Founding host list
Direct booking software for short term rental operators, from one high earning property to sixty. Guests pay into your own Stripe account, under your business name, in your own app. One flat bill that does not change when you add a unit, or a tenth, or a fortieth.
This software does not exist yet, and nothing is for sale today. There is no beta, no demo, and no product to log into. When the founding window opens you will be able to hold one of these rates with a fully refundable deposit. Until then this page exists so you can decide whether it is worth your attention, and so we can find out whether it is worth building.
The founding rate, when it opens
You are on the list. We will email you once when spots open, and not before.
No card, no charge, no obligation. One email when the window opens, plus the occasional note on what is being built. Unsubscribe in one click. The founding rate only happens if 25 operators put a deposit down, and the list is emailed before anyone else.
What it is being built to do
None of this exists yet. This is the design being built and the order it is being built in, not a description of working software. The deposit terms say the same thing in the language you would be held to.
Everyone else in this category charges per property. Add a unit, the invoice goes up, forever. Our top tier has no cap at all: the same $349 whether you run eighteen units or a hundred and eighty. Growing your portfolio stops being a line item you have to re-approve.
The design is that you connect your own Stripe account once, guests are charged by you rather than by us, your business name is on the guest's card statement, and payouts land on your schedule. Because the money never sits in an account of ours, there is no balance for us to hold back. Stripe still applies its own reviews, reserves and payout timing, exactly as it would if you had integrated Stripe yourself.
Your business name, your photos, your policies, your guest list, in your own space inside the app. The shared address is app.shorttermrentaldirect.com, and guests see your business there, never ours. A fully white labeled app under your own brand is available for an additional fee.
We do not send you guests, and we never will. This is not a listing site, not a directory, and not a marketplace. We have no travellers. Nothing you pay us buys you exposure, and no amount of it ever will.
That is a deliberate limit and it is the honest one. Paying a directory to list your property is paying for a chance at demand you do not control, and you find out whether it worked twelve months later, when the money is gone and there is nothing to point at.
What this does instead is capture the demand you already have. The guest who stayed last summer and would rather deal with you directly. Their neighbour who asked for your number. The person who found your listing on Airbnb and then searched your name. Those bookings exist today. Right now they either run through Airbnb and cost you up to 15.5 percent once its single host fee applies to you, or they happen over text messages and a payment app with no contract, no deposit, and no record. If you have no repeat guests and no referrals, this will not manufacture them, and the arithmetic above will tell you not to buy before you pay us a dollar.
Not a model. A statement.
Every figure below is copied off a genuine 2025 Airbnb host earnings report for a single property, except the guest service fee, which Airbnb never shows a host and which is therefore inferred. Inferred figures are marked with a tilde. Anonymised, and published with the account holder's permission. It is not a projection, not a blended industry average, and not a number anyone invented to make an argument. This is what a real statement looks like.
| 2025, one property, 65 nights across about 15 stays | Amount | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Gross earnings | $50,094.60 | |
| Host service fee, charged to the host | -$1,490.08 | 2.97% |
| Other deductions on the statement | -$173.76 | |
| What the host actually received | $48,430.76 | |
| Guest service fee, charged to the guests | ~$7,072 | ~14.1% |
| Occupancy tax the guests also paid | $3,653.29 | |
| Total Airbnb took out of the transaction | ~$8,562 | ~17.1% |
The guest service fee is the one number here that is inferred. Airbnb does not put it on the host's annual report at all, so it cannot be copied off one. It is calculated at 14.1 percent of gross, which is the bottom of the 14.1 to 16.5 percent range Airbnb publishes for the guest service fee, so it understates rather than overstates. Airbnb's own worked example uses 15 percent. Treat it as accurate to a point or two, not to the cent. Every other figure is copied straight off the report.
Airbnb took about 17 percent of gross out of the transaction. Only about a sixth of that came out of the host's pocket. The rest, roughly $7,000, was added on top of the host's own price and paid by guests. The host never sees that money, cannot price against it, and it makes the listing look more expensive than it is to every person comparing it against something else.
