Avail vs TurboTenant Pricing and What Each One Costs per Door

Avail and TurboTenant are the two landlord platforms small US portfolios usually end up choosing between, and comparing their prices is harder than it looks because the two companies do not price the same thing the same way. One charges per unit per month. The other charges a flat annual fee for a band of units. Put those side by side at one door and they look close. Put them side by side at ten doors and one of them costs five times the other.

Every figure below was read from Avail's and TurboTenant's own pricing pages and help centers. Both companies publish enough to do this arithmetic honestly, which is more than can be said for the big listing portals, and the arithmetic is worth doing because the gap at the top end is not a rounding difference. If you are here mid-decision and want something useful in the next two minutes, run your listing through the free Listing Grader first: it scores the copy out of 100 and names what you left out, which changes your results on whichever platform you pick.

The short answer

Both have a real free tier. Avail's paid tier, Unlimited Plus, is $9 per unit per month, so $108 per unit per year. TurboTenant's paid tiers are annual and banded by portfolio size: Essentials is $149 a year for 1 to 10 units and Pro is $199, rising to $349 and $999 at 61 or more units.

Because Avail's price scales with doors and TurboTenant's does not, Avail Unlimited Plus is cheaper only if you have exactly one rental. At two doors TurboTenant Pro is already cheaper, and from there the gap widens fast. At ten doors it is $1,080 a year against $199. Every Avail fee, including the screening price it does not publish, is on our Avail pricing page, and what landlords report after signing up is in our Avail review.

Two completely different pricing shapes

This is the part most comparisons skip, and it is the only part that changes the answer. Avail prices like a seat license: every unit you add costs the same $9 a month as the last one, forever, in a straight line. TurboTenant prices like a site license: you pay one figure for the whole portfolio, and it only moves when you cross a band boundary at 10, 30 and 60 units.

The billing period difference matters more than it sounds. TurboTenant states there are no contracts and you can cancel at any time, but the payment is taken for the year, so cancelling in month three does not stop a monthly charge you have already paid. Avail's $9 per unit is an actual monthly charge you can stop.

What each one costs at your door count

Here is the whole comparison in one table: Avail Unlimited Plus against TurboTenant Pro, both at list price, both for a full year. Avail's column is simply $108 multiplied by the number of units. TurboTenant's column is whichever band that door count falls into.

Run the same table against TurboTenant Essentials instead of Pro and the one-door result flips further toward Avail, because Essentials is $149 a year against Avail's $108. From two doors up the answer is the same either way. The full band table and what each TurboTenant tier includes is laid out on our TurboTenant pricing breakdown, and what landlords report after a year of use is in our TurboTenant review.

Where the crossover actually lands

At exactly one rental. That is the headline finding and it is arithmetic you can check yourself: $9 a month for one unit is $108 a year, which is less than TurboTenant's cheapest paid band of $149. Add a second unit and Avail is $216 while TurboTenant has not moved.

This is not a gotcha and it is not a mistake on Avail's part. Per-unit pricing is honest pricing: a landlord with one condo genuinely uses less of the platform than a landlord with forty, and Avail charges accordingly. It does mean that if you plan to grow, the software line in your budget grows with you on one platform and stays flat on the other. A landlord going from four doors to twelve over three years would go from $432 to $1,296 a year on Avail and from $199 to $399 on TurboTenant.

The honest caveat is that the tiers are not feature-identical, so this is a price comparison rather than a value comparison. Avail folds lease agreements, waived tenant bank-transfer fees and customizable screening questions into its single paid tier. TurboTenant splits comparable features across Essentials and Pro, which is why the Pro column is the fair one to use against Avail Plus.

What each one charges your renters

Both platforms are close to free for the landlord because both collect most of their money from applicants and tenants. If you are comparing total cost of running a unit rather than what lands on your own card, this table matters more than the one above.

