Baselane vs TurboTenant Pricing and What Each One Costs per Door

Baselane and TurboTenant both put "free" in the first line of their pricing pages, and both mean it, which is why landlords with a handful of doors keep asking which one to pick. The catch is that they are free for different jobs. Baselane is a bank account with landlord software attached. TurboTenant is listing and leasing software with a rent button attached. Comparing their prices is really comparing what each one charges once you step outside the part it gives away.

Every figure below was read from Baselane's and TurboTenant's own pricing pages, help centers and product pages. If you are here mid-decision with a vacancy open, the fastest useful thing you can do is put the unit live on RentPlace for $39 a month while you finish choosing a back office, or at least paste the listing into the free Listing Grader so the copy stops costing you applicants on whichever platform ends up hosting it.

The short answer

Baselane Core is $0 a month with unlimited properties. Its paid tier, Baselane Smart, is $20 a month on an annual plan, so $240 a year, at any portfolio size (every banking and tenant fee is on our Baselane pricing page). TurboTenant's Free plan is $0. Its paid tiers are annual and banded by portfolio size: Essentials runs $149 a year for 1 to 10 units up to $349 at 61 or more, and Pro runs $199 up to $999.

On the landlord side, then, Baselane is cheaper at the free tier (it includes bookkeeping and banking that TurboTenant reserves for Pro), TurboTenant Essentials is cheaper than Baselane Smart up to 30 doors and Pro only up to 10, and from 31 doors Smart is the cheapest paid tier of the three. On the tenant side both charge $2 per ACH payment and 3.49% by card, but Baselane's screening fee starts at $24.99 against TurboTenant's $45 or $55, and Baselane waives the ACH fee entirely if the rent lands in a Baselane checking account.

Two free products that start at different ends of the tenancy

This is the part most comparisons skip, and it decides more than the price does. TurboTenant's product begins before you have a tenant: the listing, syndication to the portals, the application, the screening report, the lease. Rent collection and accounting come afterward, and accounting is Pro only. Baselane's product begins once you have a tenant: the checking account the rent lands in, the invoice and reminder that get it there, the bookkeeping that tags it to the right property, and the Schedule E at the end of the year. Its plan table has no listing, syndication or marketing row at all.

That last row is why a lot of landlords end up using both, and why the comparison is less either-or than the search query suggests. If you want to run the whole tenancy on one login, TurboTenant is the only one of the two that can. If you want the rent to land in an account that already knows which property it belongs to, Baselane is the only one of the two that is a bank.

What each one costs the landlord at your door count

Here is the paid tier of each, for a full year, at list price. Baselane Smart is a flat $240. TurboTenant's columns are whichever band that door count falls into, from the band table in its help center that the pricing page does not show. Both free tiers are $0 at every row, so they are left out.

Read the table for what the tiers contain, not just the figure. Baselane Smart is an accounting upgrade: auto-tagging, balance sheets, depreciation schedules, 2-day deposits. TurboTenant Essentials is a leasing upgrade: unlimited state-specific leases and faster payouts. They are not substitutes for each other. The like-for-like row is Baselane Core against TurboTenant Pro, because Pro is where TurboTenant's accounting lives, and on that row Baselane is $0 against $199 to $999. The full band table and every TurboTenant fee is on our TurboTenant pricing breakdown.

What each one charges your tenants

Neither pricing page leads with this, and it is the number that reaches your renters every month. The two are closer here than anywhere else in the comparison.

On $1,800 of rent the card fee is $62.82 a month on either platform, which is why both of them show the tenant the amount with and without the fee and why most landlords end up steering everyone to ACH. The $2 ACH fee is $24 a year per unit. Small, but it is the one line where the two companies behave differently, so it gets its own section below.

The screening fee gap

Baselane lists tenant screening from $24.99, paid by the applicant. TurboTenant charges the applicant $45 on a paid plan or $55 if you are on Free. The landlord pays nothing for the report on either platform, so it is tempting to skip past this. Do not, because it is the fee that decides how many people finish your application.

A renter touring four units in a weekend is looking at $100 in fees on Baselane-style pricing or up to $220 on TurboTenant's, and they respond by applying to one or two and hedging on the rest. The lower fee is a real advantage for the landlord in a soft market. In a hot one it cuts the other way, because a $55 fee filters out the people who were never serious. Either way the fee is a number you should be able to state in the listing and in your first reply, and on both platforms you can.

