Airbnb's host-only fee is now 15.5%
Keep more.
Grow more.Book direct.
That fee comes straight out of your payout, not the guest's checkout. A direct booking site puts the money back in your pocket and the guest relationship back in your hands.
Built for owners, not portfolios. Sites from $1,950 — you own it outright.
Airbnb's 15.5% fee takes
$5,022
a year from a cabin at $220 a night, 40 bookings
You'd keep by going direct
$1,018
on a realistic 25% of bookings
Savings calculator
What the fee actually costs you.
Your numbers, honest math, and a default that assumes you shift a realistic share of bookings — not all of them.
Work it out
Fee rates verified 29 August 2026Airbnb takes this from you over a year
$5,022
$125.55 a booking, across 40 bookings
Fees on one booking, same stay, each channel.
Kept per direct booking
$101.76
Kept per year
$1,018
Front Door pays for itself in
23 months
Direct Book pays for itself in
8.4 years
Those payback figures count fee savings alone. They ignore the repeat guests who book you again without a platform in between, and the fact that a second channel can't be de-ranked overnight — which is the part most owners say mattered a year on.
Get your free estimateEstimates only — check your own payout statements.
More bookings. More profit. More freedom.
Cut the platform fee
Keep what the platform was taking on every direct stay.
Own the guest
Their email is yours. Repeat stays never touch a platform again.
Own the site
Yours outright — the domain, the files, all of it. No platform rent.
Not one algorithm away
A second channel that can't be de-ranked overnight.
How it works
Three steps, and the second one is ours.
Most owners stall because setting up a booking engine looks like a job. It is — so we do it.
Tell us about the property
Your rates, fees, rules and photos, and where you're listed today. One form, about ten minutes.
We build and configure it
A custom site plus the booking engine behind it — rates, taxes, rental agreement, damage deposit, calendar sync. Configured properly, so a double booking can't happen.
You take bookings direct
Guests see live availability, get an instant price, sign the agreement and pay. Your calendar updates everywhere.
Worth saying plainly
A direct site won't replace Airbnb. It shouldn't.
Airbnb is a discovery engine. A family who's never heard of your cabin finds it because Airbnb put it in front of them, and no website does that job in year one.
What a direct site captures is the demand that already knows about you — repeat guests, referrals, your own social following, and the people who come to your area every year and have learned to look past the platforms.
For most owners that's 15–35% of bookings, which is why the calculator above defaults to 25% instead of 100%. The number it gives you is smaller than the ones you'll see elsewhere. It's also one you can actually hit.
What's included
Everything a real booking channel needs.
- A site built for your propertyDesigned around your photos and your place — not a template with your name swapped in.
- Live availabilitySynced from your existing calendar, so what guests see is what's actually open.
- Instant, accurate quotesNightly rate, cleaning, fees and the right local lodging tax — calculated correctly.
- Card paymentsReal checkout through Stripe. No more chasing a Venmo transfer.
- A rental agreement that fits your stateE-signed before the booking confirms, with the clauses a generic template leaves out.
- Refundable damage depositAn authorization hold on the guest's card — costs you nothing to place.
- Two-way calendar syncA direct booking blocks your platform calendars within minutes.
- Search setup and analyticsIndexed properly, with a Google Business Profile pass and traffic you can actually read.
Pricing
Two ways in, priced in the open.
No monthly platform fee to us, ever. You pay once and the site is yours.
Entry
Front Door
$1,950one-time · no monthly software
- Custom site built around your photography
- Live availability calendar from your existing feed
- Inquiry-to-quote form straight to your inbox
- Guest guide, local area and house-rules pages
- Search setup, analytics, Google Business Profile
Best if you want somewhere to send repeat guests and your own following, and you're happy to quote and take payment yourself.
Get an estimateFull direct booking
Direct Book
$3,500one-time, plus ~$50/mo you pay the booking engine directly
- Everything in Front Door
- Real book-now: live rates, instant quote, card payment
- E-signed rental agreement and damage deposit hold
- Two-way sync so you can't be double-booked
- Automatic confirmations and pre-arrival messaging
Best if you run the rental as a business and want a second channel that works while you're asleep.
Get an estimateBooking engine setup on your behalf — rates, taxes, agreement, channel connections — is $400 one-time. Additional properties on an existing build, $900. Optional maintenance from $49/mo.
Is $3,500 a lot?
Depends what you compare it to.
Every other way of getting a direct booking site charges you monthly, forever. Here is what each route actually costs over three years, at list price, for one property.
Swipe the table sideways to see every column →
| Route | To build | Every month | Three years | Yours at the end? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Do it yourselfSquarespace, Wix, or similar | Your evenings | $16 | $576 | No — it lives on their platform |
| Rental platform subscriptionLodgify Starter | — | $16 + 1.9% of every direct booking | $576 + 1.9% | No — platform-hosted |
| Done-for-you STR platformBoostly Starter | $997 | $97 | $4,489 | No — you keep the domain, not the site |
| Done-for-you STR platformBoostly Growth | $1,997 | $197 | $9,089 | No — you keep the domain, not the site |
| Direct BookWhat we build | $3,500 | $0 to us | $3,500 | Yes — files, domain, engine account |
| Web agencyCustom build plus retainer | $8,000–15,000 | Retainer varies | $8,000+ | Usually |
Prices as published by each provider in August 2026. The booking engine is left out of every row because it is the same in all of them — OwnerRez is $50/month, about $1,800 over three years, and you pay it to OwnerRez directly, not to us. Lodgify's and Boostly's tiers go higher than the ones shown; these are their entry plans.
