Hospitable Review (2026): A Real Free Tier, and an Extra Property Costs Three Times More on the Expensive Plan

Most reviews of short-term-rental software open by complaining that the vendor will not publish a price. This one has the opposite problem. Hospitable publishes everything: four tiers, monthly and annual figures, the per-extra-property fee, the processing percentages, and a feature grid that states exactly which AI capability sits on which plan and what each one is capped at.

In a category where a $925 million company publishes no numbers at all, that is worth saying loudly.

It also means this review can do something the others in this batch cannot, which is read the actual structure rather than guess at it. And reading it turned up something odd enough that it became the headline: on Hospitable’s own published grid, an extra property costs $10 a month on the cheapest paid plan and $30 a month on the most expensive one.

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The full ladder

All OFFICIAL, read on hospitable.com/pricing, July 27, 2026. Prices exclude VAT where applicable.

Plan	Monthly	Annual equivalent	Properties included	Cost per extra property	Max properties
Essentials	No subscription fee	No subscription fee	Unlimited	No additional fee	Unlimited
Host	$29	$25.52	1	$10	2
Professional	$59	$51.92	2	$15	Unlimited
Mogul	$99	$87.12	3	$30	Unlimited

And the verdict in brief:

Dimension	Our take
Pricing transparency	Best in the category by a wide margin. Every fee published, including the awkward ones
Free tier	Genuinely free and genuinely useful. Unlimited properties, four channels, 0% commission
Guest messaging	The core product and the reason to buy. Unified inbox across four channels on every tier
AI	Clearly laddered and clearly gated. The good parts are on the $99 tier
Scaling economics	The weak spot. Per-extra-property cost rises with the plan price
Agent readiness	MCP access, the only platform in this batch shipping one
Score	4.4 / 5

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The free tier, and how it actually earns

Essentials has no subscription fee, no property cap, unlimited secondary users, and takes 0 percent commission on bookings. That last row is worth pausing on: on the comparison grid, Booking Channel Commission reads 0 percent on all four tiers, with the note that outside of direct bookings Hospitable takes no commission from your bookings.

So how does a free plan with unlimited properties make money? Through usage, and Hospitable prints those numbers too.

Usage fee	Essentials (free)	Paid tiers
Pay Your Own Team (cleaner and maintenance payments, US only)	2.5% per clean, capped at US$5	1.5% per clean, capped at US$5
Custom Upsells processing	10%	7%
Dynamic Pricing	Free for 3 bookings in the first 30 days, then $15 per property

That is a coherent and honest model. You get the software free and pay when money moves through it, at a rate that halves when you subscribe.

One number in that table deserves a second look. Dynamic Pricing at $15 per property is close to what the specialists charge: PriceLabs is $14.49 per listing on its US multi-unit rate, Wheelhouse $19.99 flat. So the bundled option is not the cheap shortcut it appears to be, and if you are buying rate-setting seriously you should compare it against the specialists on capability rather than assume the in-platform option is cheaper. Our dynamic pricing guide has that comparison.

What Essentials does not include is most of the AI, and the caps are specific enough to plan around.

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The AI ladder, stated exactly

This is where Hospitable’s transparency becomes genuinely useful, because you can see what you are buying instead of inferring it.

AI feature	Essentials	Host	Professional	Mogul
AI Suggested Replies	10 per week	Yes	Yes	Yes
Automated Messaging	Limited	Yes	Yes	Yes
Automated Q&A Detection	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Guest Summary	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Knowledge Hub	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
AI Issue Alerts	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
AI Copilot	No	No	No	Yes
AI Auto Reply	No	No	No	Yes

Two things follow from that grid.

The free tier will not do your messaging for you. Ten suggested replies a week is roughly one and a half a day. It is enough to evaluate whether the drafting is any good, which is a fair use of a free tier, and nowhere near enough to run on. Essentials keeps you organised and stops you missing messages. It does not reduce the typing.

The features that actually remove work are on the top tier. AI Auto Reply, which self-routes messages by topic or workflow tag, and AI Copilot, which turns questions about your booking data into answers, both require Mogul at $99. If autonomous messaging is why you are shopping, the entry price is $99, not $29, and it is better to know that before the trial than after.

That is not a criticism of the gating, which is a normal commercial decision. It is a criticism of every roundup that describes Hospitable as an AI messaging tool from $29 without mentioning that the AI which sends messages is at $99.

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The scaling problem

Here is the finding that surprised us, taken directly off Hospitable’s own comparison row labelled Cost per Extra Property:

• Host, $29 base: $10 per extra property
• Professional, $59 base: $15 per extra property
• Mogul, $99 base: $30 per extra property

Run it out to ten properties:

Plan	Base	9 extra properties	Total at 10 properties
Host	$29 (1 incl.)	9 x $10 = $90	$119/mo
Professional	$59 (2 incl.)	8 x $15 = $120	$179/mo
Mogul	$99 (3 incl.)	7 x $30 = $210	$309/mo

Mogul costs 2.6 times what Host costs at ten properties, and the gap widens with every door you add. At 25 properties it is $269 against $759.

Most software works the other way round: you climb tiers partly to get better unit economics at volume. Here the marginal unit gets more expensive as you climb, which means the upgrade decision is entirely about features and not at all about scale. If you need AI Auto Reply across 25 properties, you are paying a very large premium for it.

We should be careful about what this is. It is Hospitable’s published structure, printed openly on the page where anyone can check it, which is the opposite of a hidden fee. There may be a sound reason for it that is not visible from outside. But a buyer planning to grow should do this arithmetic at their target portfolio size rather than their current one, because the tier that looks right at three properties may be badly wrong at fifteen.

