Why I price per rental unit instead of per property, and use a 1-unit free tier instead of a 14-day trial

My product is for landlords and short-term-rental hosts. The obvious thing to price on is the property, because that's the word people use when they tell you what they own. I price per rental unit instead, and that single decision changed the shape of the business more than anything else in the pricing page.

A property is not a unit of value

A duplex is one property and two income streams. A triplex is one property, three tenants, three leases, three renewal dates and three sets of expenses that have to stay separate at tax time. Per-property pricing charges the same for all three, so the product costs least exactly where it does the most work.

Worse, per-property pricing lets portfolios hide. A landlord with one 40-unit building is "one property". They'd sit on the free plan forever while generating more load, more storage and more support than anyone actually paying me. Per unit, price tracks work: more units means more ledgers, more renewal dates, more documents, more reminders going out every month.

The tiers

Free: 1 unit, 1 user, 100 MB. Host $19/mo: 5 units, 2 users. Investor $59: 25 units, 5 users. Portfolio $149: 100 units, 15 users. Annual is ten months for twelve.

The part I'd defend hardest is that the free tier is permanent and capped on units rather than on time. A landlord with one condo is a real user with a real need, and they're also the person most likely to buy a second property next year - at which point the cap does the selling for me, at the exact moment their life got more complicated. A 14-day timer just asks them to decide on my schedule instead of theirs, and the honest answer at day 14 is usually "I haven't had a renewal come due yet, so I still don't know if this is useful."

Cap on the unit, gate on the features

Those are two different jobs. The unit cap decides when you have to pay. The feature gates decide what each step up buys: CSV import, tax-category export, email reminders and a second seat at the first paid tier; P&L reports, role-based access and guest packets at the second.

I deliberately put the tax export in the cheapest paid tier rather than saving it for a higher one. It's the thing that makes someone convert in March, and pricing it out of reach just means they export a raw CSV and finish the job in a spreadsheet - which is the competitor I'm actually fighting. Nobody's real alternative to my product is a rival product. It's Excel.

The part I'd think harder about next time

Counting units is simple until someone asks what happens when a unit is vacant, mid-renovation, or sold on the 12th. I count active units and decrement when one is archived or deleted, which is defensible, but it means the billed number moves during the month. If I were starting again I'd decide up front whether the billed count is a high-water mark for the period or a live figure, because retrofitting that answer into billing code afterwards is genuinely unpleasant.

If you price on a usage unit rather than per seat: what's your unit, and what was the argument you had with yourself before you picked it?

(Context, since someone always asks: this is Estavo, which I built over 11 weeks and am now selling - details on my profile.)