Where the lines cross
Against Boostly's entry plan, a one-time build costs more for the first 26 months. After that it costs less every single month, because it stops costing anything.
By the end of year three you're $989 ahead. By year five, $3,317. And the site doesn't switch off if you have a bad season and cancel a subscription.
Where we're not the answer
If you have the time and the eye for it, Squarespace at $16 a month is genuinely cheaper and we'd be lying to tell you otherwise. Plenty of owners should do exactly that.
What you're paying us for is not the HTML. It's that you don't spend forty hours learning tax rules, agreement clauses and calendar sync — and that when a guest's card fails at 11pm, the person who set it up picks up.
Front Door, over 3 years
$54/mo
$1,950 once, nothing after
Direct Book, over 3 years
$97/mo
Same as the cheapest hosted plan's monthly fee — with no setup fee on top
Direct Book, over 5 years
$58/mo
The number keeps falling
Direct Book, over 10 years
$29/mo
A subscription never does this
What the money buys
The design is the easy half.
Anyone can put a pretty page on a domain. The reason most direct booking sites never take a booking is everything behind the page — and it's the part nobody quotes you for.
01
Lodging tax, configured to your address
The Smoky Nest sits inside Pigeon Forge city limits, so it owes 9.75% state and local sales tax plus a 2.5% city hotel tax — and both apply to the cleaning fee, not just the nightly rate.
Move the same cabin a mile outside the line and it's a different pair of numbers. Get it wrong and you're either short with the state or overcharging your guests.
02
A rental agreement that actually closes the gaps
Booking engines ship a default template. We read the one OwnerRez ships and found four gaps in it, then wrote the clauses to close them.
Yours goes out with the quote, gets e-signed, and is attached to the reservation — so the agreement and the booking can't drift apart.
03
Deposits that hold instead of charge
A $500 security deposit shouldn't hit your guest's card. It's set up as an authorization hold, placed automatically two days before arrival and released after checkout.
Holds expire in seven days, which is exactly why the timing has to be configured rather than guessed at.
04
Payment schedules, refunds and cancellation
Deposit at booking, balance before arrival, refunds that follow a written rule. Your cancellation policy has to say the same thing in three places — the site, the agreement, and the engine that processes the money.
When those three disagree, you find out during a dispute.
05
Calendar sync that doesn't double-book
Airbnb allows exactly one connected software partner at a time. Switching engines means the old one has to release the slot before the new one can take it, and the read-only calendar feed has to be switched off the moment the live connection goes up.
Do that in the wrong order and you sell the same week twice.
06
Email that lands in the inbox
Quotes, agreements, payment requests and confirmations are useless in a spam folder. Sending domain, records and templates are set up and then tested with a real booking, start to finish.
We run one all the way through — book, sign, pay, cancel, refund — before your site goes live.
We did all of it on our own cabin first.
Every line above came out of building this for The Smoky Nest — our property, our money, our guests. The setup you'd get is the one we already run, including the mistakes we made getting there and don't need to make again on yours.
That's the difference between hiring a web designer and hiring someone who has taken a direct booking at 11 o'clock at night and had to make the card work.
Examples
Two real rentals, two different markets.
One of them is ours. Every decision we recommend, we've made with our own money on the line.
Pigeon Forge, Tennessee
The Smoky Nest
Our own cabin. Direct booking, live availability, e-signed agreement and a card-hold deposit — the full stack, running on the property we answer the phone for.
thesmokynest.com →Broken Bow, Oklahoma
Paint Horse Palace
A second market and a different guest, built on the same approach — a site the owner controls, with direct enquiries coming straight to them.
painthorsepalace.com →Questions
The ones owners actually ask.
What exactly changed with Airbnb's fee?
Airbnb retired the old split fee, where the host paid about 3% and the guest was charged 14–16% at checkout. It's now a single host-only fee of 15.5%, deducted from your payout and calculated on the nightly rate plus cleaning, pet and extra-guest charges. Taxes are excluded. Guests no longer see a separate service fee.
Do I have to leave Airbnb?
No, and we'd advise against it. Keep listing there for discovery and route repeat guests and referrals direct. Your calendars stay in sync, so there's no risk of taking two bookings for the same nights.
What's the $50 a month for?
The booking engine behind the site — availability, quoting, payments, agreements and channel sync. You pay that provider directly, not us, and it's a flat fee with no cut of your bookings. Plenty of all-in-one builders charge less up front and then take a percentage of everything you book, which costs far more once you're actually busy.
Who owns the site when it's finished?
You do — the domain, the files, all of it. Nothing stops working if you walk away from us.
What about lodging taxes on a direct booking?
This is the part most owners miss. When a booking comes through a platform, it usually collects and remits occupancy and sales tax for you. On a direct booking that stops, and you're responsible. We configure the engine to collect the right tax for your jurisdiction as part of the build — but registering and remitting is yours, and you should confirm the rates with your own city and state.
How long does it take?
Two to three weeks from the point we have your photos and details, depending on how much back-and-forth the content needs.
Tell us about your property.
Send your listing link and we'll come back with what we'd build, what it would cost, and an honest read on whether it's worth it for your booking volume.
No call required, and no pitch if the numbers say don't bother.
Rather not fill in a form?