List direct. Keep more.
Put your home or room on cohost's own marketplace at 8.0% all-in — roughly half the combined take of the big OTAs. Your guests see the TOTAL price, cleaning fee included, in search results — never sprung at checkout. Payouts land in your bank via Stripe Connect; cohost never touches your credentials.
Where every dollar goes.
A 3-night stay at $200/night with a $100 cleaning fee. These numbers come from the same code that prices a real booking — not marketing rounding.
The big OTAs take ~15–22% combined between host commission and the guest service fee — and your guest never saw the real total until checkout. Here there is one number, and this is the math.
Three steps to booked.
Early access posture, stated plainly: listings are live in the cohost guest search today. Instant-pay confirmation switches on with payments; until then booking requests confirm manually and no guest is charged.
They rent you software. We take 8% and get out of your way.
Guesty, Hostaway, Evolve, and Lodgify each solve part of this — and each carries the same recurring host complaints: surprise billing, sync glitches that double-book, and (with Evolve) decisions taken out of the owner's hands. Here's the honest side-by-side.
| Guesty | Hostaway | Evolve | Lodgify | cohost | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it costs the host | Lite $9/listing + 1%; Pro/Enterprise quote-only | Quote-only + $500–2,000 setup fee | 10–15% of revenue | $14–62/listing/mo + 1.9% on Starter | Flat 8% — no listing or monthly fee |
| Guest sees the total price upfront | No | No | No | No | Yes — always |
| Owner keeps confirm / price / screening control | Yes | Yes | No — auto-books & prices for you | Yes | Yes — by design |
| Double-booking prevention | Native, but sync gaps reported | Native, but stale holds reported | Defective iCal merges blocks | Native, but Booking.com glitches | Enforced at the data layer |
| Permit / compliance badge on the listing | No | No | Paid experts on request | No | Yes — cited registry |
| Unified guest inbox | Yes | Yes | Owner gets none | Yes | Building — next |
| Leave anytime, keep your content | Annual Pro term | Setup fee + multi-step cancel | $250 fee if you leave ≤90 days | Annual prepay, 14-day refund | Per booking — no prepay, leave anytime |
From each vendor's own pricing and feature pages plus public user reports (G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, BBB, Reddit), June 2026, each load-bearing claim corroborated with a second source. Guesty Lite is $9/listing/mo + 1% per reservation with Pro/ Enterprise quote-only (guesty.com/pricing); Hostaway is quote-only per-listing with a $500–2,000 setup fee; Evolve charges 10% (Core) / 15% (Plus) of revenue with a $250 early-cancellation fee inside ~90 days; Lodgify runs $14–62/listing/mo plus a 1.9% booking fee on its Starter tier. "Building — next" is stated plainly: the cohost inbox ships in the next wave. Full matrix + citations: docs/HOST_PMS_COMPETITIVE_MATRIX.md.