That is the actual opportunity, and it is not the one most direct booking pitches describe. Moving a booking to your own site does not save you that 3 percent, because a card processor charges about the same. It hands you the 14 percent your guest was paying. You can keep it, give it to the guest as a real discount that undercuts your own Airbnb listing, or split it. On the statement above, moving 15 percent of bookings direct and keeping that fee is worth about $1,061 a year. Moving 25 percent is about $1,768.
And on 15 September 2026 the fee line changes. Airbnb has been moving hosts off the split fee onto a single host-only fee of about 15.5 percent, and most remaining United States hosts move by that date. If you manage prices through property management or channel management software, Airbnb puts you in a later group that moves 13 October 2026 instead, so check which one you are in. On the 2025 volume above, the switch takes what Airbnb bills the host from $1,490 to roughly $7,765, about five times more.
Here is the honest part, because you will hear it from Airbnb and it is true: they stop charging your guest at the same time, so you can raise your rates and your guest pays about the same. That works. It also requires you to actually go and raise them, it puts a bigger number in front of every guest comparing your listing, and it makes what you charge and what you net one and the same for the first time. If you are going to re-price your listing anyway this month, that is the cheapest moment you will ever have to ask where those bookings should be arriving. Verify the date and your own rate inside your Airbnb account. Do not take it from a landing page, including this one.
Before you pay
You are being asked for money for something that does not exist. The least we can do is lead with the objections rather than bury them.
Per-property vendors charge a small amount per unit per month, and several of them include dynamic pricing, which we will not have at launch. At a handful of units they cost less than our flat bill does, and a flat bill only starts paying you back somewhere around a dozen units. Below that, buy theirs, and we will not be offended. Some of them already pay you through your own Stripe account too, so that part is not unique to us either.
We are deliberately not printing a competitor price grid. The one vendor we checked most closely publishes three different rate sets across its own pages and no rate at all above five properties, so any table we built above that would be our extrapolation presented as their price. Get a current quote from whoever you are comparing us against and put it next to the per-unit column below.
The exception is revenue. A single property grossing $100,000 clears our cheapest tier comfortably, and unit count never enters into it. The tier table below works out which of those you are.
And if your bookings come mainly from Vrbo rather than Airbnb, move every threshold higher still. Vrbo pay per booking is about 8 percent all in against the 15.5 percent Airbnb charges hosts on its single host fee, so there is roughly half as much for us to save you. See the channel table below.
Airbnb's software partner API is not open to new platforms without existing supply volume. That leaves iCal, which carries availability and nothing else. No rates, no stay rules, no guest details. Airbnb publishes no guaranteed refresh cadence for its outgoing feed, so a same day double booking is possible. We will design against it. We will not claim to have eliminated it, and we will not cover the cost if it happens.
No damage cover, no booking guarantee, no payout protection, no equivalent of AirCover. You carry your own insurance, handle your own guest disputes, and file your own chargeback responses. We will give you the evidence package and stay out of it. Airbnb includes AirCover free on every booking. Vrbo includes liability insurance free, but its damage cover is bought by the guest or handled through a deposit you set, not included. We include neither. That is a real thing you would be giving up.
If you manage units you do not own, you need owner statements, split payouts, and in some states a regulated trust account. We will not have any of that at launch, and trust accounting in particular is a serious build we have not committed to. If you are a licensed property manager holding other people's money, we are not ready for you yet and you should tell us so in the form below.
For most operators direct bookings are a minority of revenue, not the bulk of it. We are deliberately not putting an industry percentage here, because the published figures we could find measure professional property managers rather than the operators this is built for. Your OTA bill does not fall by a cent until a booking actually moves. The honest version of the pitch is narrow: on the bookings you take through us, you pay your card processor and nothing else. On those same bookings through Airbnb you would pay about 15.5 percent. It is worth doing the arithmetic on your own numbers before you pay us anything.
