Innago

Innago is a rental management platform whose headline claim is that it is free, and on inspection this is a genuine free product rather than a free trial. The vendor help centre states plainly that pricing is quite simple, it is free, that Innago does not charge a monthly fee, yearly fee or setup fee, and separately that Innago costs nothing for landlords to use. The marketing page repeats the same promise as no monthly fee, no setup fee, no contract. There is no trial clock to run down and no paid tier gating the core workflow that we could find on the vendor site.

The revenue model is tenant-paid fees, and buyers should understand exactly where the money comes from. Innago's help centre says the company charges tenants for two things, online payments and applications. The published figures are: ACH payments incur a 2 US dollars fee; credit and debit card payments incur a 2.99 percent fee; and applicants that you choose to screen will pay 30 to 35 US dollars to produce the screening report. Both payment fees are paid by the tenant by default, and a help centre setting lets the landlord absorb either fee instead, which converts the product from free to variable cost at the landlord's own election. So the honest summary is that the software is free to the landlord and the cost is shifted to the resident or applicant at the point of transaction.

On function, the vendor positions the product around tenant management rather than asset management, saying that managing properties is really all about managing tenants. The pages we reached named rent collection, online lease signing, maintenance requests, a management dashboard and mobile apps on both the App Store and Google Play, with tenant screening and online applications confirmed through the help centre fee articles. The audience spans individual landlords with a small portfolio through to property management companies, but the product is clearly self-serve and residential in character.

Documentation on the vendor side is a customer help centre rather than developer documentation. We found no published API reference, so integration beyond what the product ships with is unproven.

Who it fits. Innago is the obvious first stop for a residential landlord with a small to medium portfolio who wants to stop collecting rent by bank transfer and chasing paper leases, and who is unwilling to pay a software subscription to do it. Because there is no monthly fee, the cost of trying it and the cost of keeping it are both zero to the landlord, which removes the usual objection that software costs more than the admin it saves on a handful of units. It suits landlords whose tenants are comfortable paying a 2 US dollars ACH fee, and landlords who intend to pass screening costs to applicants, which is standard practice in the US market.

Who it does not fit. Three groups should look elsewhere. First, landlords who object on principle to charging residents a payment fee: the fee is the business model, and absorbing it yourself turns a 2 US dollars ACH charge or 2.99 percent card charge into your operating cost on every payment, which on a large rent roll paid by card is material. Second, professional managers holding client money, because we could not verify trust accounting, owner statements or a formal owner portal from vendor sources, and those are not features to assume. Third, commercial, mixed use and short term rental operators, since nothing on the vendor site addresses commercial lease structures, service charges or booking channel management.

What we could not verify. This profile is deliberately thin on capability. The vendor pages we reached confirmed rent collection, leases with online signing, maintenance requests, screening, applications and mobile apps, but did not confirm accounting depth, reporting, document management, inspections, an owner portal or any named third party integration. Treat all of those as unknown rather than absent, and test them in the product, which costs nothing to do.

Typical use cases. A landlord with a dozen units creating a listing and taking applications where the applicant pays for screening, generating and e-signing a lease, switching tenants to recurring ACH rent with the 2 US dollars fee on the tenant, and handling repair requests through the tenant mobile app instead of text messages. For that loop specifically, the value for money is hard to beat because there is no price.