AppFolio alternative for Canadian landlords with under 20 units

If you own four doors in Hamilton, AppFolio is not built for you. It's built for the property management firm running four hundred, and its pricing says so.

This is the whole comparison, with real numbers and no gated demo.

The part nobody puts on their pricing page

Rent software costs you in two separate places, and comparisons usually only show one of them:

1. A subscription, charged monthly per unit — sometimes with a minimum that ignores how many units you actually have.
2. A payment processing fee, charged per rent payment, usually to the tenant.

A platform can look cheap on one and expensive on the other. You need both.

Processing fees, on a $2,000 rent payment

Published rates as of 2024–2025:

Platform	Card	Bank / ACH
AppFolio	2.99%–3.49% + $0.25	$2.49, or free on some plans
RentRedi	3.1% + $0.30	$1.00 flat
Buildium	2.95%	$1.00 flat
AshGlow	2.9% + $0.30 (Stripe) + 0.10% platform	1% + $0.40 capped at $5, plus 0.10% capped at $2

On a $2,000 payment, by card:

• Buildium — $59.00
• AshGlow — $60.30
• AppFolio — $60.05 to $70.05
• RentRedi — $62.30

Buildium beats us by $1.30, and AppFolio's floor is 25 cents under ours. We're mid-pack on card, and there's no honest way to present that as a win.

On the bank rail, AppFolio's ACH is free on some plans; ours costs a capped $7.00. On per-transaction fees alone, they win.

So why would a four-unit landlord in Canada choose us?

Because the subscription is where you actually get bled

AshGlow charges per billable unit, with the first two free and no monthly minimum:

Units	Rate
First 2	Free
3–12	$1.99 / unit
13–52	$1.79 / unit
53–102	$1.59 / unit
103–202	$1.39 / unit
203+	$1.19 / unit

A five-unit landlord bills three units: $5.97 a month. A two-unit landlord pays nothing, permanently, and that isn't a trial.

AppFolio's Core plan carries a monthly minimum that applies regardless of portfolio size — so a small landlord pays for capacity they will never use.

<!-- TODO: founder to verify AppFolio's current Core-plan monthly minimum at appfolio.com/pricing before this goes live -->

That gap is the entire argument. Save a dollar a month on processing and lose it many times over on a subscription floor.

Where AppFolio is genuinely the better choice

Being straight about this is cheaper than having you find out later:

• Large portfolios. Past a few hundred units the per-unit economics converge and AppFolio's operational depth pulls ahead.
• Full-service property management. Owner portals, trust accounting, work-order routing to vendor networks — that's their product, not ours.
• US-focused operations. We're built for Canadian rails: CAD settlement, Interac-adjacent workflows, HST handling for incorporated owners.

If you manage other people's buildings for a living, buy AppFolio. If you own a handful of doors and want rent to arrive without a Saturday text, that market has been ignored for a decade, and it's the one we built for.

What "Canadian-first" means concretely

• CAD settlement through Stripe Connect, straight to your own bank.
• HST handling for incorporated landlords, where platform fees become an input tax credit — a real recovery most small landlords never claim.
• Bank rail pricing that reflects Canadian reality, where e-Transfer is the incumbent and the problem with it was never the fee.

The switching question

There is no contract, no setup fee and no annual commitment. Two units are free, so the honest way to evaluate this is to move two units across, run one rent cycle, and decide with evidence instead of a demo call.

Export your payment history whenever you like. We don't hold it hostage.

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Prices in CAD. Processing rates are set by the payment processor and change; competitor rates are as published in 2024–2025. Where we've quoted a competitor, check their current pricing page — we'd rather you verify than trust us.