Do the arithmetic first
Flat pricing is bad value at small unit counts and good value at large ones. That is not a flaw we are hiding, it is arithmetic, so here it is. The last column is what we would tell you if you called and asked.
| Units | Your tier | Per month | Per unit | What we would tell you |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Solo | $79 | $79 | Depends on what it earns. See below |
| 3 | Solo | $79 | $26 | Depends on what they earn |
| 5 | Studio | $199 | $40 | Buy theirs |
| 10 | Studio | $199 | $20 | Level. Pick on features |
| 15 | Unlimited | $349 | $23 | Still theirs, narrowly |
| 20 | Unlimited | $349 | $17 | Ours |
| 30 | Unlimited | $349 | $12 | Ours, clearly |
| 50 | Unlimited | $349 | $7 | Ours, by a lot |
Unit count is the wrong question and we had it on this page for a while. What decides it is how much revenue one property actually moves direct, because that is the only thing that produces a saving. A single strong summer house clears our cheapest tier several times over. A quiet spare cabin never will, at any share of bookings it can realistically shift.
Below is what one unit on Solo ($790 a year, billed annually) puts back in your pocket after paying us. Positive means it paid for itself that year.
| One unit grossing | If 15% moves direct | If 20% moves direct | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| $20,000 | -$413 | -$287 | No. Do not buy this |
| $30,000 | -$224 | -$36 | No |
| $45,000 | +$59 | +$342 | Marginal. Your call |
| $60,000 | +$342 | +$719 | Yes |
| $100,000 | +$1,096 | +$1,725 | Yes, comfortably |
| $150,000 | +$2,039 | +$2,982 | Yes, several times over |
The line is roughly $42,000 of gross on one unit, if you can move 15 percent of it direct. Shift 20 percent and the line drops to about $31,000. Shift 30 percent and it drops to about $21,000. One strong coastal summer rental clears it without difficulty. If your unit is under about $30,000 a year, the honest answer is that no software fixes that, and you should not pay us.
Unlimited is never the answer for one property. At $349 a month you would pay $4,188 a year to save a fee on a single unit. If you have one property and the numbers above work for you, the tier is Solo.
The same comparison held flat as the portfolio grows. This is the whole argument for a flat bill, stated as a table rather than as an adjective.
| Units | Our Unlimited tier | Our cost per unit | What a per-unit vendor would cost you |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | $349 | $58 | 6 times their per-unit rate |
| 12 | $349 | $29 | 12 times it |
| 20 | $349 | $17 | 20 times it |
| 30 | $349 | $12 | 30 times it |
| 50 | $349 | $7 | 50 times it |
Our bill is the same at 6 units and at 50. Theirs multiplies. Put your own vendor's current per-unit rate against the middle column: wherever their rate times your unit count passes $349, we are cheaper, and below that they are, which we have said above.
A commission is charged per booking, so your OTA bill does not fall by a cent until a booking is actually displaced. When a booking comes through your own site instead, you stop paying the commission and start paying your own card processor at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents. What you keep depends on which channel you are leaving and, on Airbnb, on which of its two fee models you are still on.
Open a recent payout and look at the host service fee line. It says either about 3 percent or about 15.5 percent, and the two mean completely different things. Most arithmetic written about Airbnb fees, including the version this page used to show, quietly assumes the second one.
| Your payout says | You pay | Your guest pays on top | What going direct is actually worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Split fee about 3 percent |
~3% | ~14% | Almost nothing off your own fee, because Stripe costs about the same 3 percent. The value is the 14 percent your guest is paying that you do not control. Direct, that becomes yours to keep, to give away as a discount, or to split |
| Single fee about 15.5 percent |
~15.5% | nothing | About 12.6 cents per dollar moved, straight off your own fee. This is the case every table below assumes |
If you are still on the split fee, you are about to be moved. Airbnb has been migrating hosts onto the single fee, and the remaining United States hosts move by 15 September 2026. Verify the date and your own rate inside your Airbnb account rather than taking it from us. When it happens, your host fee goes up roughly fivefold and Airbnb stops charging your guest, so you can raise your rates to compensate and the guest pays about the same. That only holds if you actually raise them. A host on 3 percent who does nothing watches the difference come out of their own net.
