pages can both print $25 and cost you different amounts. On one page, $25 buys a plan. On another, it attaches to each property, sits alongside a platform fee, and travels with a percentage of every direct booking. Neither page is hiding anything — they're answering different questions. The number you actually need, your effective total cost for a month of operation, isn't printed on either.

Hostfully is a useful starting point for this exercise because its published model combines three mechanics you'll meet across the market: a per-property rate, a platform fee, and — on its Growth plan — percentage fees on payments and direct bookings (as of July 2026, per Hostfully's published pricing). Among Hostfully competitors you'll find at least four other shapes: flat plans billed annually, quote-gated tiers, selector-driven plan prices, and per-room add-on modules.

This guide lays out what Hostfully publishes on its own pages, gives you a method for turning any pricing shape into one comparable number, and applies that lens to six Hostfully alternatives — ours included, clearly labeled.

What Hostfully offers, per its own pages

Hostfully's homepage hero reads "Where your whole vacation rental business comes together," with software that helps you "automate, simplify, and grow" — its words, retrieved July 2026. The site counts "62k+ Properties managed" and describes portfolios from "1 to 100+ listings." On the operations side, its published claims include a "Unified Inbox + InboxAI" and an automation pitch: "Free yourself from repetitive tasks." Advertised channels are Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and Homes & Villas, with "60+ channels" overall.

As of July 2026, per Hostfully's published pricing, plans attach to the property: Growth is "Starting at $15 per property per month" for 1–50 listings, and Pro is "Starting at $25 per property per month" for 1–199 listings — each billed alongside a platform fee (see Hostfully for the current amount). Growth carries two percentage lines: a 1% payment gateway fee and a 0.85% direct booking fee. Pro prints the reverse — "No payment gateway fee" and "No commissions on direct bookings." Enterprise is "Tailored for 200+ listings" with custom pricing; see Hostfully for current pricing. The pricing page doesn't mention a free trial.

For operators who answer to homeowners, Hostfully's owner-management page is headlined "Empower homeowners, on your terms": an owner portal where owners view bookings and financial statements, plus automatic owner reports. Trust accounting is not advertised as a native feature on its pages; it appears through integrations such as VRPlatform and Clearing. If owner money runs through your business, price that layer into every model you build.

How do you compare pricing models across vendors?

Per property pricing is common in vacation rental software, but it's one shape among several — and the shapes don't convert at a glance. The fix is to compute a single number per platform: your effective monthly cost, from your own portfolio. Five questions get you there.

1. What's the base, and what unit does it attach to? A plan, a property or a room. Multiply per-unit rates by your own count before setting them next to any flat plan price — the unit decides which is larger for you.
2. What scales when you grow? Re-run the math at the listing count you expect in twelve months, not just today's. Tier boundaries appear on most of these pages; crossing one can change the rate or the plan.
3. Which add-ons would you actually switch on? Modules, dynamic pricing, owner features — anything sold separately belongs in your total if you'd genuinely use it. Watch the unit here too: some add-ons price per property, others per room.
4. What percentage or per-booking fees apply, and to what volume? A percentage fee costs whatever your volume makes it cost. Apply each published percentage to your own trailing-year figure for the relevant base — payment volume, direct-booking revenue or owner payouts — and divide by twelve to put it beside the subscription.
5. What billing period, currency and tax treatment is the number quoted in? Annual-billing discounts, monthly toggles, multi-currency selectors and lines like "prices exclude VAT where applicable" all move the printed figure. Note which version you copied.

Run that once per vendor and you get one line each: base, plus per-unit rate times your units, plus the add-ons you'd enable, plus percentage fees on your own volumes — stated per month, on the same billing basis. At that point the line does the comparing, not the sticker price.

How we compared

Every competitor fact here comes from the vendor's own public pages — homepage, pricing page and feature pages — retrieved in July 2026, and quoted wherever the wording matters. Nothing comes from review sites or third-party roundups. Where a figure is quote-gated, we write "see the vendor for current pricing" instead of guessing. Where a capability doesn't appear on a vendor's pages, we write "not published" — a statement about the pages, not the product. One disclosure up front: PropertyStack is our platform. Its section comes first, holds to the same sourcing standard, and should be read knowing who wrote it.

