(If you joined in 2017, nothing to see here, keep walking :-)
Dear Legacy Users,
The time has come to talk about pricing. Yes that pricing - the price you pay OwnerRez to use our awesome software.
Back when we started OwnerRez in 2009, per-booking pricing made a lot of sense for us and for you. You generally did all of your bookings yourselves, through OwnerRez, and blocked off times were typically used for things like maintenance or your friends staying at the property.
In the intervening years, the model has changed. With the rise of AirBnb and now VRBO's new fee model, a good chunk of bookings are done on other sites and then imported into OwnerRez for tracking, management, reporting, etc. We now have a fair number of users where the majority of their use is imported bookings and blocked-off time, and many users do nothing but use OwnerRez as nothing more than a calendar synchronization hub.
That's a problem for us, because we don't get paid ;-)... but it also presents a quandary for users to decide whether they want to add a booking done on AirBnb or VRBO to OwnerRez so they can use all of the features we offer, like scheduled and triggered emails, reporting, searching, travel insurance, and much more.
We thought through all of that, and came up with the idea to switch to a per-property pricing model vs. the per-booking model we had before. That way, there's no question on whether to book or block and you can add as much information to OwnerRez as you need. You can set up processes like pre-arrival emails and post stay review requests and have them applied across everything instead of only working for bookings made in OwnerRez because AirBnb/VRBO sourced ones are blocked off time.
We've actually had this new pricing structure up, live, for a few months now. You can see it on our main pricing page:
https://www.ownerrez.com/pricing
We also added a support article about how the pricing breaks down including premium features:
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/costs-and-fees
As we watched and analyzed the new pricing model, we made adjustments and then made some models for what fees would look like for many different types of users - mom and pops, mid size, large PMs, etc.
We feel that the new pricing model is fair, easy to understand and provides a great platform for the future - both for users and our internal business needs.
The time has come to ask our Legacy users (those users who signed up prior to 2017) to join the new pricing model.
You can do this already by clicking on the "Change to Normal Pricing" button on your account billing page.
Many Legacy users have already seen the button and moved over- thanks for that!
For everyone else, please take a moment to use the pricing calculator to see what your monthly rate would be. Then use the "Change to Normal Billing" to move over.
If you have any questions or concerns, just shoot us an email or comment on this blog post. We'll explain whatever we can!
By May 1 2017, we would like all Legacy users to have transitioned to the new pricing model. After May 1, we will begin reaching out to Legacy users directly to help with the transition. We will not be supporting Legacy pricing past May 1.
If your business situation is such where this pricing just won't work for you, let us know. We'll work with you. We'll talk with you about your business and what works.
Finally, please understand that we spent a long time agonizing over these decisions: what the pricing should be, what is fair for users of different sizes, what revenue our business needs to stay healthy, and a lot more. None of these decisions were made lightly. In fact, we originally started the research for "coming up with better pricing" almost 2 years ago. We changed, paused, pivoted and delayed several times over those 2 years to make sure we were getting it right.
As a business, we are deeply committed to being the best vacation rental software on the market. That commitment only gets stronger every day!
-Paul and Chris