Either way, the arithmetic below is the post-migration case, which is the one everyone ends up in.
| Channel you are moving bookings away from | Their cut | You keep, per $1,000 moved |
|---|---|---|
| Airbnb, single host fee | 15.5% | $126 |
| Vrbo, pay per booking (5% plus 3% processing) | 8% | $51 |
| Vrbo, legacy annual subscription | 3% processing only | about $0 |
Every figure in the third column is net of card processing at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, which you pay on a direct booking and which Airbnb already bakes into its fee. That is why the Airbnb row shows $126 and not the full $155: 15.5 percent of $1,000 is $155, less $29.30 of processing. The processing rate is Stripe's published US online rate, not an Airbnb or Vrbo figure.
If most of your bookings come from Vrbo rather than Airbnb, we are worth roughly half as much to you, and if you are on Vrbo's legacy annual subscription we are worth close to nothing, because you already pay a flat fee and the 3 percent processing does not go away when you go direct. The table below assumes you are leaving Airbnb, which is the best case. Halve the benefit for Vrbo pay per booking.
| Tier | Annual cost | Revenue that must move direct to break even | Total gross if 15% moves direct |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo, up to 3 | $790 | $6,282 | $41,900 |
| Studio, up to 10 | $1,990 | $15,825 | $105,500 |
| Unlimited, no cap | $3,490 | $27,753 | $185,000 |
Assumes you are leaving Airbnb's single fee at 15.5 percent and paying card processing at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, which is where the 12.6 percent net saving comes from. Billed monthly instead of annually, every number goes up by 20 percent. A single unit on Airbnb needs to gross roughly $42,000 a year, with 15 percent moving direct, before Solo breaks even. The same unit on Vrbo pay per booking needs roughly $104,000, which almost no single property earns. If your gross is well below the right hand column, the honest answer is that this is not yet worth paying for, and we would rather you knew that now than after a refund request.
Our commitment
Founders talk themselves into building things. The way to not do that is to write the decision rule down in public, first, where it cannot be quietly revised afterwards.
If fewer than 25 operators have put down a deposit by 13 November 2026, this does not get built. That is 60 days after the founding window opens on 14 September 2026. Every deposit is refunded in full, without anyone having to ask, and we will publish what we learned including the numbers.
Twenty five is not a number picked to be reachable. It is roughly the point at which the committed revenue behind it justifies a year of building at what this costs to run. Below it, the honest read is that we have not found the customer yet.
Between 10 and 24 tells us the demand is real and the pitch is wrong. In that case we come back to everyone who paid, say so plainly, and offer the refund alongside whatever we think the corrected version is. Nobody gets kept on a list for a product that changed underneath them.
At 25 or more, we start building, and the people who paid pick the order.
Tell us about your operation
Answer this whether or not you put a deposit down. The gap between the people who fill this in and the people who pay is the single most useful thing this page can measure.
Questions
A place in line, a price lock, and a $200 credit against your first invoice. The credit is deliberately larger than the deposit: $99 is 28 percent of a month on Unlimited but 125 percent of a month on Solo, and charging small operators more in real terms for less protection is not defensible. A flat deposit keeps the signal clean; a flat credit puts the benefit where the imbalance was.
What it does not buy is software. There is none. If a place in line and $200 is not worth $99 to you, it should not be, and you should join the free list instead. The $99 exists because a free signup tells us almost nothing, and a one dollar signup tells us barely more.
It locks the monthly price of whichever tier you end up on: $79 Solo, $199 Studio, or $349 Unlimited. Those are the founding rates, and your rate does not rise for as long as your subscription stays continuously active. Cancel and come back later and the lock is gone.
The lock is not tied to the tier you select today. Pick the one you expect to need, because it tells us what to build first, but if you deposit against Solo and have fourteen units by launch, you get the founding Unlimited rate, not whatever list price exists then. The reverse holds too.
One honest note on what the lock is worth. We have not set launch list pricing, so today the lock is a promise that your price never moves, not a discount off a number we have published. If that is not worth $99 to you, it should not be.