PropertyStack: a base per property, plus the agents you switch on

PropertyStack, an agentic property management platform for short-term rentals, frames the job differently: AI agents do the work end-to-end — answering guests, scheduling maintenance, reconciling accounts — rather than just storing your data. You set guardrails and approval thresholds per agent, deciding what runs automatically and what waits for your sign-off, and the AI escalates to a human when something genuinely needs one.

Through this article's lens, the pricing shape has three parts: a platform base per property, plus the AI agents you switch on, plus a share of the new revenue the AI generates for you. Plans start at $50/month. On the percentage-fee question this article keeps asking: the revenue-linked component is that third line — a share of the new revenue the AI generates for you — and card processing runs through PS Pay, the built-in payments feature — current card rates are on the pricing page.

Trust accounting is part of the platform rather than a separate line item — built to be reconciled and audit-ready to your jurisdiction's standard. Booking channels are Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo, plus your own direct-booking site, and guest messaging runs across SMS, WhatsApp, email and an AI phone line in one inbox. If your shortlist is Hostfully vs PropertyStack, the effective-cost lines write themselves from the two published models — per-property rate, platform fee and, on Growth, percentage fees on one side; base per property, enabled agents and the AI revenue share on the other — computed on your own property count and volumes.

Guesty: size-tiered plans, mostly quote-gated

Guesty's published shape is tiers segmented by listing count, with figures mostly behind a sales conversation. As of July 2026, per Guesty's published pricing page: Lite is "Perfect for 1–3 listings" and carries a 14-day free trial; Pro is "Tailored for 4–199 listings" behind a "Get a quote" button; Enterprise offers "Solutions for 200+ listings" as a "Customized offer." One dollar figure appears, and only in the pricing FAQ: "We have packages that start from $9/month per listing." For the effective-cost method, the total comes from the quote — ask for it itemized, and see Guesty for current pricing. Context from its other pages: "The future of vacation rental management, built on AI" as positioning, "500K+ listings managed," channels from Airbnb through Homes & Villas by Marriott Bonvoy ("60+ channels" via direct API), and trust accounting sold as an add-on — a line for your model if you manage owner money.

Hospitable: flat plan prices, billed annually by default

Hospitable is the flat-plan case. As of July 2026, per its published pricing: Essentials has "No subscription fee," Host is $29 per month, Professional $59 and Mogul $99 — each billed annually, with a monthly toggle on the page and annual billing labeled "Save 12%." "Prices exclude VAT where applicable." The plan prices include a set number of properties, with a per-extra-property monthly fee beyond it; those counts render from an interactive table, so read the live page at your portfolio size. Two smaller lines belong in your model: Dynamic Pricing is an add-on at "$5/property" after a free period, and owner payout runs beyond one per month carry a "1.5% fee, capped at US$5." Owner features — portal, statements ("Periodic statements for owners with income and fees"), invoices and payouts — sit on the Mogul plan, where trust accounting is listed as "Coming soon." Note which billing toggle produced the number before it goes in your spreadsheet.

Hostaway: pricing by quote only

Hostaway is the shape you can't compute from the outside. As of July 2026, its pricing page is a multi-step "Get a free quote" form — no plans, no prices and no free-trial terms appear on the page — so see Hostaway for current pricing. Unpublished pricing tells you nothing about the product; it changes your process. Take the five questions into the quote and ask for an itemized answer — base, per-property scaling, add-ons, percentage or per-booking fees, billing period — so the result sits in the same column as the published models. Context from its other pages: the homepage calls it "The world's most loved AI vacation rental software," built for "thousands of successful vacation rental managers"; the features page lists "Financial reporting, owner statements, and owner portals" under a 15–49-listings segment; and trust accounting is not advertised as a native feature, appearing instead through marketplace partners such as Clearing and VRPlatform.

