Twelve landlord apps call themselves free . We read the fine print on who pays.

We are bringing the lab to landlord software. Over the next two months we will run one fictional landlord’s quarter of books, three units, two mortgages, a security deposit that comes back short, through the four products that claim to do rental bookkeeping properly, and score them on a published checklist the same way we scored QuickBooks against Xero.

Before any of that, we did what we always do first. On a single day, September 19, 2026, we read the pricing page, the trial terms and the billing policy of every landlord app a self-managing owner of one to ten units is likely to search for. Twelve of them. Not third-party guides, which are how stale prices get quoted for years, but the vendors’ own pages, logged with the date.

• 12

  Pricing pages read

• 8

  Offer a free tier

• 6

  Offer a timed trial

• 3

  Say no card is needed

Two things stood out before we had opened a single account.

“Free” is the dominant business model in this category, and almost nobody offers a trial. In bookkeeping software a timed trial is the norm. Here, only six of twelve have a clock at all, and only three of those say you can start it without a card.

Every free tier is paid for by something, and the pages tell you what if you read to the bottom. Four different things, in fact.

What the twelve pages say

Tool	Free tier with bookkeeping	Trial of the paid tier	Card at trial signup
Stessa	Yes — unlimited properties, bank feeds	None; the free tier is the trial	n/a
Baselane	Yes — Core, with Schedule E	30 days (Smart)	Required
REI Hub	Yes — “minimal transactions”, no bank feed	14 days	Not required
Landlord Studio	Yes — Go, 3 units, manual entry	14 days (Pro)	Not required
TurboTenant	Yes — but no transaction import	None by policy	Not stated
RentRedi	No	None; charged at signup	Required
Rentastic	No	7 days	Not required
Hemlane	Yes — Starter, with bank sync	14 days (paid tiers)	Not stated
TenantCloud	No	14 days	Not stated
Avail	Yes — manual entry only	None on the free tier	Not stated
Innago	Yes — the whole product	n/a	Not stated
DoorLoop	No	None; demo only	n/a

Three vendors, REI Hub, Landlord Studio and Rentastic, describe the thing a bookkeeper would recognise as a free trial: a fixed number of days, no card, and a stated outcome at the end. REI Hub’s help center says what you entered stays readable after the fourteen days. Landlord Studio says the account drops to its free tier with the data intact. Rentastic says you will be asked to pick a plan.

One vendor runs the model the ledger vendors use. Baselane’s Smart plan has a thirty-day trial, its payment policy requires a card for any paid service, and its help center says the card is charged when the trial ends, with a reminder seven days before. That is a subscription with a fuse, and we have written before about why the honest framing is useful: it tells you what the next thirty days require of you.

Two vendors say, in as many words, that there is no trial. TurboTenant’s pricing FAQ: “We don’t trick landlords into a ‘free trial’.” RentRedi’s: “You’re charged when you subscribe (it’s not a free trial),” backed by a thirty-day money-back guarantee you have to ask for. DoorLoop offers only a demo booking, and its free-trial URL returns a 404.

The rest are free tiers without a clock. Which brings us to the question the pages answer only in their footers.

Four ways to pay for “free”

Tool	Funded by	The line that says so
Stessa	banking	Deposits at a partner bank; APY tiers rise with the plan
Baselane	banking	Tenant ACH fee waived only when rent lands in Baselane Banking
REI Hub	caps	Unquantified transaction limit; bank feeds are paid
Landlord Studio	caps	3 units, no bank feeds, then $1.20 per extra unit
TurboTenant	tenant fees	$2 tenant ACH fee and $55 screening on the free tier
RentRedi	subscription	30-day money-back on request
Rentastic	subscription	Schedule E only on the $238/yr tier
Hemlane	caps	No leases or rent collection on Starter; $28 platform fee above it
TenantCloud	subscription	Tax reports gated to the $50–60/mo Pro tier
Avail	tenant fees	$2.50 tenant ACH fee; 3.5% by card
Innago	tenant fees	$2 ACH or 2.99% card; bookkeeping via a separate paid partner
DoorLoop	subscription	$69–99/mo entry; bank connect starts at $149/mo

Your deposits

Stessa and Baselane are the two most-searched names in this category, and both are banks before they are bookkeeping apps. Stessa’s pricing page lists “up to 2.02% APY on cash balances” as a feature of its free plan, and its fine print discloses higher APY tiers as you move up to Pro: the interest rate on your money is a plan perk. Baselane’s fee table waives the tenant’s ACH fee only when the rent is deposited into a Baselane Banking account, and its customer-referral bonus pays out when both parties collect over $500 of rent into one.

