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.
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 |
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Short term rental platforms, and what the per property meter does
Vacation rental software is priced per listing almost everywhere, which makes it one of the few categories where the pricing page tells you your bill directly. Here is each alternative to hospitable review, read 4 September 2026.
Lodgify, from $14 a month, with a real annual discount
Lodgify publishes four tiers at $14, $26, $42 and $62 a month, with monthly, yearly at 20% off and bi-yearly billing options. The yearly saving is genuine and the bi-yearly option is unusual in this market. Note that the entry tier is sized for a very small number of properties, so read the listing allowance beside the price rather than the price alone.
Hospitable, free to start, then $25.52 a month
Hospitable publishes an Essentials tier at no cost for core automation and multi-channel management, then $25.52, $51.92 and $87.12 a month. A functional free tier is rare in this category and makes it a sensible place to learn what you actually need before committing, which is worth more than a small monthly saving.
Guesty, from $9 a month, but read what that assumes
Guesty publishes from $9 a month and states plainly that price depends on the number of listings and the features taken. Its pricing page is built around a calculator rather than a rate card, so the entry figure is a starting point rather than a plan. Put your real listing count and feature list in before comparing it to anything.
The vendor we could not read
We attempted Hostaway on 4 September 2026 with the same method that read every vendor above and could not extract a figure from its pricing page. That is not the same as it publishing nothing, and we will not present it as such. Ask for a written quote and compare it against the published options priced at your listing count.
Channel fees are the line outside the subscription
Whatever the platform costs, the booking channels take their own percentage, and that is usually the larger number by a wide margin. A software decision that saves $30 a month is worth roughly a single night’s commission on one property. Judge these tools on whether they raise occupancy, protect your direct booking share or genuinely save hours, because the subscription is rarely the deciding cost.
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.
Written by
FazFaz is the founder of AIToolsBakery. Some tools here are tested hands on. Others are assessed from vendor documentation and pricing verified on the live page, and every review says which one it is. Sponsors can buy a position in a guide. They cannot buy the score, the criticism, or silence about a better option.
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