01[ 01 / THE DECISION ]
The decision
Pricing software, a revenue manager, or a done-for-you service?
Software moves your rates. A revenue manager decides what the rates should be and why. They are not competing purchases, they are two different jobs, and almost every portfolio that feels stuck has bought the first and left the second undone. The real question is not which one to buy. It is who is doing the weekly thinking, and what that person costs you.
The three options, with what each still leaves you holding
Buy software and run it yourself
About $19.99 a listing a month, or roughly 1% of booking revenue.
What is still yours. Everything above the rate itself: base prices, minimum stays, gap rules, seasonality, comp sets, and a weekly pass to check what the market did.
Right when. You have fewer than about ten listings, or you genuinely enjoy this work and will protect the time for it every week.
Goes wrong when. It gets busy. Pricing is the first thing dropped when an owner calls or a cleaner cancels, and dropped pricing looks exactly like working pricing until the quarter closes.
Hire a revenue manager
Roughly $75,000 a year fully loaded, or about $6,250 a month.
What is still yours. Recruit, train, manage and retain them, and cover the gap when they leave.
Right when. You are past about fifty listings. At that size the salary spreads thin enough to beat any vendor, and you get someone who knows your owners by name.
Goes wrong when. You hire the wrong one. Revenue management is a small field and a mediocre hire is worse than good software, because now you are paying a salary for default settings.
Hand it to a service
From $350 a month flat, up to a per-listing fee. Ours is $99 a listing with a $990 monthly minimum.
What is still yours. Nothing weekly. You read a report once a month and answer the occasional question.
Right when. You are between about ten and fifty listings, which is the range where the work is too big to squeeze in and too small to hire for.
Goes wrong when. You pick a vendor who cannot show you what they did. If the reporting is a dashboard rather than a measurement, you are buying activity and not results.
The cost nobody puts in the comparison
A tool costs about $19.99 a listing. The weekly pass that makes it work costs your time, and that
line never appears on anyone's pricing page. Price it yourself: take the hours a proper weekly
review of your portfolio would take, multiply by what an hour of your attention is worth, and add
it to the subscription. For most managers between ten and fifty listings, that total lands well
above the cost of a service, and the service is the version that actually happens every week
rather than the version that gets skipped in a busy month.
If you are going to do it yourself, do these five things
This is the honest version. None of it needs us, and a manager who does these five properly will
beat most portfolios paying somebody.
- Set a real floor per listing, from your own costs, not from what the market charges. A floor you guessed is the single most expensive setting in the tool.
- Fix your minimum stays before you touch price. Most lost revenue in a calendar is unsellable gaps, not underpricing.
- Build a comp set that is actually comparable: same bedroom count, same sub-market, same guest. A comp set of the whole city tells you nothing.
- Walk the next ninety days once a week and look for orphan nights, holes ahead of events, and anything still sitting at your floor.
- Measure against where you started, not against last year or against the market. Both of those move on their own.
A service sits on top of your stack, not instead of it
This is worth being precise about, because the category is muddy. Hiring a done-for-you service does
not mean replacing the software you already pay for. It means someone else is now the one operating
it, deciding the strategy behind it, and answering for the result. You keep your own accounts in your
own name and you keep your data. If a vendor needs you to move onto their platform to work with you,
you are being sold lock-in.
How to judge whoever you pick
One question separates the real ones. Ask what they will measure you against. Most answer revenue
versus last year, or revenue versus your market, and both of those move with the season and the
economy whether the pricing is any good or not. The only measure that isolates the work is movement
against a snapshot of your own portfolio frozen on the day they started, that you keep a copy of. We
publish ours across 9 markets, redacted but otherwise untouched, including the
portfolios that went backwards.
Common questions
Is dynamic pricing software enough on its own?
It is if someone drives it every week. The tools are good and they are not the bottleneck. What they cannot do is decide your strategy, notice a minimum stay setting quietly costing you weekends, or work the ninety days ahead of an event. That is a job rather than a subscription.
Should I hire a revenue manager or use a service?
Portfolio size decides it. Under about ten listings, neither: buy software and drive it yourself. Between ten and fifty, a service almost always wins, because the work is too big to squeeze into your week and too small to justify a salary. Past fifty, price up a hire seriously, because a good in-house revenue manager beats an average vendor.
Do I have to stop using my current pricing tool?
No, and you should not. A service like ours is a layer on top of whatever you already run. You keep your own accounts in your own name, you keep your data, and you can end the arrangement without losing any of it. Anyone who asks you to move off your stack is buying lock-in, not doing revenue management.
What does a revenue manager actually do each week?
Reviews the next ninety days for gaps and orphan nights, checks what comparable properties did, adjusts minimum stays around events and shoulder dates, resets floors that are no longer true, and looks at every listing sitting at its floor to work out why. It is unglamorous and it is where the money is.
Costs checked August 2026. Jack Murphy runs every call himself.
