If you have ever tried to find out what AppFolio costs, you already know the frustration. There is no price on the website. You fill out a form, you take a sales call, and you get a quote shaped around your portfolio. That is not an accident. Opaque pricing lets a vendor charge each customer the most that customer will tolerate, and it keeps comparison shopping hard.
So let us do the thing AppFolio will not. Using current pricing trackers and reseller reports, since AppFolio still does not publish official numbers as of 2026, here is what the platform actually costs, and more importantly, how the structure lands on a small operator very differently than it lands on a large one.
The three plans, and the per-unit mirage
AppFolio sells three tiers of its Property Manager product. The advertised per-unit rates look reasonable. The monthly minimums are where the real story lives.
| Plan | Per unit / mo | Monthly minimum | Onboarding fee | Realistic fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core | ~$1.49 | ~$298 | ~$400 | 200+ units |
| Plus | ~$3.20 | ~$960 | $1,000+ | 300+ units |
| Max | ~$5.00 | ~$7,500 | $2,000 to $5,000 | 1,500+ units |
Look at the Core plan, the entry tier. The advertised rate is about $1.49 per unit per month. That sounds fine until you notice the roughly $298 monthly minimum sitting next to it. Divide one into the other and you find the break-even: you do not actually pay the $1.49 rate until you cross about 200 units. Below that, you pay the floor, no matter how few doors you manage.
What a 30-unit operator really pays
Run the math for a typical small portfolio of 30 units on the Core plan:
- Subscription: the ~$298 monthly minimum, because 30 units times $1.49 is only about $45, far under the floor. That is roughly $3,576 a year for the software alone.
- Onboarding: a one-time setup fee around $400 just to get started.
- Payment fees: the mandatory tenant payment fee on top of all of it, which we broke down in a separate piece on AppFolio's ACH fees.
- Add-ons: tenant screening, renters insurance, and other modules are billed separately, often per transaction.
So the real first-year cost for a 30-unit operator lands around $4,000 before a single add-on, for a platform engineered to be economical only when you manage ten times that many doors.
Who AppFolio is actually built for
None of this means AppFolio is a bad product. It means it is the wrong product for most of the people evaluating it. The pricing structure is the tell. The per-unit rates only start to make sense at scale, the Plus plan needs around 300 units to be worth its minimum, and the Max plan carries a $7,500 monthly floor. AppFolio is built for regional and institutional managers with hundreds or thousands of doors and a back office to run the software. If that is you, the platform earns its price.
If you manage a few dozen units, or even a few hundred, you are subsidizing infrastructure designed for someone ten times your size. You pay the floor, you pay the onboarding fee, your tenants pay the payment fee, and you use a fraction of what is there.
What small operators actually need
The honest alternative for a small portfolio is not a cheaper version of AppFolio. It is a different shape of product entirely: a flat monthly price that does not multiply by your door count, no onboarding fee, no minimum that punishes you for being small, and payment processing that does not quietly skim your rent on the way through.
That is the deal we built KeyTurn around. Flat pricing from $49 a month with no per-unit fees on the manager side, an AI that imports your existing data so switching takes an afternoon instead of six weeks, and a tenant payment the tenant covers, shown to them up front and never deducted from what you receive. You can see the full pricing in plain numbers and decide for yourself.
You are welcome to disagree with our price. You cannot accuse us of hiding it, which is already more than the incumbents will offer you.
Stop paying enterprise prices for a portfolio that isn't enterprise
KeyTurn is the lightweight, AI-powered alternative to AppFolio for small property managers and independent landlords. Built in Fort Worth, flat pricing, no per-unit fees, and a migration that takes an afternoon.
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