Stop Paying Rent to Your Software Vendor

Custom property management portals range from $15,000 to $25,000 depending on scope. A basic tenant portal with rent payments and maintenance requests starts around $15K. Full-featured platforms with owner dashboards, mobile apps, and advanced reporting run toward $25K. The key difference from SaaS: you pay once for the build instead of a fee on every unit, and the portal then costs about $150-250 a month to run. How fast you recoup it depends on your unit count, because the savings scale with the portfolio. The worked 500-unit example on this page pays back in about 17 months; our 2,050-unit client was net positive in about three and a half.

Eighteen to twenty-five weeks from contract signing to launch for the full platform. Discovery and design take three to five weeks, and the core web portal is ready for testing around week 7 to 11. The dashboards, payment setup, and native iOS and Android apps follow, so the apps are done by week 15 to 21, with testing and launch after that. If you only need the core tenant portal, without the dashboards and mobile apps, it's closer to our other customer portal projects, which take 8 to 12 weeks. Either way we can run the new portal alongside AppFolio or Buildium for two to three months so rent collection never has a gap.

Yes. We recommend running both systems in parallel for 2-3 months. New tenants can start using the new portal immediately while existing tenants transition at their own pace. Property managers can mark manual payments (checks, cash) in both systems during overlap. Most clients fully transition within 60-90 days with zero disruption to rent collection.

Unlike AppFolio's $1.49/unit/month pricing that scales with your portfolio, your custom portal has fixed infrastructure costs (~$200/month) regardless of unit count. Adding 100 or 1,000 more units costs nothing extra. You also avoid AppFolio's typical $1,500+ integration fees for new properties. The platform architecture supports unlimited properties, units, and users with no performance degradation.

Very little changes for tenants. They'll create an account on your branded portal (takes 2 minutes) and link their bank account via Plaid (30 seconds). ACH fees can stay at what they pay now ($2.49 is standard). The difference is that the fee revenue goes to you instead of AppFolio. Tenants who prefer paper checks can keep mailing them, and property managers mark those payments manually in the system.

We integrate Plaid for instant identity verification and bank account ownership confirmation. For credit checks and background screening, we can integrate with your preferred provider (TransUnion SmartMove, RentPrep, etc.) or implement Plaid's income verification for $2-5 per check. Application fees ($20-50) are collected through the portal, with net profit of $15-45 per application after verification costs.

Yes, and you own 100% of the source code and the backend it runs on. After launch you can request feature enhancements from us at our standard hourly rate, or hand the codebase to any developer you like. Owning it outright is the whole point: it's what ends per-unit pricing permanently, and it's the thing AppFolio and Buildium will never give you at any price. For ongoing work there's an optional maintenance retainer: you put down a deposit, and we bill feature updates, security patches, and iOS/Android app updates against it at $150 an hour, with a monthly summary of the work.

Fixed monthly infrastructure costs run approximately $130-270/month total: hosting ($40-80), database ($50-100), email service ($20-50), push notifications ($0-20), and app store fees ($20/month). ACH processing costs $0.40 per transaction through Plaid + Dwolla. If you charge tenants $2.49 per ACH (same as AppFolio), you profit $2.09 per transaction. A 500-unit property with 60% ACH adoption generates ~$7,500/year in ACH profit alone.

Our portals are built for multi-LLC operations from day one. Each property or LLC gets its own Dwolla sub-account routing to its designated bank account. Rent payments automatically flow to the correct LLC's account based on which property the tenant occupies. Owner dashboards show per-LLC reporting. The central admin dashboard shows management everything in one place while keeping each LLC's finances properly separated.

Yes. The property manager dashboard is built for non-technical users, with plain, simple screens instead of developer tools. Common tasks like approving applications, viewing payment status, responding to maintenance requests, and running reports are point-and-click. We provide live training sessions (recorded for future reference), written documentation, and 30 days of post-launch support. After that, an optional maintenance retainer covers ongoing questions and issues.