The ACH fee, and the account that makes it disappear

Both platforms charge $2 for a rent payment by bank transfer, and both let the landlord absorb it. TurboTenant waives it for your tenants when you are on Pro, which at ten doors means paying $199 a year to remove $240 of tenant fees, roughly a wash. Baselane waives it when the rent is deposited into a Baselane checking account, which costs nothing, because the checking account is the free product.

That is the whole Baselane model in one fee. The software is free because the company would like to be your bank, and it is a reasonable bank for this purpose: property-specific accounts, up to 2.63% APY on balances, FDIC pass-through coverage through Thread Bank, and QuickBooks and Xero sync on the free tier. The cost is that your rent, your reserves and your bookkeeping move to one provider. If the rent keeps landing in an ordinary business checking account instead, the bookkeeping does not sync itself, and you are back to downloading statements and getting them into the books by hand, or having a tool convert the bank statement straight into QuickBooks at each month end. That is the real fork in this decision, and the $2 is just where it shows up.

Where Baselane is the better choice

• You want accounting without paying for it. Bookkeeping by property, Schedule E, QuickBooks and Xero sync and a tax package are all on the $0 tier. TurboTenant puts accounting on Pro at $199 to $999 a year.
• You are happy to bank there. The ACH fee disappears, deposits land in the right property's account automatically, and the balance earns interest while it waits for the mortgage payment.
• You have more than 30 doors and want a flat bill. Smart is $240 at any size. TurboTenant Pro is $699 at 31 doors and $999 at 61.
• You want the lower screening fee. From $24.99 against $45 or $55.

Where TurboTenant is the better choice

• You have a vacancy. Baselane does not list, market or syndicate. TurboTenant does, on the free plan, to the major portals.
• You want the lease in the same place as the application. Unlimited state-specific leases and addenda are on Essentials at $149 a year.
• You want screening built into the application flow. The TransUnion report arrives with the application rather than as a separate request.
• You do not want to move your banking. TurboTenant pays out to whatever account you already have, in 2 to 4 days on a paid plan.

The cost neither pricing page shows

An $1,800 unit loses about $60 for every day it sits empty. One extra vacant week is $420 of rent you will never bill. Set that against the numbers above: the difference between Baselane Smart and TurboTenant Essentials at ten doors is $91 a year, and the entire annual cost of either paid tier is less than a single extra vacant week on one unit.

That is not an argument for ignoring price. It is an argument for spending proportionate time on it. What moves the $420 is the listing and what happens in the first hour after somebody reads it. Baselane does not touch that stage at all. TurboTenant puts the unit on the portals and then hands you an inbox, where an inquiry is a name and a message and you find out the move-in date, the income, the occupants and the pets by writing back and asking, one applicant at a time.

That is the specific problem RentPlace is priced around. The listing asks your screening questions before the message will send, so the first thing you read already has the answers, and every applicant on that listing answered the same set, so you can compare them side by side. It is $39 a month for up to five listings, monthly, no annual prepay, renters pay nothing, and the listing goes live the same day you pay. It does not collect rent, hold your deposits or write your lease, and it is not trying to. Run it in front of whichever of these two you pick.

How to decide this week

Ask where the tenancy is. If the unit is empty, TurboTenant is the one of the two that can fill it, and its free plan is real, so start there and decide about Essentials when you need a lease. If the unit is occupied and the problem is where the rent goes and how the books get done, Baselane Core does that for $0 and the ACH fee vanishes if you let it be the bank.

Then check the two things the price comparison does not cover. Ask what applying will cost a renter on your setup, because it shapes how many finish. And look at where the platform leaves you on the day the inquiries start arriving, because neither of these tools sorts that pile for you.

If you want the full fee schedule for the listing-first platforms rather than the comparison, the TurboTenant pricing page has every band and every renter-side charge with the date each figure was checked, and the RentRedi pricing page covers the flat-rate alternative at $144 a year with unlimited units, and Baselane is set against it directly in Baselane vs RentRedi pricing. For how TurboTenant stacks up against a per-unit platform, see TurboTenant vs Avail pricing, where the crossover lands at exactly two doors.

And before you pay anyone anything, fix the listing. When applying costs a renter $25 or $55, copy that leaves out the move-in date, the pet policy and who pays the utilities is copy they skip. Paste yours into the free Listing Grader: it scores the text out of 100, names the missing facts one by one, and rewrites the headline and description. There are also four complete sample rental ads to work from if you would rather start from copy that already works.