What property management software actually costs when you self-host it — every line, including the ones vendors leave out
The full cost of owning your property software: the licence, the hosting you probably already pay for, the install, backups, email, updates and your own time — priced honestly against the subscription meter, with the things a self-hosted tool does not do stated first.
"Buy it once and it costs nothing after that" is the marketing version of self-hosting, and it is false in the way that matters: there are costs after the licence, they are small, and a buyer who was not told about them will find them at the worst moment. This page lists every line on the owned side of property software, so the comparison with a subscription is between two complete columns rather than a headline and a fantasy.
What you are buying, and what you are not
Rentara is the property tool in this catalogue: a single-install PHP application for a portfolio of roughly five to fifty units that you already own or manage. It posts rent automatically per lease, monthly or quarterly, keyed on lease and period so a re-run can never double-post; it posts one clearly labelled late fee per overdue period after the grace you set, exactly once; it gives each tenant a private per-lease link where they see their lease terms, ledger and balance and can submit a maintenance request with a photo; it prints owner statements for any date range and exports them as CSV; and it keeps the signed lease and inspection reports with the lease itself. Since the 3.1 release it can email a receipt when a payment is recorded and a status notice when a maintenance ticket moves.
What it is not, from its own page: it does not collect rent online (payments are recorded, not taken), it is not a general ledger, it does not market vacancies, and the tenant portal is a magic link rather than an account with a password. One portfolio per installation. If any of those four is the thing you need, stop here and read the pricing comparison for the subscription that has it.
The lines, one by one
The licence. $119, once, for Rentara alone; $149 for the Property Suite if you also want Consigna. The licence never expires and is not tied to a unit count, a user count or a renewal date. Updates within the major version are yours.
Hosting. A self-hosted PHP application with a MySQL or SQLite database runs on ordinary shared hosting — the account many small firms already pay for to hold their website. We do not print a hosting price here because it is not ours to print and it varies by country and provider; the shared-hosting guide walks the whole click path on cPanel, and SQLite or MySQL? explains why a portfolio this size does not need a database server at all. If you would rather not run it, Ownware Cloud does, for a monthly fee, with the perpetual self-host licence yours after twelve paid months.
The install. About ten minutes the first time — self-host in ten minutes is the honest account, including the step people trip on. Zero minutes for the subscription, which is a real point in its favour and one we would rather concede than hide.
Backups. A nightly copy of the database and the uploads folder, and — this is the line everyone skips — one restore, done once, to a scratch install, to prove the copy is real. Rentara ships a backup-and-restore path with a mandatory dry-run report before anything is overwritten. The cost is an hour the first month; the alternative is finding out on the day it matters, which is the subject of your backup is not a backup until restored.
Email. Receipts and maintenance notices go out through your own SMTP server, which is off until you switch it on. Most hosting accounts include one; if yours does not, a transactional email provider's free tier covers a portfolio this size. Rentara opens no mail account for you and never sends on your behalf.
Security and updates. Rate-limited login, two-factor authentication, an append-only audit trail and a health endpoint ship in the box. What remains yours is applying updates when they arrive and keeping PHP current on the host — securing a self-hosted business app is the short list, and the honest part of it is what you can safely ignore.
Your time. The line no vendor prices. Reckon an hour to install and configure, an hour for the backup and the proving restore, and a few minutes a quarter thereafter. If your hourly rate makes those hours cost more than a year of the subscription, the subscription is cheaper for you, and we would rather you did that sum than believe a slogan.
The two columns side by side
Against the cheapest published tiers we have on record — Buildium Essential "starting at $62/month" and TenantCloud Starter $15/month on annual billing, both read from the vendors' own pages on 5 July 2026 — the owned column is the licence plus the hosting you were probably paying for anyway plus two or three hours in the first month. That column stops growing. The other column does not, and it also grows with the portfolio: DoorLoop's $69 Starter stops at ten units, Hemlane charges $2 per unit on top of a $28 platform fee. The five-year math does the full calculation with both sides priced properly, and it also names the cases where renting wins — they exist, and a page that could not name them would not be worth reading.
The live demo is open without a sign-up; the product page carries the limitations paragraph in full. Read that paragraph before the features.