Lodgify: plan prices that move with a property selector

Lodgify prices per plan, but the plan price scales through a property-count selector on the page, quoted in EUR, USD or GBP — so part of the per-property arithmetic is done on the page. As of July 2026, per Lodgify's published pricing, annual billing (labeled "Save 20%") runs Basic $14, Starter $26, Professional $42 and Ultimate $62 per month; the same plans billed monthly are $18, $33, $53 and $77. On the percentage-fee question, Lodgify prints an answer: every plan is flagged "0% booking fee," and its pricing FAQ states, verbatim, "Lodgify does not take a cut of your bookings." There's a 7-day free trial with no credit card required. Owner features — "Owner payments, reports and statements" — appear on the Ultimate plan; trust accounting is not published on the pages we reviewed. Its pricing FAQ frames the audience as "whether you have one property or 30+."

eviivo: a property base plus per-room modules

eviivo prices along two axes at once: a base that scales by property and bedroom count through an interactive selector, and add-on modules priced per room. As of July 2026, per eviivo's published pricing, a single property starts from $50 per month and multi-property from $125 per month, quoted in USD, GBP, EUR, CHF or CAD. The modules — Payment +$1, Guest +$3, Promo +$3, Performance +$2 and Owner +$3 — are each priced per room, so a module's cost in your model is its rate multiplied by your room count. Above 10 rooms, the page directs you to sales for a tailored quote. One per-booking line: a $0.50 fixed processing fee applies per confirmed booking when using its payment and messaging services — fixed, so it scales with booking count rather than booking value. The first 30 days are free, billed in arrears. On owner money, the Owner module advertises "Trust accounting and fully automated owner statements" plus a "secure Owner Portal."

Hostfully vs PropertyStack: feature by feature

Effective cost is the denominator. The numerator is what the spend buys — messages answered overnight, statements that go out on time, jobs that close without you. So instead of another price grid, the table reads down what an operator needs, with Hostfully's published answer beside what PropertyStack delivers. Hostfully's cells hold to the sourcing rules above; ours condense the claims made earlier in this article.

Read the two columns against your own week. Where Hostfully's cell carries a quote, that's its own page speaking — the owner portal and automatic owner reports, for instance, are advertised plainly. What the table adds to the effective-cost method is the other axis: how much of each job the platform finishes on its own. Price per property tells you what a month costs; the rows above tell you how much of the month's work is done when you pay it.

Which pricing shape fits your portfolio?

There's no ranking to end on, because a pricing shape is only right or wrong against a particular portfolio. If your listing count is stable and no owner clients are involved, a flat plan is the easiest to model and forecast. If you're growing, re-run every model at your twelve-month count and watch the tier boundaries you'd cross. If direct bookings carry a meaningful share of your revenue, apply any published direct-booking percentage to your own figure before comparing totals — that line moves with revenue, not property count. And if you manage owner money, add the owner layer to every model — included on some platforms, an add-on, a top-tier feature, a per-room module or an integration on others.

The pricing math is one input of several. For the rest of the evaluation — requirements list, shortlist, trial plan and reference checks — see our guide on how to choose vacation rental software.

Migration: the cost that isn't on any pricing page

One cost never shows up in the models above: the move itself. Switching platforms means exporting listings, bookings and guest history from your current platform, rebuilding automations, and reconnecting channels — work that usually gets paid for in evenings and weekends. Our guide to switching property management software breaks that project into a checklist with timing and a cutover plan, whichever platforms are involved.

If the destination is PropertyStack, the moving work is handled for you. Migration is done for you — from Guesty, Hostaway or another tool: listings, bookings, guests and history are brought across. Onboarding is guided, the PropertyStack team does the heavy lifting, and the pace matches your portfolio size. Channel reviews stay on the channels they were left on.

The method outlives the snapshot. The figures in this article are July 2026 readings from the vendors' own pages, and some will have moved by the time you decide. The five questions won't have: base, scaling, add-ons, percentage fees, billing basis. Ask them of every pricing page — including ours.