Lodgify Pricing Explained: Every Plan, Fee & Hidden Cost

A host wrote to me last summer with a Lodgify invoice she could not reconcile. The subscription line was exactly what she expected. Underneath it sat a second charge, a few dollars against a reservation that had come through her own website, and she was convinced she had been double billed. Nothing was wrong with the invoice. She had budgeted from the plan price on the pricing page and stopped there, which is how most people get the real cost of this platform wrong.

Lodgify's pricing has been reshaped over the past couple of years, and a large share of what is written about it online describes a version that is no longer sold. The per-reservation commission that used to define the entry plan is not part of the current lineup. What sits in the costs-people-miss column now is smaller, quieter, and applies to every subscriber rather than just the cheap ones. So here is the whole picture as of writing: the four subscription tiers and where the feature walls fall, the fee that lands on your payments, the processing charges stacked underneath it, and the add-ons that quietly lift the monthly total above whatever you first wrote down.

How much does Lodgify cost per month?

As of writing, the Lodgify pricing page lists four tiers, and the figures shown for a single property on yearly billing in US dollars are $14 a month for Basic, $26 for Starter, $42 for Professional, and $62 for Ultimate. All four are labeled 0% booking fee. That last detail is the single biggest change from the pricing advice still floating around host forums, and it matters more than any of the dollar figures.

Read those numbers with three caveats attached. The first is billing term. The prices above are the yearly-prepay rate, which lodgify.com/pricing advertises at roughly 20 percent off, with a bi-yearly option around 25 percent off. Paying month to month costs noticeably more, and the pricing page leads with the discounted figure, so the number in your head and the number on your card will not match unless you commit to a year.

The second caveat is unit count. Lodgify has a property selector on the pricing page, and the totals move as you raise it. The entry tiers also carry ceilings: as of writing, Basic is sold for one property, and Starter for two. Push past that and you are into Professional whether or not you wanted its feature set, which is a real constraint for a host adding a third rental.

The third is currency. The page toggles between EUR, USD and GBP, and the numbers are not straight conversions of each other. Treat the table below as the shape of the pricing, and confirm the live figure for your currency and unit count before you commit.

The free trial is worth knowing before you touch any of this. Lodgify runs a 7-day trial with no credit card required, which is short but genuinely free, and premium features are unlocked during it so you can see what the higher tiers do before paying for one.

What is the Lodgify transaction fee and when does it apply?

Lodgify charges a 1% transaction fee on payments processed through the payment gateway you connect inside the platform, and per help.lodgify.com it applies on every subscription plan, not just the cheap ones. Payments taken outside the gateway are exempt: bank transfers, cash, and anything you simply mark as paid in Lodgify carry no transaction fee at all.

Lodgify's own worked example is the clearest way to see it. A $1,000 booking arrives through your Lodgify website, the guest pays $600 of it by card, and the fee due is $6, calculated on the $600 that actually moved through the gateway rather than on the booking total. The fee follows the money, not the reservation.

A few mechanics are worth having in your head before you model this. Refunds do not return it: if you refund a guest in full, the transaction fee on the original payment stays charged. How it gets collected depends on your gateway, and Lodgify's help center spells this out plan by plan. With Lodgify Payments it comes out of the payout and shows up bundled into processing fees. With Stripe it is deducted instantly and appears in your Stripe account as an application fee, which is why some hosts never notice it. With Braintree, Authorize.Net or PayPal, Lodgify invoices it monthly to the card on your subscription, and that is the version that generates the confused emails. Payyo, at least as of writing, carries no transaction fee, which is a small but real reason to look at gateway choice as a cost decision rather than a plumbing one.

My honest read: this fee is far less punishing than the old model it replaced, and I would not let it drive a plan decision. On $30,000 of card-paid direct bookings in a year, 1 percent is $300. That is not nothing, but compare it to the roughly $4,500 an OTA would have taken at 15 percent on the same volume and the argument for a direct-booking site survives easily. The reason to understand the fee is budgeting accuracy, not avoidance. If you want to shrink it, the lever is payment method rather than plan, since offline payments sit outside it entirely.

One historical note, because it explains the confusion. Lodgify's help center still hosts an article on a booking fee describing a 1.9% charge on the old Starter plan and 3.9% on the retired Lite plan. The current plan lineup does not include those terms, the dedicated booking fee page at lodgify.com/terms/booking-fee/ now returns a 404, and every tier on the live pricing page is marked 0%. If you signed up years ago and never changed plans, check your own invoices rather than assuming, because legacy subscriptions do not always inherit new terms. For anyone signing up today, the booking commission is gone and the 1% transaction fee is what remains.

What do you actually get at each Lodgify tier?

The meaningful differences between the four plans are feature walls, not fee structures, and the two walls that decide most purchases are the website builder at Starter and Google Vacation Rentals at Professional. Everything below those lines is cheaper than people expect; everything above them is where Lodgify starts behaving like a property management system.

Basic is a channel manager with an inbox. You get API-level sync across Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com, a unified calendar, the AI-assisted unified inbox, and self-serve onboarding. What you do not get is the thing most people come to Lodgify for. There is no website builder on Basic, so if your plan is to publish a bookable site and start peeling guests off the OTAs, Basic is not the plan, no matter how attractive $14 looks.

Starter is where the product most people picture actually begins. It adds the no-code website builder, the booking widget you can drop onto an external site, custom rate configuration, secure guest payments, booking reports, co-host access, and human email support plus a one-to-one onboarding session. For a one or two property owner whose growth plan is direct bookings, this is the natural entry point. The builder is the reason to be here at all, and I have written up what it does and does not handle well in this Lodgify website builder review; the short version is that it converts respectably and spares you from wiring a separate site to a separate channel manager, but it is a booking tool first and a marketing site second.

