Two property management systems can quote you numbers that look nothing alike and cost you exactly the same. Or they can quote the same headline and cost you double. The reason is almost never the number. It is the unit the number is attached to, and in shared living the unit changes everything.
This is a buyer's guide to comparing per-bed and per-unit PMS pricing on a like-for-like basis. It describes the two pricing models, gives you the one multiplier that decides which is cheaper for your portfolio, and lists the hidden line items that make a headline price meaningless until you normalise them. It does not quote real vendor prices, because published pricing changes constantly and most enterprise pricing is negotiated. Every number below is a labelled illustration you should replace with your own quotes.
The two pricing models
Strip away the packaging and PMS pricing resolves to a handful of billing units. The two that matter for shared living are these:
- Per-unit pricing. You pay per door, property, or apartment under management. A six-bed HMO is one unit. A studio is one unit. This model comes from single-family and multifamily software, where one tenancy equals one unit and the mapping is clean.
- Per-bed pricing. You pay per lettable bed or room. A six-bed HMO is six billable units. This model is native to coliving, PBSA and HMO software, where you sign an agreement per bed and the bed is the thing you actually let.
You will also meet flat-tier pricing (a fixed monthly fee for a band of inventory), per-user or per-seat pricing (billed by staff logins rather than inventory), and hybrid models that combine a platform fee with per-unit or per-bed usage. Payment processing is almost always billed separately as a percentage of rent collected, and it frequently dwarfs the licence fee. More on that below.
Why the unit matters in shared living
In single-family lettings, per-unit and per-bed pricing are the same thing, because a unit has one tenancy. In shared living they diverge by exactly your beds-per-unit ratio. That ratio is the entire story.
A per-unit price looks cheap to a coliving operator because it is quoted against a small number, the count of properties. But you run the business on beds. So to compare anything you must convert both models to the same denominator: cost per bed per month.
Beds per unit = total lettable beds / total units
Per-unit model, cost per bed = per-unit price / beds per unit
Per-bed model, cost per bed = per-bed price (already per bed)The break-even multiplier
Set the two costs-per-bed equal and solve, and you get the only number you need to know which model wins:
Break-even beds per unit = per-unit price / per-bed price
If your actual beds per unit > break-even -> per-unit model is cheaper
If your actual beds per unit < break-even -> per-bed model is cheaperThe intuition: per-unit pricing rewards you for cramming more beds behind each billable door, because the fee does not rise with beds. Per-bed pricing is flat per bed regardless of building size. So large houses favour the per-unit model and small units or studios favour the per-bed model.
Worked example
Suppose two vendors, with these illustrative list prices used only to show the arithmetic:
- Vendor A, per-unit model: an illustrative £40 per unit per month.
- Vendor B, per-bed model: an illustrative £8 per bed per month.
Break-even beds per unit = £40 / £8 = 5 beds
So Vendor A (per-unit) is cheaper only where a property has MORE than 5 beds.
Below 5 beds per unit, Vendor B (per-bed) is cheaper.Now apply it to different portfolios. The cost-per-bed columns are computed from the two illustrative prices above:
| Portfolio profile | Avg beds/unit | Per-unit cost/bed | Per-bed cost/bed | Cheaper model |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Studios / self-contained | 1 | £40.00 | £8.00 | Per-bed |
| Small HMOs | 3 | £13.33 | £8.00 | Per-bed |
| Break-even | 5 | £8.00 | £8.00 | Tie |
| Large HMOs | 6 | £6.67 | £8.00 | Per-unit |
| Coliving blocks | 20 | £2.00 | £8.00 | Per-unit |
Read the table and the received wisdom flips depending on who you are. A studio-heavy or small-HMO operator saves with per-bed pricing. A large-block coliving operator saves dramatically with per-unit pricing, paying an illustrative £2 per bed against £8. Same two vendors, opposite conclusions, and the only thing that changed was beds per unit. This is why a headline price comparison is worthless until you run it through your own ratio.
One caution on the per-unit side: a low cost per bed only holds if the system actually models beds. Some per-unit systems treat the whole property as one record and cannot let, price or report a single bed independently. You may pay less per bed and still be unable to answer basic per-bed questions. See per-bed vs per-room inventory for why the data model matters as much as the price.
The line items that move the real number
Licence fee is often the smallest part of what you pay. Normalise these before comparing any two quotes:
- Payment processing. Usually a percentage of rent collected plus a per-transaction fee. On a portfolio collecting hundreds of thousands a month this can exceed the entire licence fee. Compare the effective take rate, not just the licence.
- Per-user or per-seat charges. A low per-bed price with expensive seats punishes operators with large lettings or operations teams. Count your logins.
- Onboarding and implementation. A one-off, sometimes a multiple of monthly fee. Amortise it over your expected contract length.
- Module or feature gating. Screening, revenue management, channel management and analytics are frequently paid add-ons. Price the bundle you will actually run, not the base tier.
- Minimum commitments. A floor of X units or Y beds regardless of your true count. Small and growing operators pay for inventory they do not have.
- Annual uplift. Contractual price rises. Model the whole term, not month one.
A total-cost-of-ownership checklist
Put every quote through the same conversion so you are comparing one number:
Effective cost per bed per month =
( licence fee
+ amortised onboarding (one-off / contract months)
+ per-user fees
+ add-on module fees
+ payment take rate x rent collected )
/ total lettable beds
Then sanity-check against the minimum-commitment floor.Run that for each vendor across your real portfolio and the winner is often not the one with the friendlier headline. A per-bed quote that looks expensive can win once a rival's per-unit licence is loaded with seats, modules and a richer payment take rate.
Which model suits whom
| If you are... | Lean toward | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Studio or self-contained BTR | Per-unit or per-bed (they converge) | Beds per unit is 1, so the models price the same; decide on features |
| Small-HMO portfolio | Per-bed, watch the seats | Low beds per unit makes per-unit expensive per bed |
| Large-block coliving / PBSA | Per-unit or capped per-bed | High beds per unit makes per-unit very cheap per bed, if it models beds |
| Fast-growing operator | Avoid high minimums | You will pay for inventory you do not yet have |
| High-collection operator | Negotiate the payment take rate first | Processing can outweigh the licence entirely |
Where this connects
Pricing is only half the buying decision; the other half is whether the system earns its fee back in yield. See RevPAB explained for the metric that tells you whether better tooling is paying for itself. If you are comparing named incumbents, the AppFolio alternative and Buildium alternative breakdowns cover where per-unit multifamily tools strain against bed-let inventory. Our own pricing page shows how JumboTiger structures this, and per-bed vs per-room inventory explains why the billing unit and the data model have to agree.