Note the one real difference in that table: Avail waives tenant bank-transfer fees on its single paid tier, while TurboTenant only waives them on Pro. A landlord on TurboTenant Essentials is still putting a $2 charge in front of every rent payment. On twelve payments a year across four units that is $96 coming out of your tenants' pockets for no reason you can explain to them.

The screening fee only one of them publishes

TurboTenant states the number plainly: $55 per applicant if you are on the Free plan, $45 if you are on a paid plan, covering the TransUnion credit report and score, the nationwide criminal check and the eviction check. You can quote that to an applicant before they start.

Avail does not publish a single figure. Its pricing page says the cost of credit, criminal background and eviction checks varies by location because of state laws, and that landlords choose which reports to require for each applicant. That is a defensible position, since several states do cap what you may charge an applicant and the report mix genuinely changes the cost. It is also awkward in practice, because you cannot tell a prospective tenant what applying will cost them until you have built the screening request.

Either way, this is the fee that shapes your funnel. A renter touring four units over a weekend is looking at somewhere near $200 in application fees if every landlord runs a paid screen, so they apply to one or two and hedge on the rest. You are competing to be the application somebody actually pays for, which is decided by whether your listing answered their questions and whether your first reply arrived the same day.

Where Avail is the better choice

• You have one rental, or you expect to keep having one. $108 a year against $149 or $199, with monthly billing you can stop, is the cleaner deal at a single door.
• You want a monthly charge rather than an annual one. Avail bills per month. TurboTenant takes the year up front even though it has no contract.
• Realtor.com exposure matters to you. Avail has been part of Move, Inc., the operator of Realtor.com, since December 2020, which is a meaningful distribution advantage in some markets.
• You want tenant bank transfers free without buying the top tier. Avail waives them on its only paid plan. TurboTenant waives them on Pro alone.

Where TurboTenant is the better choice

• You have two or more doors. The flat band price wins immediately and the gap grows with every unit you add. At ten doors the difference is $881 a year.
• You are planning to grow. Adding units costs nothing until you cross a band, so a portfolio going from four to nine doors pays the same software bill throughout.
• You want the application fee quotable up front. $45 or $55 is a number you can put in a listing and in a reply.
• You want accounting and income verification in the same account. Pro adds financial reports, Snappt income verification and fraud detection, user roles and permissions, and unlimited connected bank accounts. If you also need lender-ready statements for a refinance, those categorized exports are the raw material, and you can turn a bookkeeping export into a balance sheet and P&L rather than rebuilding them by hand in a spreadsheet.

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. Hold that against the numbers you have just spent ten minutes comparing: the difference between these two platforms at five doors is $341 a year, and it is smaller 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. The thing that moves $420 is not which platform holds your lease templates. It is how good the listing is, how fast you reply, and whether the questions that decide the tenancy get asked in message one or message five. Most landlords have this exactly backwards, because the fee is knowable and the vacancy is not.

Both platforms leave that part to you. An inquiry on either arrives as a message, and you find out the move-in date, the income, the occupants and the pets by writing back and asking, four days later, 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 contains the answers, and every applicant on that listing answered the same set so you can compare them side by side. Flat monthly price for the whole portfolio, renters pay nothing, no per-unit charge and no annual prepay.

How to decide this week

Count your doors and read the table. At one, take Avail. At two or more, take TurboTenant. That single question settles the price comparison, and both free tiers are real enough that you can run a unit on either without paying anything while you make up your mind.

Then check the two things the price comparison does not cover. Ask what applying will cost a renter on your setup, because on Avail you will have to build the screening request to find out, and that number affects how many people 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 either platform 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 third suite on most shortlists, a flat $144 a year with unlimited units. If the bookkeeping matters more than the listing, Baselane vs TurboTenant pricing compares a free bank-first platform against TurboTenant fee by fee. For the listing portals rather than the landlord suites, the same treatment is on our Apartments.com listing fees breakdown, where the Premium price turns out to be the one number the company refuses to publish.

And before you pay anyone anything, fix the listing. When applying costs a renter $45 or more, 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, and a wider look at what each advertising channel really costs per vacant day.