The question "property management software pricing" has one honest answer and several tidy ones. The tidy ones quote a headline per-month figure and stop. The honest one says what the meter counts, what it costs over the years you will actually run the software, and what a license you buy once covers instead. This page is the honest one, with every vendor figure read from that vendor's own pricing page on the date printed beside it.
What the subscriptions publish
Five vendors, five shapes of meter. The dates are the days we read the pages; prices change, so check the page before you decide.
| Vendor | Cheapest published tier | What the meter counts | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buildium | Essential "starting at $62/month" (Growth from $192, Premium from $400) | Portfolio size — "starting at" rises with units | 5 July 2026, re-read 3 September 2026 |
| DoorLoop | Starter $69/month billed yearly ($99 monthly), capped at 10 units | Units, with a hard cap on the cheapest tier | 5 July 2026, re-read 3 September 2026 |
| TenantCloud | Starter $15/month billed annually ($18 monthly) | A flat base, features gated by tier | 5 July 2026, re-read 3 September 2026 |
| AppFolio | No public price — "Minimum spend and 50 unit minimum apply" | Quote-gated; small portfolios are not served | 2 August 2026, re-read 3 September 2026 |
| Hemlane | Basic "$30/mo (incl. $28 platform fee)" at "$2/unit" | A platform fee before any unit is counted, then per unit | 11 August 2026, re-read 3 September 2026 |
Three things stand out once the rows sit together. The cheapest tier is rarely the tier a landlord with a real portfolio ends up on: DoorLoop's Starter stops at ten units, Buildium's "starting at" is a floor, and Hemlane's per-unit fee climbs with the portfolio. AppFolio does not want the small landlord at all; a fifty-unit minimum is a polite way of saying so, and we wrote a whole page about that gap: the 50-unit minimum. And every one of the five is a monthly figure that continues for as long as the rent roll exists, which is to say indefinitely.
The one-time price beside them
Rentara is a self-hosted rental operations manager sold for $119, once. That is the whole license: automatic rent posting, automatic late fees, a tenant self-service portal, owner statements, the rent roll and arrears, maintenance tracking, and — since the 3.0 release — a REST API and an MCP endpoint so your own AI assistant can read the roll. The Property Suite pairs it with Consigna for $149, which only matters if you also run a resale counter; most landlords want the single license.
Try the Rentara demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
It runs on your own server, and the live demo is open without a sign-up. Its limits are printed on its page, not discovered later, and the one that decides most purchases is this: Rentara records rent payments, and since 3.2 a tenant can pay by card from their private link only through your own Stripe account, once you switch that on. If online rent collection run for you, without holding your own Stripe account, is the feature you are buying property software for, read no further — a subscription with a payment rail is the right product for you, and we would rather say so here than after the sale.
The arithmetic, labeled as arithmetic
Take each vendor's cheapest published tier at face value, assume the portfolio never outgrows it (it usually does), and run the meter for three years and for five. This is multiplication, not a forecast.
| 1 year | 3 years | 5 years | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buildium Essential, $62/month | $744 | $2,232 | $3,720 |
| DoorLoop Starter, $69/month (yearly billing, ≤10 units) | $828 | $2,484 | $4,140 |
| TenantCloud Starter, $15/month (annual billing) | $180 | $540 | $900 |
| Hemlane Basic, ten units ($28 platform + 10 × $2) | $576 | $1,728 | $2,880 |
| Rentara, one-time | $119 | $119 | $119 |
The owned side is not free after the license, and a comparison that pretends it is would be the kind we complain about. You supply the hosting — the shared host most small firms already pay for will run it — and the ten minutes to install; you keep your own backups and restore them once to prove they work. We priced that side honestly, with nothing left out, in the five-year math. Even with it counted, the break-even against the cheapest real tier arrives in the second month against Buildium and inside the first year against TenantCloud.
Where the subscription is still right
Three cases, stated plainly, because they are not edge cases:
- You want the software to run the payment rail for you. Rentara takes tenant payments only through your own Stripe account (since 3.2, off until you switch it on). Buildium, DoorLoop and TenantCloud run the rail themselves, and that is what part of the monthly fee buys.
- You market vacancies through the software. Listing syndication, applicant screening and lead inboxes are subscription features; Rentara is for the portfolio you already manage, not for finding the next tenant.
- Someone else must run the server. If nobody in the business will keep a PHP application patched, Ownware Cloud hosts it for a monthly fee with the perpetual license yours after twelve paid months, or a subscription vendor's operations team is the honest alternative.
Everything else — the roll, the leases, the arrears, the late fees, the tenant's ledger, the owner's statement — is a records problem, and records are what a license you own is for. The complete guide to self-hosted rental management walks the job end to end; property management software with a one-time price is the shorter version of this page. Every vendor figure above also lives in the Price Observatory, dated and source-linked, free to cite.