Cheapest short-term rental compliance software

STRwatch monitors 130+ city, county and state sources across 31 US markets and promises alerts within 48 hours of a permit deadline, ordinance change or enforcement action. The free tier tracks one city with a weekly digest. Pro is $29 a month after a 45-day trial and covers unlimited cities and properties with real-time alerts; Agency is $99 a month and adds API access and white-label reports. It also generates checklists with action steps, phone numbers, fee amounts and deadlines, which it describes as AI-generated.

The 31 markets are the big ones (Nashville, Austin, Denver, Scottsdale, Palm Springs, New Orleans, San Diego, Charleston, San Francisco, Miami Beach, New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Las Vegas, Boston, Honolulu among them), so a host whose properties sit inside that list gets a lot for $29. A host in a beach town of 4,000 people, which is where much of the US short-term rental stock actually is, gets nothing.

STR Comply's pitch is a 30-second check: enter an address and see the permits, taxes and rules that apply. It covers 100+ US cities, researches from official city and county sources, and says it updates its database within days of a city changing a rule, with change alerts for paid subscribers. The free tier is one address lookup. Host is $14.99 a month for up to 5 properties; Pro Host is $39.99 a month for up to 15 and adds a portfolio dashboard. Permit tracking, expiry reminders at 90, 60 and 30 days, a document vault, regulation-change alerts and step-by-step permit guides are included.

For a host with up to five properties in one of its cities it is inexpensive and direct. The two things to check before choosing it are whether your city is one of the 100+, and whether you can see where a figure came from, since no per-figure source link is visible on the public site. It names Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com, Furnished Finder and Houfy as listing platforms it covers; we found no property-management-system integration or public API on the site, so a manager enters each address by hand.

Rentcompliant publishes written guides covering registration, taxes, safety and insurance requirements for 50+ US cities, and sells Compliance Kits with checklists, template forms, tax calendars and step-by-step registration walkthroughs. Every guide shows a last-verified date and links to official government sources, which is exactly how a rule should be published and more than several paid tools on this page do.

It is a library rather than a monitor. The Compliance Tracker for permits, deadlines and status across properties is marked Coming Soon, no prices are shown on the homepage, and there is no integration or API. If you want to understand a city before you buy anything, start here; if you need to be told when the rule changes, you need something else.

Lodge Compliance sells a per-property subscription. The Basic tier is free per property and covers a compliance concierge, lodging-tax calculation, guides and recommendations. Core, at $24.99 a month per property billed yearly, adds licence assistance, lodging-tax filing and remittance, compliance task tracking with reminders, and licence management and renewals. Pro, at $249.99 a month per property, adds guest, channel, vendor and pricing management. Licence assistance is also sold as a $199.99 add-on on the free tier.

Its coverage claim is the largest on this page and also the least precise: the homepage headline says 80,000+ jurisdictions, the stats block on the same page says 6k+ jurisdictions in the compliance database, all 50 US states and 191 countries. It lists Airbnb, Booking.com, Guesty and VRBO as integrations and sells a Compliance Data API to platforms. We did not find a per-fact link to a government source on the pages we read, so how a given rule was established is not visible to a buyer before they sign up.

The pricing shape decides who it suits. For one or two properties where you want the tax return filed for you, bundling filing with licensing at $299.88 a property a year is straightforward. For a manager with 40 doors the same tier is $11,995.20 a year, and the licensing half of that is the part a flat-rate portfolio plan elsewhere covers for a fraction.