Ten direct booking website builders are worth a small operator's time, and for most people the cheapest answer is the one already inside the property system they pay for. Hostaway, Guesty, Hostfully, Hospitable and OwnerRez all include a direct booking site or a booking widget in the subscription, and switching it on costs nothing extra. With no property system at all, Lodgify starts at $14 a month for one property billed yearly. When the system is fine and the website is the weak part, CraftedStays is $89.99 a month for the first two properties.
What each builder costs, and who it suits
| Builder | Published price at a small property | Who it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Lodgify | $14, $26, $42 and $62 a month across its four plans at one property billed yearly, shown against $18, $33, $53 and $77 for monthly billing, with a 0% booking fee on every plan | An operator with no property system who wants the whole thing on one bill. Basic covers one property and Starter two, and the price climbs with your property count |
| OwnerRez | $40 a month for the first property, $15 each for the second and third, $10 for the fourth, $8 each from the fifth to the ninth, and lower tiers down to $2. No commission, no guest fee, no per booking fee | Two or more separate buildings. Its hosted website runs on your own address and is billed on a table of its own on top of the subscription |
| Hostaway | A booking website is included with the subscription. Booking Website Pro is $49 a month plus 0.5% of what it books, and Hostaway charges US guests a further 1.8%. The subscription itself is quoted | Anyone already on Hostaway. The guest pays without leaving your site |
| Guesty | Lite from $9 a month plus 1% a reservation, for one to three listings. Pro covers 4 to 199 listings and is quoted on a call | Anyone already on Guesty. Ten units puts you on Pro, so the $9 figure in the search results is not your price |
| Hostfully | Growth from $15 a property a month plus a 1% payment fee and a 0.85% direct booking fee. Pro from $25 a property and waives both | Anyone already on Hostfully. Which plan is cheaper depends entirely on your direct volume, and the crossover is lower than it looks |
| Hospitable | Direct Basic at 1% of booking value, Direct Premium at 4% plus 3% processing. Direct booking sits on the Professional and Mogul plans only | A host who would rather pay per booking than per month. The percentage keeps growing as you get better at this |
| CraftedStays | $89.99 a month for the first two properties, then $8 a month each, with no setup fee, no commission and no markup on guest payments. The Host Plan is built for up to 20 properties | An operator on Hostaway, Guesty, Hospitable, OwnerRez or Hostfully whose website is the weak part. It adds the site and leaves your calendars, pricing and messaging where they are |
| Boostly | No price on either of its websites. It guarantees 65% direct bookings within 12 months of launch or it refunds every penny plus $1,000, and you keep the site | An owner buying a done for you service, with coaching and marketing wrapped around the website. It builds and hosts a WordPress site you own, around more than 27 property systems on one domain and more than 30 on the other |
| Houfy | Lite $7.99 and Premium $11.99 a listing a month, a one time $5.99 host verification, and 0% commission. Some property system connections, OwnerRez, Hostaway and Lodgify among them, add a 5% usage charge to the guest's booking | A host who wants a marketplace listing first. The website builder is a Premium extra, and on an ordinary Houfy booking the guest pays through your own Stripe, Square or PayPal account on a Houfy page |
| WooCommerce Bookings and HBook | $20.75 a month billed at $249 a year, and $99 once then $55 to renew | A WordPress site somebody already maintains. The reservation is created in your own database and the guest pays in your own checkout |
Every figure comes from the vendor's own pricing, product or help page, checked on August 2026, with the Lodgify, OwnerRez, Guesty and Hostaway numbers read again in September 2026.
The first thing to try is the booking site inside the subscription you already pay for. Guesty gives its booking engine to every customer, and Hostaway, Hostfully, Hospitable and OwnerRez each include a site or a widget too. Switch it on, put it through a real booking, and only then go shopping. Start with the builder or build decision if you have not settled that one yet.
What a year of this actually costs at ten units
A flat fee is the same every month. A percentage costs you more every month your site does better. Run ten separate units and $20,000 a month of direct bookings through the published rates, and one plan on this list comes to $127 a month while another comes to $1,400, with the whole gap sitting in the percentage.
| Builder | What ten units and $20,000 a month costs | The shape of it |
|---|---|---|
| OwnerRez | $127 a month for the ten properties, plus the hosted website tier | Flat, and it falls per property as you add more |
| CraftedStays | $153.99 a month, on top of whatever your property system costs | Flat, and unaffected by how well the site sells |
| Hostaway Booking Website Pro | $149 a month, the $49 plus 0.5% of the $20,000, with the base subscription on top | Part flat, part percentage. Your guests separately pay 1.8% |
| Hospitable Direct Basic | $200 a month | Pure percentage, so it doubles when your direct bookings do |
| Hospitable Direct Premium | $1,400 a month at 4% plus 3% processing | Pure percentage, and the one to model before you pick it |
| Hostfully Growth | $520 a month, the $150 plus 1.85% of the $20,000 | Part flat, part percentage |
| Hostfully Pro | $250 a month flat | Flat, and cheaper than Growth above about $5,400 a month of direct bookings |
We worked all of that out from the vendors' published rates, checked on September 2026. None of it includes card processing, which every one of them leaves to you. Stripe's standard US rate is 2.9% and 30 cents on a domestic card, so $20,000 a month costs another $580 before any builder's fee, plus 30 cents on each payment.
The Hostfully rows are the ones worth modeling on your own numbers. The plans are $10 a property apart, and the cheaper one carries 1.85% in fees, so at ten properties the more expensive plan wins as soon as you are booking about $5,400 a month direct. Every plan with a percentage in it has a crossover point, and no pricing page shows you where yours falls.