Email the address in the footer and say the word refund. No reason required, no retention offer, no phone call. It goes back to the same card. If the 25 deposit threshold is not met within 60 days, or if founding hosts are not onboarded by 1 September 2027, refunds are issued automatically without you asking.
It depends on revenue, not on how many doors you have. The test is whether one year of Solo, $790 billed annually, is less than what you would save by moving 15 percent of your bookings direct. That lands at roughly $42,000 of gross across whatever units you have.
One strong summer rental clears it. Four quiet units may not. Put your numbers into the table above rather than counting properties, and if it comes out negative, do not buy this. We would rather lose the sale than issue a refund in March.
James Folk, through NJLIGames Ltd, a New York corporation incorporated in 2015. You will be dealing with the person writing the code.
Twenty years as a software engineer, most of it at principal level, on systems where being wrong is expensive: the Roku video player used by millions of Comcast subscribers, streaming apps at NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery, gameplay on Halo Infinite at 343 Industries, and an augmented reality project for NIST putting tools in the hands of first responders.
The directly relevant one is tolling. At Neology I designed multithreaded real time software for lane side tolling systems, processing millions of daily micro transactions under strict latency and accuracy requirements. That is the same shape of problem as a booking: money attached to a specific moment, where a duplicate, a dropped record or an off by one is not a cosmetic bug.
The two products closest to this one are already running. One Group Central is a multi tenant member portal on the same stack this is being built on, a C++ backend with Flutter clients across six platforms, Stripe billing, and cryptographically anonymous voting on an append only hash chain. PostBaton publishes to eleven social platforms on an idempotency first engine: every post goes out exactly once, on time, with no double posts and no silent failures. A double booking is that same defect wearing different clothes, and that engine exists because I already had to solve it once.
And I am the customer. The 2025 statement further up this page is my own property, on my own Airbnb account. I am not a developer who read about this problem.
The full record, with dates and employers, is at jamesfolk.me. Check it before you give anyone a deposit.
You should not trust us with them, and the design is built so you do not have to. The booking app runs under your business name. The charge is made by your business, in your name, into your Stripe account. If we disappeared tomorrow, your Stripe balance would still be yours, settling on Stripe's normal schedule rather than ours. The thing you would lose is the software, not the revenue.
No, and be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise. The OTAs own the search demand. This is for capturing the repeat guest, the referral, and the guest who found you and would rather book with you, which across the industry is a slice in the region of a tenth of revenue rather than the majority. Keep your listings up.
No. There is no per booking fee, no percentage, and no guest facing service fee in the product being built, at any volume. That is not a promotional rate, it is structural: we are never in the payment path, so there is nothing to take a cut from, and taking one would mean rebuilding the architecture. What we do reserve is the right to change list prices for new customers over time, which is exactly what the founding rate lock protects you from.
Completely different thing, and worth being clear about because the two get confused. A listing site sells you exposure: you pay, you appear, and you hope travellers find you. Whether it worked is nearly impossible to attribute, and if it did not work you have spent the money and learned nothing.
We sell you none of that. We are the machinery that takes a booking: the app under your business name, the calendar, the quote, the rental agreement, and the payment landing in your Stripe account. The demand has to come from you, from guests you already have and people they tell.
The practical test is different too. A listing fee is unfalsifiable until the year is over. Ours is arithmetic you can run before you pay, which is why the tables above exist and why they tell some people not to buy.
No, and we are not building one. We looked at it seriously and killed it. A search app with thin inventory is worse than no search app, running one would make us a marketplace facilitator for lodging tax purposes in several states, and the trust and safety operation it requires costs about a million dollars a year while earning nothing, because we take no commission.
Others have already run this experiment, and none of them has become a demand channel worth the build. We would rather spend that money making your own site convert than build a worse Airbnb. If you want us to be a demand channel, we are the wrong product.
It sits in the company's Stripe balance and is not spent on operating costs while the 60 day decision window is open, so that a full refund is always available on demand. This is a commitment, not a legal trust arrangement, and you should weigh it as such before paying.