Neither of these is hidden. Both pages name the partner bank. But it means the product you are evaluating is a place to park your rental cash flow, with software attached, and the question to ask is not “is the bookkeeping good” but “do I want to move my operating account.” We will be testing whether the bookkeeping works without doing that.

Your tenants

TurboTenant, Avail and Innago are free to the landlord and charge the tenant: $2 per ACH payment at TurboTenant on the free tier, $2.50 at Avail, $2 or 2.99% by card at Innago, plus screening fees of $30 to $55 charged to the applicant. Each page lets the landlord absorb those fees instead, which is the honest way to read the price. The bookkeeping in all three is thin by their own description. TurboTenant’s free tier connects one bank account but the comparison table marks transaction import as unavailable. Avail’s accounting is manual entry with an Excel export. Innago’s own announcement points landlords who want bank sync and a Schedule E to a separate, paid partner app.

Caps

REI Hub, Landlord Studio and Hemlane give you a real free product with a ceiling. REI Hub’s free plan is “for those with minimal transactions” and has no bank feed; the page never says how many transactions is minimal. Landlord Studio’s free Go tier stops at three units and has no bank feeds either; its paid tiers then charge $1.20 per unit above three, which turns the $12 headline into $20.40 a month for ten units. Hemlane’s Starter tier is the most generous free bookkeeping on this list, bank sync included, and its paid tiers hide the sharpest catch we found.

Just a subscription

RentRedi, Rentastic, TenantCloud and DoorLoop charge money, which we note with some relief. Their catches are of the ordinary kind: Rentastic’s Schedule E lives only on its $238-a-year tier, TenantCloud’s tax reports and reconciliation start at the $50-a-month Pro tier, and DoorLoop’s bank connection and QuickBooks sync begin at $149 a month, one tier above the plan a ten-unit landlord would buy.

What the pages contradict

We log these on the pricing tracker as “catches,” and this scan added four on a single day.

Hemlane’s “$2/unit” costs $30. The Basic plan is advertised per unit, and the pricing page adds a $28 monthly platform fee beneath the headline. For the one-unit landlord the per-unit price is the smallest part of the bill.

Baselane cannot decide what it pays. Its own partner page offers referrers “up to $200” in the headline and “up to $150” in the body for the same referral. Its Smart plan is priced only as “$20/mo on an annual plan,” and the monthly-billed price appears nowhere on the page.

Rentastic tells three price stories. The pricing page says $60 a year for Core and $238 a year or $29 a month for Unlimited. The FAQ says $7 a month for Core and mentions free users who no longer exist on the pricing page. A “versus QuickBooks” page shows $16.58 a month. We track the pricing page.

TurboTenant’s accounting is either included or an add-on. The pricing page says the $199-a-year Pro plan includes “built-in accounting tools.” The rental-accounting page sells accounting as a per-unit add-on for every user, $15 a month for one unit, capped at $85. Nothing we read says which one a Pro subscriber gets. That is the first thing we will settle at trial.

There is a fifth item that is not a price. Landlord Studio publishes full affiliate terms, $50 per paid referral with a 45-day cookie, and every affiliate URL we tried on its site redirects to the homepage or back to those terms; there is no sign-up page. We mention it because it tells you something about how much these pages are maintained, and because it is the kind of thing a review site should say out loud.

Before you sign up for any of them

What happens next

Four of these go into the lab in October: Stessa, Baselane, REI Hub and Landlord Studio, the four whose pages describe actual bookkeeping rather than rent collection with a report attached. They will get the same treatment as every tool on this site: one fictional client, one messy quarter, the same file imported into each, and a 32-point checklist scored with screenshots. The landlord’s books have their own traps, a mortgage payment that must split three ways, a property tax paid from escrow that never touches the bank feed, a $1,800 deposit refunded at $1,550, and we will publish the dataset the day the first review does.

Until then, the twelve rows above are what the vendors say. In our experience the pricing page and the trial are two different products, and the interesting article is the distance between them.

Every figure here was read from the vendor’s own page on September 19, 2026, and is tracked with that date on the pricing tracker, where we will re-verify it monthly. We have no affiliate relationship with any of the twelve companies named as of publication. Several run referral programs, and if we join any after the reviews are written we will say so in the review itself, as we have done before. Where a vendor’s page did not state a fact, we have said “not stated” rather than fill the gap from somewhere else.