What HOA Software Actually Costs (Once You Count Every Fee)

The number on the pricing page is rarely the number you pay. Buildium advertises its mid-tier plan at $192 a month. Add the $1.35 it charges every time a resident pays dues by bank transfer, and a 300-unit association collecting most of its dues online is closer to $597 a month in real terms, three times the sticker (Buildium's own pricing page, checked 2026-07-30, re-verified 2026-09-20). I run the books for a 10-unit condo association myself, and the first time I actually added up a competitor's real cost instead of reading their homepage, that gap is what convinced me to write this. Here's the honest version for GnomeOwner too, including the places a competitor is genuinely cheaper than we are.

The subscription number is the easy part to hide behind

All three platforms below price by how many units you manage. Where each one's bands break tells you what you'll pay as an association grows:

Sources: our own pricing, PayHOA's pricing page (annual billing shown; month-to-month runs a few dollars higher per band), Buildium's pricing page. Re-verified 2026-09-20 against the same vendor pages; Buildium Essential updated to $65 on 2026-11-08. PayHOA's Gable AI assistant is a separate add-on, on by default and free for 3 months, then $24.50 a month on its smallest plan (more for larger communities); GnomeOwner's assistant is included on every plan.

PayHOA's price climbs in bands as you add units — $49 at 25 units, $199 at 300, and a per-unit formula above 500 that lands near $550/month at 1,000 units. GnomeOwner bands too, in four wider steps — $29 through 25 units, $59 from 26–100, $99 from 101–250, and $199 from 251 up to 1,000, with no per-unit formula waiting above that. At 300 units our $199 lands exactly where PayHOA's does; every smaller size, our band is wider and our price lower.

Buildium's $192 sticker, walked forward

This is the one I want to walk through slowly, because it's the clearest example of a real cost hiding behind a homepage number. Buildium's Growth plan (the one most HOAs would land on) charges $1.35 for every incoming bank-transfer payment, on top of the $192 subscription (Buildium pricing page, checked 2026-07-30, re-verified 2026-09-20). If a 300-unit association collects dues from all 300 units by bank transfer once a month, that's 300 × $1.35 = $405 added to the $192 sticker: $597 total, not $192. Fewer units paying online brings the real number down proportionally; more months of the year with a special assessment or a second collection pushes it up. The honest takeaway isn't "Buildium is a bad deal." Essential and Premium serve different needs, and Buildium is a mature, capable platform for larger residential portfolios. It's that the subscription line and the real bill are two different numbers, and only one of them is on the pricing page.

What a payment itself actually costs

Here's ours, in full, the same way we say it on our own site: two fees, both itemized, neither hidden. Stripe charges its own standard processing rate — 2.9% + 30¢ on a card, 0.8% capped at $5 on a bank transfer — the same rate any Stripe customer gets, paid straight to Stripe. On top of that, GnomeOwner adds 0.75% of the payment, capped at $5, no matter which payment method the resident uses. Neither number changes based on which of our subscription tiers you're on.

That $5 ceiling is new. Our cap used to be $25, and looking properly at what our own fee did on a large payment changed it: at $5,000, a percentage that never stopped climbing meant we collected more than the processor that actually moved the money. So in July 2026 we lowered our cap to $5 on every payment method. Ask any vendor what their payment fee does on a $5,000 special assessment, not just on a monthly dues payment — that's the number where the structures actually differ, and it's the one nobody puts on a homepage. PayHOA and Buildium both publish flat per-transaction fees ($2.45 and $1.35–$2.35 respectively) rather than a percentage. It's worth asking any vendor whether a flat number has an unstated ceiling before you assume it holds at every payment size.

Mailed letters, the line item everyone forgets

Certified mail for a delinquency notice or a violation warning is where a lot of self-managed boards get surprised by cost, because it's easy to forget until the moment you need it:

Source: PayHOA's pricing page, checked 2026-07-30 and re-verified 2026-09-20. PayHOA is cheaper than us on a routine first-class letter, $1.25 versus our $1.49, and it's worth saying plainly. What it doesn't offer, as far as its own pricing page shows, is a certified-mail option at all, which matters the moment a delinquency notice needs a paper trail a board can point to later. Our certified price bundles the electronic return receipt in.

The honest total

Add it up and the shape of the answer is: GnomeOwner's subscription beats PayHOA's sticker at every size we checked through 100 units, and matches it exactly at 300; against Buildium's bare sticker we're lower through 100 units and a few dollars higher at 300 — where Buildium's stated $192 doesn't yet include the per-payment fee that turns it into the $597 real bill above. Price is one input to that decision, not the whole one — but you shouldn't have to do the arithmetic above yourself to know which number is real. If you want the line-by-line version kept current, we maintain it as a page rather than a post: the honest comparison, with deeper looks at GnomeOwner vs PayHOA, vs Buildium, and the wider field of PayHOA alternatives — every number primary-sourced and dated.

We built GnomeOwner free for a board's core tools (records, compliance tracking, the AI assistant), with a 45-day full trial and no credit card. If you want to run these numbers against your own association's unit count and dues volume, that's a five-minute conversation, not a sales call.