Self-hosted rental property management — the small landlord's complete guide
The complete guide to running rentals on software you own: what the job actually is, what Buildium-class SaaS costs, where spreadsheets break, and how a one-time tool covers the core.
If you manage a handful of rental units — yours, or an owner's — the software market mostly ignores you. The platforms are built and priced for portfolios; the spreadsheet is free but answers none of the questions you actually ask on the first of the month. This is the complete guide to the middle path: running the rent ledger on software you own.
The job, stated plainly
Strip away the brochure language and small-portfolio management is five recurring tasks: post the rent charge on the right day for every lease; apply late fees consistently after the grace period; answer "what do I owe?" without digging through a phone's payment history; track maintenance from report to resolution; and produce a statement the owner (or your accountant) accepts. Everything else — listings, marketing, screening — is a different job done occasionally, not monthly.
What the platforms cost (verified prices, dated)
- Buildium — Essential starting at $62/month, with the page showing tiers up to $500/month as portfolios grow (checked 2026-07-21).
- DoorLoop — Starter $69/month billed yearly ($99 monthly), capped at 10 units.
- TenantCloud — the budget option: Starter $15/month billed annually — still $180 a year, forever.
- AppFolio — no public price, and a stated 50-unit minimum (verified 2026-07-21): small landlords are locked out by design.
These platforms are real software earning real money — for portfolios. At five units, Buildium's entry price is $744 a year for a rent ledger; every figure above also lives in the Price Observatory with its verbatim source quote.
Where the spreadsheet breaks
The workbook handles month one gracefully. It breaks on the recurrences: nobody posts the late fee consistently; the owner statement means an evening of copy-paste each quarter; a tenant's "what do I owe?" phone call requires reconstructing history; and a lease's rent change mid-tenancy silently corrupts every formula downstream. None of these is a catastrophe — together they are the hours that make five units feel like fifteen.
The owned option, and exactly what it covers
Rentara covers the five monthly tasks for a one-time purchase. Each lease bills itself monthly or quarterly anchored to its start day — no cron, no double-posting. Late fees post once per overdue period from a grace-period rule you set (flat, percentage, or off — jurisdictions differ, and the rules are fully configurable). Every tenancy gets a private portal link — no account, no password — where the tenant sees their lease terms, running ledger, and balance, and files maintenance requests with a photo: the "what do I owe?" call, retired. Owner statements print per property or owner for any date range; the rent roll and arrears report show who is late the instant a due date passes.
The honest limits — read these before buying
Stated plainly, because the product page states them too: Rentara records payments; it does not process cards or collect rent online — you mark payments as they arrive by transfer, cash, or check. The tenant portal is a private per-lease link (revocable and rotatable any time), not a login-account system. It is an operations tool, not a listings/marketing portal, and not a general ledger — export CSV into your accounting tool. One admin login per install. It sends no email; you share portal links yourself. If online rent collection is your must-have, that is a genuine reason to pay a platform its monthly price.
Running it
Rentara installs with a two-minute web installer on PHP 8+ with MySQL or SQLite — which in practice means virtually any cPanel/Plesk shared host or the smallest VPS. Self-hosting in 10 minutes walks the general path, the demo is open with sample data, and the vs page runs the cited numbers side-by-side.
Owning the ledger carries one responsibility renting does not: backups are yours. A rent ledger is exactly the database you cannot lose, so put the nightly database dump on the same calendar as the rent posting it protects — what "your data, your server" actually means covers the honest version of that trade. If rentals sit alongside inspections and compliance paperwork in your operation, the Property Suite groups the related tools at one price.
Five units on a $62/month platform is a subscription doing a one-time job; the same five units on software you own is a ledger that simply runs.