Property management software with a one-time price
Landlord SaaS meters you per unit, every month. The honest one-time-purchase alternative for the portfolio you already manage — with today's Buildium/DoorLoop/TenantCloud prices, verified and dated.
If you already manage a handful of rentals, property-management SaaS charges you every month to keep doing what you were doing anyway — and the price climbs with your unit count. Here is the honest case for landlord software you buy once, and a straight look at the free field.
Property management software pricing, read from the vendors' own pages
Prices read on the vendors' own pages on 2026-07-22 (the Price Observatory re-reads them and holds each verbatim quote):
- Buildium — Essential "starting at $62/month", then Growth from $192 and Premium from $400 (read 2026-07-22, re-read 5 September 2026 — all three unchanged); past 5,000 units, or for community associations, the page asks you to telephone.
- DoorLoop — Starter $69/month billed yearly ($99 monthly), capped at ten units (read 2026-07-22, re-read 5 September 2026 — unchanged). That cap has a price on the other side of it: Pro is $149 billed yearly, so the eleventh unit costs $80 a month, $960 a year — not the "Only $3/unit" the card advertises — and the next thirty-nine come with it.
- TenantCloud — Starter $15/month billed annually ($18 month-to-month; read 2026-07-22), then Growth $29.17, Pro $50 and Business "Starting at $100/mo". An earlier version of this line said the tiers "scale up by units". They do not, and the correction favours the vendor rather than us: a 5 September 2026 re-read finds the paid tiers separated by features, with properties and units unlimited on every plan — Growth adds enhanced reporting and inspections, Pro adds tax reports and bank reconciliation, Business adds team management. Only at the Business tier does portfolio size re-enter, as one input to a custom quote. So a small landlord on TenantCloud is not on a meter that grows with the portfolio, and we should not have implied otherwise.
At $62–$69/month, three years of landlord SaaS runs $2,200–$2,500 — a recurring charge for rent posting and a tenant portal.
The free self-hosted field (honestly thin)
Unlike invoicing, there is no strong open-source landlord platform that does automatic rent posting, late fees, and a tenant portal together. A capable self-hoster can assemble pieces, but there is no drop-in free equivalent to name here — and inventing one would be dishonest. If you find the free field covers you with a spreadsheet plus a document tool, that is a legitimate choice; it just is not a product.
Where a paid, owned tool fits
Rentara is our commercial entry: a one-time $119 purchase with the full PHP source, for the portfolio you already manage — automatic rent posting, automatic late fees, a tenant self-service portal, owner statements, and a rent-roll/arrears view — on ordinary shared-hosting PHP. Live demo, no signup. What that licence buys, and what it deliberately does not do is its own page.
Try the Rentara demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
Honest limits, in plain text before you pay: it is a ledger — it records payments (mark them as they arrive by transfer, cash, check, or card) but does not process or collect rent online. If online rent collection is a must-have, Rentara is not your tool. The self-hosting angle has its own self-hosted rental property management guide.
The three-year arithmetic
Against Buildium Essential at $62/month, Rentara's $119 one-time purchase breaks even in under two months, and then the meter stops — over three years that is roughly $2,232 rented versus $119 owned, with the tenant and payment records in your own database. The rent-vs-own three-year math runs the full numbers; property management software pricing: one-time vs subscription runs five vendors out to five years, what self-hosting property software actually costs prices every line of the owned side, and the 50-unit minimum is why the top of the market does not want a small landlord at all.
The honest chooser
- Want online rent collection built in and don't mind the meter: a hosted platform is the honest fit.
- Already manage the units, want rent posting, late fees, and a tenant portal, bought once, self-hosted: Rentara.
- A few units and a spreadsheet genuinely covers you: keep the spreadsheet — no tool needed.
Every vendor figure in this category also lives in the Price Observatory — verified, dated, and source-linked, free to cite — and the calculator turns those figures into your own three-year number in ten seconds. Selected apps can also be hosted for you on Ownware Cloud — the honest trade-off guide covers when that's worth it.