By Sagar Shankaran, Founder of CallSphere
Vacation rental headcount quadruples every summer but AI seats bill annually. A worked comparison of buying seats versus running an open model at 300 doors.
Key takeaways
Thirty-four. That is how many named users your company had in the software in the second week of July, counting the seasonal reservationists, the two turn-day coordinators, the four inspectors you hire out of the community college every May, and the girl who does nothing but answer Airbnb messages from noon to eight.
Nine. That is how many you had in the second week of February, when the office is three reservationists, the property care manager, the owner relations person, the bookkeeper, the maintenance lead, the general manager and you.
Your software renewal quote is written for thirty-four.
Vacation rental management has a staffing shape almost no software vendor prices for. Your door count barely moves between February and July, but your headcount close to quadruples, and the AI add-ons now attached to Guesty, Hostaway, Track and OwnerRez are billed the way software has always been billed: per named user, on an annual commitment, whether that user is logging in in January or not.
So managers do what managers do. They buy twelve seats and let the seasonal staff share three generic logins named frontdesk1, frontdesk2, frontdesk3. It violates the contract, it destroys your audit trail on who promised the guest in 214 a late checkout, and when an owner disputes a charge on their statement you cannot say who entered it.
Here is the plain version of the 2026 choice: you can rent a seat for every person who touches the work, or you can run your own model on your own rented hardware and pay for the work itself rather than for the chairs. Which one is cheaper depends almost entirely on how much repetitive language your company produces in a year, and hardly at all on how clever the model is.
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Until recently the free-to-run models were noticeably worse than the ones you pay per seat for, so the comparison was easy: pay, because the cheap one embarrasses you in front of a guest. That gap narrowed hard. Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 as the largest open model in the world, built so that only a small slice of it wakes up for any single request — which is why something that big is affordable to run at all. Alongside it, the whole open tier closed much of the distance to the paid frontier, and the cost of the paid frontier itself fell roughly tenfold from 2025, to somewhere around $2 for every three-quarters of a million words processed.
Two consequences for a rental manager. First, the paid seats got cheap enough that for a lot of companies the answer is simply to keep buying them. Second, for the companies producing genuinely large volumes of repetitive writing, running your own is now a real option rather than a science project, because you are no longer accepting a worse answer to save money. Running high-volume work on hardware you control comes in around 90% cheaper than sending it out to a cloud service.
Owners are usually surprised by how much of their company is text production. Three hundred doors listed on Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com is nine hundred listing descriptions that need rewriting whenever you renovate, change a pet policy or add a hot tub. It is 300 house manuals, each one needing a Spanish version and increasingly a French-Canadian version in Gulf markets. It is 40,000-plus guest messages a year across the channel inboxes and SMS. It is 300 monthly owner statement cover notes, 300 year-end packets with the 1099s, damage-claim narratives for Safely or Waivo with photo captions, quarterly owner property reports, and the annual pass-through of every review into something your revenue manager can act on.
flowchart TD
A["Renewal quote lands in January"] --> B["Count named users in February: 9"]
B --> C["Count named users in July: 34"]
C --> D["Add up a year of repetitive writing: listings, manuals, statements, messages"]
D --> E{"Under roughly 500 doors and one brand?"}
E -->|Yes| F["Buy seats, negotiate seasonal terms, stop here"]
E -->|No| G["Price your own model on rented hardware"]
G --> H["Add one owner: 0.3 of an operations person, all year"]
H --> I["Compare against the seat quote, then decide"]
Assumptions: 300 doors, one brand, one market, 34 peak users, 12 year-round users, an AI add-on quoted at $30 per user per month on a twelve-month commitment. Own-model side: a rented graphics server capable of running a large open model, about $780 a month, plus the part nobody quotes you — a person who owns it.
| Option | Annual cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Buy 34 seats, 12 months | $12,240 | You pay for 22 seats through the winter |
| Buy 12 seats, share logins in summer | $4,320 | Breaks the contract and your audit trail |
| Run your own: hardware | $9,360 | $780 a month, rented |
| Run your own: 0.3 of an operations person at $68,000 | $20,400 | The real line item |
| Run your own: total | $29,760 | 2.4x the seat price |
At 300 doors, buying the seats wins and it is not close. The honest headline for most readers of this article is: keep paying, and spend the negotiation on seasonal terms instead — a twelve-seat base with month-to-month bursts from May through September, which several property management vendors will now write if you ask before renewal rather than after.
Now run it at scale. A 1,400-door operator with three brands, an in-house call center, 210,000 guest messages a year and a full-time content person needs roughly 120 seats: $43,200 a year, before per-message overages on the AI features. The own-model side barely moves — call it $14,000 of hardware for the higher volume plus a half-time operations person at $34,000, so $48,000. Still close to a wash. The crossover in this trade is not really about door count; it is about whether you already employ someone technical enough to own the thing, and whether your volume of repeat writing is large enough that per-message pricing has started to sting.
The job description nobody writes down: someone has to notice when the model starts telling guests the pool is heated in a market where it is not, has to keep the house rules and cancellation policy that the model draws its answers from current when your qualifying broker updates the rental agreement, has to re-check output after every update, and has to be reachable on the Saturday of Fourth of July week when it stops responding. In a company of your size that person is your operations manager or your best reservationist, and the time comes out of what they do now.
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If nobody on your payroll fits that sentence, you do not have an open-model option, no matter what the arithmetic says. What you have is a consulting relationship, and consulting relationships in this industry have a way of ending in September when the consultant gets a bigger client.
Trust accounting and anything touching owner funds. If your state requires a real estate broker license to manage rentals for an owner — and many of the big vacation rental states do — your trust account is examined, and you want vendor software with an audit trail a state examiner recognizes, not a homegrown arrangement you have to explain. The same goes for lodging and transient occupancy tax filings and for the 1099s that go out in January.
Also keep buying for anything a guest sees in real time during a stay. The failure mode of a self-run setup is that it goes down on the busiest weekend of the year, and the person who can restart it is at a wedding. That is a bad night to save $30.
Not an engineer, but you do need an owner — a named person on your org chart whose job includes it, with time carved out. Budget a quarter to a half of one person’s year. If that person does not exist today, the answer is to buy seats.
It is more under your control, which is not the same thing. Guest names, arrival dates and door codes sitting on a server you rent and patch yourself are only as safe as your patching. The genuine advantage is contractual: you can tell an owner or a corporate housing client exactly where their guest data lives and that it is not being sent anywhere else.
Use them first and measure them before you price anything else. They are already connected to your reservations, your rates and your work orders, and that connection is most of the value. The self-hosting conversation only makes sense for volume they charge you per message for, or for work their tools do not cover, such as rewriting nine hundred listing descriptions.
Pull the login report for the second week of February and the second week of July and put both numbers in front of the vendor before you sign. Ask for a base plus burst. Vendors in this space are used to it — every one of their customers has the same July.
CallSphere builds AI voice and chat agents that answer business phone lines and web chat, book appointments and capture leads around the clock. It is the bought-not-built end of this decision: the calls and chats that spike in July do not care what you concluded about hosting in January, and the phone is one place where paying someone else to keep it running through the Fourth of July weekend is usually the right trade.
Written by
Sagar Shankaran· Founder, CallSphere
LinkedInSagar Shankaran is the founder of CallSphere, where he builds production AI voice and chat agents deployed across healthcare, hospitality, real estate, and home services. He writes about agentic AI, LLM engineering, and shipping voice agents that handle real calls in production.
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