Getting guests to the site is separate work with its own costs, and none of the prices above touches it. Some of these builders advertise search and AI visibility help alongside the website itself. Boostly is the only one here that puts a number behind the promise, guaranteeing 65% direct bookings within 12 months of launch or a refund of every penny paid plus $1,000, with the site yours either way. Everybody else leaves the traffic to you.
One more line belongs in the budget. On a direct booking the lodging tax is yours to collect and send on, while on platform bookings it depends on the channel and the city. Ask each vendor to show you the tax on a test booking before you buy, and settle who collects it per channel before you change anything.
Where the guest actually types the card
Houfy, Beds24 and Cloudbeds each handle the payment page differently from what their marketing suggests. The rest keep the whole booking on your own address.
Houfy is a marketplace before it is a builder, which its own about page says plainly. On an ordinary Houfy booking the money goes into your Stripe, Square or PayPal account and the guest is on a Houfy page while they pay. Its AI Website Builder does support your own address, and it sits on the $11.99 Premium tier. Beds24 shows its own web address on the booking page until you pay 19 euros a month for yours to show instead, on top of a subscription from 15.50 euros. Cloudbeds publishes both behaviors, which is the gap worth knowing about. Its basic embed starts the booking on your page and then sends the guest to Cloudbeds to finish, while its premium embed keeps the whole thing on your site once you have told Cloudbeds which address is yours. A sales page that says the booking engine goes on your website can mean either one, so ask which embed your plan includes.
You can settle this for your own site in an evening. Book your own property with a real card and watch the address bar the whole way through.
Five systems that will not let an outside site create a booking
If the plan is a custom site, or a builder that talks to the system already holding your calendar, check first that the system will let an outside website write a booking into it. Five will not, and each one says so in the technical pages it publishes for developers. ThinkReservations lets an outside site look at your data and change nothing except daily rates. ResNexus allows a booking to be created only by certified travel agency partners, so your own website cannot do it. eviivo names no way for your site to send it a reservation. innRoad publishes nothing for developers at all. Little Hotelier sends every connection through its parent SiteMinder, whose guide covers availability, rates and property information and never mentions creating a booking.
They are still good systems, and you can take direct bookings on all five. Your route there is the vendor's own booking page inside your site, a dedicated builder, or WordPress.
Options for a B&B or a small hotel
The builders above mostly grew up around apartments and houses. A B&B or a small hotel has two more options that publish a price. Little Hotelier starts at $39 a month plus a 1% booking fee, with Pro from $179, and it will drop a plugin into a WordPress, Squarespace or Wix site you already have, hand you a snippet of code, or host the whole site for you. eviivo starts at $50 a month for a single property and $125 for several, with extras charged per room, and its engine takes the payment on your own site. Cloudbeds, ThinkReservations and ResNexus answer the price question with a form. There is more on that field in what a ten room B&B actually needs.
The screen none of these vendors publishes
We run MINT @Naschmarkt, 18 serviced apartments in five apartment types in Vienna. We had the site, the property system and a checkout on our own address. What we had no answer for was a guest searching dates we could not offer.
The calendar only appeared once an apartment was already in the cart. A guest who asked for nights we did not have landed on an empty cart with no way to change the dates. A button labeled "Try different dates" took nobody back to the calendar. The one control that still worked was the browser's back button, which leads straight to the platform listing the guest arrived from. I had looked at that page hundreds of times without seeing the problem, because I always arrived with dates already chosen.
We rebuilt it ourselves, with the developers from my agency. The calendar now sits above everything and stays there whether or not anything is selected, "Try different dates" clears the selection and returns the guest to it, and emptying the cart resets the booking steps so nobody is left halfway through. No vendor publishes what its own empty result screen does, and we could only fix ours because the checkout belonged to us.
The share of booking value arriving direct at MINT went from 3% to 13% between May and July 2026. The best single month brought in €10,616 of direct bookings, and the working is on our results page. Our apartments are in Vienna, and under European rules Booking.com cannot require an Austrian property to match its prices on the property's own website. A US or Canadian contract does require exactly that, so treat the pricing freedom in this story as Austrian. Maxine and I run MINT together. Fullstreak is the direct booking practice we started at Ekamoira after this worked at our own place.
Where to start, by what you run
If you already pay for Hostaway, Guesty, Hostfully, Hospitable or OwnerRez, use the site or the widget inside that subscription before spending anything, because all five take the booking on your own address. When you have tried it and the website itself is the weak part, CraftedStays connects natively to all five for $89.99 a month at two properties.
With a handful of units and no property system behind them, Lodgify from $14 a month at one property billed yearly gives you a complete site and checkout on one bill, with no fee on the bookings it takes.
Several separate buildings suit OwnerRez, where the per property price falls as the count rises and there is no commission or guest fee underneath it.
If you have a WordPress site that works and somebody who keeps it updated, install WooCommerce Bookings at $249 a year or HBook at $99 once, and the booking never leaves your own database.
On ThinkReservations, ResNexus, eviivo, innRoad or Little Hotelier the website has to come from somewhere else, because an outside site cannot write a booking into any of the five. Put the vendor's own booking page inside your site, or add a dedicated builder or WordPress alongside it.
Below about $350,000 a year of bookings, stay where you are. At that volume the commission you would save does not pay for a switch, and the same money does more good filling rooms. The reasoning is on who this is built for.
I have a business in this field, so here is where we stand. We build on every system named above without selling any of them. Your property system stays the record of what is booked, and we send our bookings into it. Before you spend anything here, work out what the platforms take from you now and hold every price on this page against it.
If one of these rows describes your setup and you still cannot tell which way to go, book a call and tell me which property system you run, because that decides most of the conversation.
