Buildium Pricing & Hidden Fees: The Honest 2026 Breakdown

If you collect rent online through Buildium, the plan you choose matters less than the number of payments you process. Growth starts at $192 a month and adds $1.35 for every incoming bank payment. Premium starts at $400 a month and includes payment fees. The two cross at roughly 154 payments: $192 + (154 × $1.35) = $399.90, and 155 payments come to $401.25. Every other line on Buildium's published price list is smaller than that gap.

The three published floors, and why they are floors

Buildium advertises three plans, and all three are written as "starting at":

• Essential from $62/mo per account
• Growth from $192/mo per account, marked as the most popular
• Premium from $400/mo per account, with all payment fees included

The wording is not decoration. A floor means the subscription moves with the number of units on the account, and Buildium does not publish the exact monthly figure for a given portfolio size. So a landlord with 10 units and a landlord with 100 units see the same three numbers and cannot tell from them what either will be billed.

That single fact explains most of the confusion around this vendor. Search results quoting $62 as "the price" are repeating an entry point, not a bill. Anyone comparing Buildium against tools that publish per-unit rates, such as the ones in our landlord software hub, is comparing a floor against a rate.

The fee that decides which plan you end up on

Buildium's transaction fees are published and unambiguous, which is unusual for this category. The incoming EFT charge is the one that changes buying decisions:

• Essential: $2.35 per incoming bank payment, paid by the landlord
• Growth: $1.35 per incoming bank payment, paid by the landlord
• Premium: included in the plan

Outgoing EFTs cost $0.99 per transaction on the plans that charge them. Card payments carry a 2.99% processing fee. eSignature is $5 per document on Essential, $1 per document on Growth, and unlimited on Premium.

Rent collection is not an optional workflow for a property manager, so the incoming EFT line is the one that scales with normal use. A 60-unit portfolio with one payment per unit each month generates 60 incoming transfers whether or not anyone signs a lease that month.

Essential: cheap floor, expensive rent collection

Essential is the plan the $62 figure belongs to, and it carries the highest published payment fee. Sixty payments in a month cost $141 in incoming EFT charges alone — more than twice the subscription floor. At that point the headline number has stopped describing the bill.

The same logic applies to documents. Five leases a month at $5 each is another $25 on top. A landlord who sends a renewal packet to every tenant in the spring can add real money in a single week without changing anything about the subscription.

Essential makes sense in one specific case: few units, few online payments, and a preference for keeping the subscription low at the cost of per-transaction charges. Outside that case the arithmetic turns against it quickly, because the plan with the cheapest entry is also the plan with the most expensive routine transaction.

Where Growth stops being the cheaper middle

Growth is the plan most buyers land on. It halves the incoming EFT fee compared with Essential, which sounds like the sensible compromise, and for low volume it is.

The compromise breaks once payment volume gets high enough to erase the $208 gap between the two subscription floors:

• Difference in floors: $400 − $192 = $208
• Number of Growth payments that consume it: $208 ÷ $1.35 = 154.07

So 154 incoming payments cost $207.90 in fees and leave Growth at $399.90 for the month. At 155 payments, the same account pays $401.25 and has passed Premium — while still not having the unlimited eSignature that Premium includes.

That comparison is deliberately conservative. It counts only incoming EFTs. A portfolio that also moves money out, takes card payments, or sends documents reaches the crossover sooner than the payment count suggests. A landlord processing 155 payments a month across 155 units is a mid-size operator, which is exactly the segment Growth is marketed to.

The narrow band where Growth is actually cheapest

Comparing Growth with Premium is only half the arithmetic. Growth also competes with Essential, and that comparison produces the more surprising result.

Essential is cheaper per month than Growth until the $130 gap between the floors is eaten by the extra dollar per payment:

• Difference in floors: $192 − $62 = $130
• Payments needed to close it: $130 ÷ $1 = 130

At 100 payments, Essential costs $62 + $235 = $297 and Growth costs $192 + $135 = $327. At 140 payments the order reverses: Essential reaches $391 while Growth sits at $381. Put the two crossovers together and the plans sort into three bands:

• below 130 incoming payments a month, Essential is the cheapest of the three
• between 130 and 154, Growth is cheapest
• above 154, Premium is cheapest, because its floor already covers the payment fees

That leaves Growth winning inside a band roughly 24 payments wide. It is a real plan for a real volume, but it is a much narrower target than "the middle option" implies, and a portfolio whose payment count drifts upward leaves the band without anyone changing a setting.

The published numbers in one table

One more one-time charge sits outside the monthly table: business bank account setup costs $99 per account, paid by the landlord, and Growth includes ten free accounts.

What Buildium does not publish

Three things are missing from the public price list, and each one matters when the quote arrives.

The first is the subscription price at a given unit count. Every plan is a floor, so the actual monthly cost of running 25 units or 100 units cannot be calculated from published figures. A reader who wants a single number for a specific portfolio will not get one before speaking to sales.

The second is the size of each plan. Buildium publishes no unit allowance per tier, so the question "which plan covers my portfolio" has no public answer. Anyone claiming that Growth suits a particular unit range is guessing.

The third is the full payment fee schedule on Premium. The plan states that payment fees are included, which is clear enough for budgeting, but the underlying schedule is not published alongside it.

None of this makes the vendor dishonest. It makes the pricing incomplete, and incomplete pricing is the reason a floor should never be quoted as a bill.

Who should not buy Buildium

Skip it if you need to know the monthly cost before a sales conversation. A landlord comparing three vendors on a spreadsheet cannot finish the row for Buildium, and that is a legitimate reason to choose a vendor that publishes per-unit rates.

Skip it, too, if you sit in the band where Growth looks affordable and payment volume keeps climbing. The plan is priced so that the middle option becomes the expensive option somewhere around 150 transactions a month, and most operators only discover that after a few billing cycles.

Premium is the cleaner choice for payment-heavy portfolios, but it asks for a $400 floor plus an undisclosed amount on top for units, and it only wins when volume is genuinely high. Below that, the premium buys headroom the landlord does not use.

If you are weighing this vendor against others, the head-to-head comparisons cover the switch arithmetic that a single vendor's price list cannot.

Verdict: Buildium's floors are honest but incomplete, and the Growth plan in particular punishes mid-size, payment-heavy operators who pick it because it looks like the safe middle.

Prices verified against vendor pricing pages on October 25, 2026.