How Much Does Property Management Software Cost Under 100 Doors?

Every small operator I talk to asks the same question in roughly the same words: what does property management software actually cost when you have under 100 doors? And every vendor answers it the same way, with a number that is technically true and practically useless.

The problem is that the sticker price on a pricing page describes the subscription only. For a portfolio under 100 doors, the subscription is usually the second or third largest line on your annual bill. The transaction fee on rent, the setup fee on your bank account, the per document eSignature charge, and the plan caps that force you a tier higher all land on top of it.

So I sat down on August 24, 2026 and pulled the published prices off the vendors' own pricing pages. Not a review site, not a reseller blog, the actual pages. Then I ran the math for a 40 door portfolio, which is the middle of the range for the people I build for.

The short answer

If you manage 40 doors and you want online rent collection, tenant screening, maintenance tracking, and owner reporting, budget somewhere between $600 and $2,500 a year. That is an enormous spread for the same set of jobs, and the spread has almost nothing to do with software quality. It has to do with how each vendor structures fees.

What the five main options publish for 2026

Here is the base subscription and the rent transaction fee, as published on each vendor's pricing page as of August 2026. I am comparing the plan a 40 door manager would actually need, which usually means a mid tier, not the entry tier.

Two things jump out. First, the base subscriptions differ by almost 4x for products that do broadly the same work. Second, the transaction fee ordering is the reverse of the subscription ordering. The cheapest subscription on this list carries the most expensive rent fee, and the most expensive subscription carries one of the cheapest.

That is not a coincidence. It is a deliberate design. A low headline price wins the comparison shopping click, and the margin comes back through the payment rail where nobody is looking.

The line item nobody quotes you

Run the Buildium Essential math all the way out for 40 doors, using only figures published on their pricing page:

• Subscription: $62 a month starting price, so $744 a year.
• Incoming EFT: $2.35 per transaction. At 480 rent payments a year, that is $1,128.
• Bank account setup: $99 per business bank account on Essential. If you run a separate trust account, which most Texas managers do, that is at least $198.
• eSignature: $5 per document on Essential. Forty leases a year is $200, and that is before addenda.

First year total: roughly $2,270, against a quoted price of $744. The quote was not wrong. It was just answering a narrower question than the one you asked.

Compare that to Rentec PM, where the published pricing includes one free incoming ACH per active property per month, no setup fees, and no term commitment. For a 40 door portfolio collecting rent once per unit per month, the entire rent transaction line goes to zero. Same job, same portfolio, and the difference in fees alone is over a thousand dollars a year.

The second trap: caps that are not unit caps

The other thing that quietly moves you up a tier is a cap on something other than doors. Vendors advertise unlimited units and then meter a different resource.

TenantCloud is the clearest example. Every plan advertises unlimited properties and units, which sounds perfect for a growing portfolio. But the plans cap leases: 10 on Starter, 30 on Growth, 60 on Pro. A 40 door manager with 40 active leases is out of Starter and out of Growth on day one, so the honest price is the $50 a month Pro tier, not the $15 a month headline. Pro is also the first tier with an owner portal and bank reconciliation, which you need the moment you manage for anyone but yourself.

DoorLoop's Starter plan caps at 10 units, so a 40 door operator starts at Pro, published at $189 a month billed yearly, plus $3 per unit above the plan's base allotment. DoorLoop also charges an onboarding fee described on its page as based on portfolio size, which means you do not know that number until you talk to sales.

Buildium requires its onboarding service on the Growth and Premium plans. Rentec Direct publishes a live calculator and states plainly that a sales call is never necessary to see your rate, which is the only version of this I actually respect.

How to run this math on your own portfolio

You do not need a spreadsheet. Three numbers get you within a hundred dollars.

1. Subscription: monthly price of the plan you actually qualify for, times 12. Check the caps before you pick the tier.
2. Rent fees: your door count, times 12, times the per transaction ACH or EFT fee. This is the number that gets left out of every quote.
3. Year one setup: onboarding fee, plus $99 or so per bank account if the vendor charges for that, plus eSignature costs at roughly one lease per door per year.

Add those three and you have your real number. Then divide by your door count to get a cost per door per month you can actually compare across vendors. For 40 doors, $2,270 a year works out to $4.73 per door per month. That is the figure to hold in your head, and it is nowhere on anybody's pricing page.

What we charge, since it would be rude not to say

KeyTurn is $49 a month for up to 10 properties, $99 a month for up to 50, and $199 a month for up to 200. Flat. No per unit multiplier on the manager side, no onboarding fee, no charge for adding a second bank account.

The rent transaction fee is paid by the tenant, disclosed to them up front before they hit submit, and never deducted from what lands in your account. I made that choice for the same reason I wrote this post: I would rather lose a comparison on the sticker price than win it on a fee the operator finds in month four.

At 40 doors that is $1,188 a year, all in, and you can check my arithmetic against everything above. You are welcome to decide one of the others is a better fit. Rentec Direct in particular is a genuinely fair deal for a small portfolio and I will say so to anyone who asks. What I will not do is quote you a number that is missing a line.

If you want to run your own numbers with me, the beta request form is on the KeyTurn home page. Send me your door count and what you pay today and I will tell you honestly whether switching is worth your afternoon. Sometimes the answer is no, and that is a fine answer.

Related reading

• How much does AppFolio actually cost? 2026 pricing breakdown
• AppFolio alternatives for small property managers
• The real cost of AppFolio's ACH fees for small landlords
• KeyTurn pricing, in plain numbers

Sources

• Buildium pricing page, retrieved August 24, 2026
• Rentec Direct pricing page, retrieved August 24, 2026
• TenantCloud pricing page, retrieved August 24, 2026
• DoorLoop pricing page, retrieved August 24, 2026