Professional buys reach and automation. Automated guest messaging, manual payment collection, phone support alongside email, and the ability to list your website on Google Vacation Rentals, which per the plan comparison on lodgify.com is not available on Basic or Starter. For hosts who care about direct traffic, that Google listing is frequently the whole reason to move up a tier, and it is a better argument for Professional than the messaging automation is.

Ultimate is the property manager tier. Task and cleaning management, check-in and check-out automation, owner payments and statements, guest invoices, advanced analytics, the guest mobile app, a bundled Turno subscription for turnovers, and priority support across live chat, email and phone. If none of those words describe your week, you are paying for capacity you will not use.

What costs never show up on the pricing page?

The charges that surprise Lodgify users are gateway processing on top of the 1% fee, the jump from advertised yearly pricing to real monthly billing, per-property scaling, and third-party subscriptions for the tools Lodgify integrates with rather than includes. None of these are dishonest, but each one is easy to omit when you budget from a single headline number.

Payment processing is the big one. Your gateway charges its own standard card rate on every transaction, and Lodgify's help center says so explicitly: the transaction fee is a Lodgify fee, and your chosen gateway may add a processing fee of its own. So a card payment on your direct site carries two costs stacked together, Lodgify's 1 percent and whatever your processor takes. Budgeting for only one of them understates your per-booking cost by more than half. I go deeper on how these charges behave in day-to-day use in the Lodgify review.

Then there is the billing-term gap already mentioned, which deserves a second look because it is the most common complaint I see from new subscribers. Committing to a year is what unlocks the advertised price and, on yearly plans, a free registered domain. Staying flexible month to month costs a premium on every tier. Decide that consciously rather than discovering it at checkout.

Per-property scaling is the third. Because Lodgify prices by rental, a portfolio's subscription line grows close to linearly, softened by whatever volume discount applies at your unit count. Going from one rental to four is not a small increment, and combined with the unit ceilings on Basic and Starter it means portfolio growth triggers both a higher tier and a higher multiplier at the same moment.

The rest are the tools that live outside the plan. Lodgify's native dynamic pricing is fine as a floor but shallow next to a dedicated engine, so hosts serious about revenue management usually connect something like PriceLabs and pay its per-listing fee. Smart locks and devices arrive through integrations with their own costs. And there is no native email campaign tool: the only newsletter path in the help center is a Mailchimp integration, so if guest email marketing is part of your direct-booking plan, budget for a Mailchimp tier too. A realistic monthly figure is the plan price times your unit count, plus processing, plus the 1 percent, plus the two or three add-ons your operation genuinely needs.

Which Lodgify plan fits your portfolio?

Match the tier to whether you need a website and how many rentals you run, because those two questions decide it almost entirely. Here is how I steer hosts:

• One rental, happy on the OTAs, no website ambitions. Basic. You are buying calendar sync and an inbox, and $14 a month on yearly billing is a fair price for exactly that.
• One or two rentals, direct bookings are the plan. Starter. The website builder is the whole point, and this is the cheapest tier that has it. Use the 7-day trial to publish a test site before you commit to a year.
• Any portfolio where Google traffic matters, or three-plus rentals. Professional. Google Vacation Rentals and automated messaging justify the step up, and past two properties the entry tiers are closed to you anyway.
• Managing for owners, or running a team. Ultimate, but price it against a flat-rate competitor first, because at that unit count the per-property multiplier decides your bill more than the tier does.

The plan is not a one-way door. Opening on Starter, proving the site converts, and moving to Professional the quarter Google traffic starts to matter is a perfectly sensible path, and Lodgify makes that upgrade painless. Our guide to growing direct bookings for a vacation rental covers how quickly that direct share tends to move once you commit, which is the trend that triggers the upgrade.

Is Lodgify worth the price?

For a host whose growth depends on a branded, bookable website, yes: Lodgify is worth it because you are buying a site builder and a channel manager as one product instead of paying for and integrating two, and the 0% booking fee across all current plans removes the objection that used to make this a harder sell. For a host who lives entirely on Airbnb and wants the deepest messaging automation on the market, the value case is thinner and a platform built around OTA workflows will fit better.

The strengths are coherence and conversion. One login covers calendar sync, the guest inbox, and a public site that actually takes reservations, and the site output is good enough to turn browsers into direct bookers. The weaknesses are equally plain: per-property billing makes scaling expensive next to flat-rate rivals, native pricing and automation are shallower than specialist tools, and the entry tiers are capped tightly enough that a growing host hits a wall quickly.

That is where alternatives earn a look. European hosts in particular tend to weigh Lodgify against Smoobu, which prices in euros and, as of writing, sells a Professional Flex plan around EUR 29 a month with a 0.9% booking fee alongside a prepaid tier that removes the fee entirely. Readers signing up through Smoobu can claim a 10 percent discount, and I put the two side by side in this Lodgify versus Smoobu comparison. Neither wins outright. Lodgify's model rewards the host who wants a real website and penalizes the one who just wants cheap multi-unit sync.

By portfolio size, then: a single-unit owner testing the water should open a Lodgify trial on Basic or Starter depending on whether a website is part of the plan, and decide inside the 7 days. A one-to-four-property host chasing direct bookings should budget for Starter or Professional and add the 1 percent plus gateway processing to their per-booking math from day one. Anyone running five or more units should price Ultimate against a flat-rate alternative before signing, because that is the point where the multiplier, not the tier, sets your bill. Run the numbers on your own unit count and your own payment mix, and the right plan stops being a guess.

Related Articles

• Lodgify review, a full walkthrough of the platform beyond its pricing.
• Lodgify versus Smoobu, the two direct-booking platforms compared on cost and features.
• How to increase direct bookings, the strategy that changes which Lodgify plan makes sense.