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What else is on every tier

Some things Hospitable does not gate, which is worth crediting since gating them is the norm.

Four channels on the free plan. Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and Agoda by API, on Essentials, plus iCal feed imports. For comparison, Guesty Lite covers three channels on a paid $16 tier.

Unlimited secondary users on every tier, including free. Team member accounts with adjustable access levels, at no per-seat cost. In a category where per-user fees are common, that is a real saving for anyone with a co-host or a VA.

Zero booking commission on every tier. Stated as 0 percent across the board.

Guest Portal and Knowledge Hub on free, which between them cover guest self-service and an auto-reply library of your own SOPs and local information.

Higher tiers add the direct booking site (Professional), smart lock and thermostat automation with two devices per property included and $5 per extra (Professional), guest payment collection (Professional), custom branding, native accounting with a QuickBooks integration, owner portal with payouts and statements, and commission tracking (all Mogul).

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Which tier you actually need

The four tiers map onto four fairly distinct situations, and the mapping is not the obvious one, because the boundaries are drawn by features rather than by property count.

Essentials, free. You are hosting one to a few properties, you are on Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com or Agoda, and your problem is that messages arrive in four places and you sometimes miss one. This tier solves that completely, and it will keep solving it indefinitely at no cost. It is not a trial and there is no countdown.

Host, $29. You crossed the point where ten AI-drafted replies a week is not enough, or you want Automated Q&A Detection answering your recurring questions without you. Note the hard cap: Host allows a maximum of two properties. If you have three, Host is not available to you regardless of budget, and that limit is easy to miss.

Professional, $59. You want a direct booking site, guest payment collection, or smart lock and thermostat automation, with two devices per property included and $5 for each extra. This is also the first tier with unlimited properties.

Mogul, $99. You want the AI to actually run messaging. AI Auto Reply and AI Copilot are here and nowhere else. It also brings native accounting with a QuickBooks integration, an owner portal with payouts and statements, and commission tracking, which together are the feature set for managing properties on behalf of other people.

The awkward consequence of the pricing structure is that these upgrade triggers are all feature triggers, and the per-property economics push the other way. So the decision is genuinely one-dimensional: work out which features you need, buy that tier, and accept that the per-door cost goes up. There is no volume argument for climbing.

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The one thing to check before you commit

Hospitable’s free tier is unusual enough to deserve a word about what it implies.

Software that gives away unlimited properties with no commission and no time limit is monetising somewhere, and here it is on the transaction fees: 2.5 percent on cleaner payments, 10 percent on upsells. Those are the free-tier rates, and both halve or nearly halve on paid plans.

Do the arithmetic on your own volumes before assuming free is cheapest. If you process $2,000 a month in cleaner payments through the platform, the cap at $5 per clean keeps that modest, so the exposure is bounded and predictable, which is a genuinely fair design. The upsell fee is where it bites: at 10 percent, $1,000 a month of upsells costs $100, and moving to Host at $29 drops that to $70, so the subscription pays for itself and more.

That is not a criticism. It is the model working as designed, and Hospitable printed every number needed to check it, which is the entire reason this paragraph can exist. Try writing it about Hostaway.

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Hospitable against the field

	Hospitable	Guesty	Hostaway	Lodgify
Publishes full pricing	Yes, every tier and fee	Smallest tier only	No figures at all	Yes, plans only
Entry price	$0, then $29	$16/mo (1 to 3 listings)	Not published	$18/mo list
Real free tier	Yes, unlimited properties	No	No	No, 7-day trial
API channels at entry	4, on the free tier	3, on the paid tier	Not published	3
Published AI feature ladder	Yes, per tier with caps	No	No	No
Add-on prices published	Yes	No	No	No
Agent interface (MCP)	Yes	No	No	No

On the columns that describe what a buyer can actually find out, Hospitable wins every one.

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The MCP note, which matters more than it looks

Hospitable lists MCP access as a feature, letting AI agents connect directly to your Hospitable data. No other platform in this batch ships one.

That is a small line on a pricing grid and a significant signal about direction. An agent-facing interface means your operation becomes something you can query and instruct in language, rather than something you click through. For a host already running an assistant, it is the difference between a tool you use and a tool your assistant uses on your behalf.

It is early, and we are not going to overclaim what it does in practice. But of the ten platforms we priced for this batch, exactly one has decided that AI agents are customers too.

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The verdict: 4.4 out of 5

Hospitable is the platform we would point most hosts at first, and the reasons are unglamorous.

It publishes what it charges, including the fees that make it look worse. It ships a free tier that is genuinely usable rather than a countdown, with unlimited properties and no commission. It supports four channels at zero cost, more than a direct competitor offers on a paid plan. And it tells you exactly which AI feature sits on which tier and what each one is capped at, which nobody else in this batch does.

The score is held below 4.5 for two things. The per-extra-property fee rising with the plan price is a genuine structural oddity that penalises exactly the growing operators a platform should want. And the AI that actually removes work, Auto Reply and Copilot, sits at $99, which makes the widely quoted $29 entry price misleading about what you are buying if AI messaging is the reason you came.

Score 4.4 out of 5. This rating is editorial. It reflects our judgement from Hospitable’s published pricing, its published feature grid and its documentation, read on July 27, 2026. We have not run a live trial of the platform and we do not claim to have.

For the full category, see our best AI tools for Airbnb hosts. For the two platforms that will not publish, our Hostaway review and Guesty pricing decode. And for the direct-booking specialist, our Lodgify review.