How to Let Tenants Pay Rent Online Without Paying $280 a Month

A guy I know who manages 14 doors called me last spring with one question. He wanted his tenants to stop dropping checks in his mailbox. He had sat through a demo, gotten a quote near $280 a month, and wanted to know whether that was just what it costs now.

It is not. He was quoted an enterprise subscription because he asked an enterprise vendor. Letting a tenant push rent from their checking account to yours is a bank transfer with a receipt attached. The expensive part of property management software has never been the payment. It is the accounting, the owner statements, the trust ledger, and the compliance work stacked on top of the payment.

So here is the honest version, with prices I pulled off the vendors' own pages on August 31, 2026.

Where the $280 number comes from

The quote is almost always a monthly minimum, not a per unit rate. AppFolio still does not publish pricing, but as I laid out in the AppFolio cost teardown, the entry tier carries a floor in the neighborhood of $298 a month. Below roughly 200 units you pay the floor no matter what, so a 14 door operator and a 190 door operator get the same bill.

That floor exists for a reason. It is priced to cover a support organization, an implementation team, and a feature set built for regional managers. If you only want tenants to pay rent online, you are buying a warehouse to store one bicycle.

The four ways to do this, priced

Every path splits into two numbers: what you pay per month, and what the tenant pays per payment. Vendors love to advertise one and bury the other.

Free on the landlord side, tenant pays the fee

Avail's published pricing puts its Unlimited plan at $0 per unit with rent collection included. The catch is on the tenant's side: on the free plan, tenants pay $2.50 per bank transfer, and card payments carry a 3.5% processing fee regardless of your plan. Upgrading to Unlimited Plus at $9 per unit per month waives the tenant ACH charge. At 14 doors that upgrade is $126 a month to save your tenants $35 a month, which is a bad trade unless you value the other Plus features.

Baselane's Core tier is also $0 a month and includes automated rent, reminders, and late fees. Rent paid by ACH carries a $2 fee, and Baselane's own help article says that fee is waived entirely when the rent lands in a Baselane Banking checking account rather than an outside bank. That is the cleanest genuinely free path I found this year, with the obvious tradeoff that you are moving your banking to get it.

Flat monthly, cheapest tenant fee

RentRedi charges one flat rate for unlimited properties and tenants: $29.95 month to month, $20 on the six month term, or $12 a month billed annually. Its convenience fee page puts the tenant ACH charge at $1.00 per transaction, the lowest I found, with cards at 3.1% plus $0.30. You can also flip the setting and absorb the ACH fee yourself.

Run that at 14 doors. Annual RentRedi is $144 a year. Your tenants pay $1 each, twelve times a year, so $168 across the portfolio. Total cost of getting 14 tenants off paper checks: about $312 a year, all in, split between you and them. Compare that to $3,360 for a $280 monthly subscription.

The option that looks free and is not

Plenty of small landlords land on Zelle, Venmo, or Cash App. I understand the appeal and I will still tell you not to do it, and my reason is the one nobody in the software business brings up because they are not lawyers.

In an eviction, what you accept matters as much as what you are owed. Peer to peer apps let a tenant send you any amount at any time, including $40 on the morning of your hearing. Accepting rent after you have given notice can undercut the case you filed, and untangling that requires you to explain to a judge which deposits were rent, which were partial, and which you tried to return. A real rent ledger with per charge application and the ability to block a payment from a tenant you are evicting is not a luxury. It is evidence.

Nothing here is legal advice for your situation, and Texas eviction practice has enough traps that you should talk to your own lawyer before you file. But if you take one thing from this post, take this: the free payment method is the one most likely to cost you a month of lost rent.

The bookkeeping problem is smaller but real. Zelle does not issue 1099-K forms, which means the reporting burden sits entirely on your records. If your records are a phone screen, January is going to be unpleasant.

How to choose in about two minutes

The question is not which platform is best. It is which of these three sentences describes you.

• "I own the units myself and just want rent to show up." Baselane Core or Avail's free plan. Your monthly cost is zero and your tenants pay $2 to $2.50, or nothing if you bank with Baselane.
• "I own the units and want the lowest total cost including what my tenants pay." RentRedi at $12 a month annually, with the $1 tenant ACH fee. Cheapest combined number in the table.
• "I manage units for other people." None of the above, and this is where most of the confusion starts.

That third case is the actual dividing line in this industry. The moment you collect rent that is not yours, you need owner statements, an owner draw, a management fee calculated and taken automatically, a maintenance reserve, and in Texas a properly handled trust account. Landlord tools do not do that work, so people managing for owners get funneled toward the $280 platforms by default. That funnel is the gap I built KeyTurn to close.

What we charge and why

KeyTurn is $49 a month for up to 10 properties, $99 for up to 50, and $199 for up to 200. Flat, with no per unit multiplier, no onboarding fee, and no charge for a second bank account so your trust account does not cost extra. The rent transaction fee is a flat amount the tenant sees before they hit pay, and it never comes out of what lands in your account.

At 14 doors under one $49 plan, that is $588 a year for owner statements, trust accounting, maintenance tracking, and rent collection together. If you do not need owner accounting, RentRedi is cheaper and I will say so. What none of us should be doing is quoting you $280 a month because you asked whether tenants can pay online.

Setting it up without a six week implementation

Whichever you pick, the sequence is the same and it takes an afternoon.

1. Open a dedicated checking account for rent if you have not. Mixing rent with personal money is the single most expensive habit in this business.
2. Add your properties, units, and current rent amounts. Get the lease start and end dates right the first time, because late fee rules key off them.
3. Set the late fee policy to match what your lease actually says, not what you wish it said. In Texas that means a grace period consistent with your lease and a fee you can defend.
4. Decide who absorbs the transaction fee and put it in writing before you invite anyone.
5. Invite tenants with a short note that names the date the change takes effect and keeps the old method open for one cycle.
6. Turn on autopay reminders. The reminder does more for on time payment than the portal does.

Step five is where most rollouts stall. Tenants do not resist online payment, they resist surprise. Give them one billing cycle of overlap and adoption stops being a fight.

If you want a second opinion on your own numbers, the beta request form is on the KeyTurn home page. Send me your door count, whether you manage for other owners, and what you were quoted. I will tell you which of the options above I would pick in your position, including the ones that are not mine.

Related reading

• How much does AppFolio actually cost? 2026 pricing breakdown
• How much does property management software cost under 100 doors?
• The real cost of AppFolio's ACH fees for small landlords
• KeyTurn pricing, in plain numbers

Sources

• Avail pricing page, retrieved August 31, 2026
• Baselane pricing page, retrieved August 31, 2026
• Baselane help center, how ACH fees for rent collection work, retrieved August 31, 2026
• RentRedi pricing page, retrieved August 31, 2026
• RentRedi help center, convenience fees for rent payments, retrieved August 31, 2026