What Nowistay Is, What It Costs, and How It Compares With BnBGenius

Nowistay sells an AI co-host for short-term rentals: software that reads a guest's message, works out the answer from the booking and the property file, and sends the reply itself, without the host approving it first. Its terms of use name the seller as nowistay SAS, registered at 2 Place de la Bourse, 33000 Bordeaux, France, under number 938 031 838. Opened from a United States connection today, the pricing page prints $15 per property per month for the full plan and $3 per property per month for the digital welcome guide on its own, both before tax. Their FAQ puts the free trial at 30 days; the pricing page itself says only that the first month is free.

This page weighs Nowistay against us. For the product on its own — what it costs, on what basis, and where its user reviews live — read our Nowistay review.

That is what most people typing this company's name are after, so it goes first. I am Baris Ergin and I build the product at BnBGenius, which overlaps with Nowistay on one of the several jobs it does and not on the rest. The comparison sits at the bottom of this page, after the answers. Everything above it comes from a page on nowistay.com that I opened on 11 September 2026 and linked. Where their site publishes nothing, I say nothing; where two of their own pages disagree with each other, I quote both and let you decide which one to ask them about.

What is Nowistay?

One subscription carrying two products that are usually sold separately. The first is the AI co-host, which answers guests on 5 channels - Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, WhatsApp and email - in what their FAQ puts at "over 90 languages". The second is a channel manager syncing calendar, rates and availability across Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia and VRBO. The same FAQ describes it in plain words: "The channel manager is a built-in PMS."

The difference they lead with is not the feature list but who presses send. Their home page sets it out as three steps and ends the third with "90%+ of questions answered without you", against the alternative it describes on the FAQ as "Most other tools still require you to read and approve every message." Read the consequence before buying rather than after: the reply goes out under the host's name, and in their words, "An AI disclaimer is only added for European guests as this is a EU regulatory obligation." A guest in Ohio is not told.

Around those two products sit the things a channel manager drags in - a direct booking widget, smart lock codes, cleaning missions, a guest CSV export, a PriceLabs connection for rates, and a digital welcome book. The site itself is published in two languages, and close to evenly: their sitemap lists 538 URLs, of which 271 sit under /fr. That is not a French company with an English page bolted on; the two trees are the same size.

If those category words are doing too much work, two of ours pull them apart: whether a small host needs a PMS at all, and what a channel manager actually does between Airbnb and VRBO.

What does Nowistay cost?

They publish it in full, in both currencies, with no form to fill in first. The FAQ prints the whole ladder and the pricing page carries a slider that computes the same figures:

• 1 to 4 properties - $15 per property per month (EUR 12)
• 5 to 9 - $14 (EUR 11)
• 10 to 49 - $13 (EUR 10)
• 50 to 99 - $12 (EUR 9)
• 100 and over - $11 (EUR 8)

Three properties is 3 x $15 = $45 a month, or $540 a year. The bottom of that ladder has a step worth knowing about: four properties cost $60 a month and five cost 5 x $14 = $70, because crossing the fifth property re-rates every property, not just the new one. Add-ons are billed separately and, on the page I read, priced only in euros - the voice assistant at EUR 10 per property per month with 60 minutes included and EUR 0.25 a minute after that, Yale or Schlage locks at EUR 5 per device per month. Billing is monthly with no commitment, and cancelling leaves access running to the end of the current month.

Two numbers on their site are not on that ladder, and both are worth raising with them rather than assuming. The About page says "Starting at EUR 9/month per property", which is the 50-to-99 rate, not the rate a host with three properties pays. And the $15 and the EUR 12 are not conversions of one another - they are two independent ladders, so which one you are billed on is a question for the invoice, not for a currency converter.

I will not put a figure here that they do not publish, and the reason is close to home. A sibling page of ours carries per-listing prices and an implementation fee for a different vendor that I cannot now find anywhere on that vendor's own site. One unverified number ages into a fact. For how these subscriptions stack up across the category, the automation-software comparison and the channel-manager round-up for small hosts hold the wider list.

Is Nowistay a real company?

Yes, and the identification sits on the two pages that would govern a contract. The terms of use give the legal form as Societe par Actions Simplifiee (SAS), the registered office as 2 Place de la Bourse, 33000 Bordeaux, registration number 938 031 838, VAT number FR08938031838, publication director Bassel Abedi. The privacy policy repeats all 5 of those details unchanged, describing the number as RCS Bordeaux. Two separately maintained legal pages agreeing to the digit is a better signal than any badge on a home page.

Then there is the third page. Under the heading "Company Information", the About page names a different company and a different number: "Company: Stay By Camille SAS - SIREN: 939 997 474". Their own site therefore publishes 2 company names and 2 registration numbers. I am not going to guess which one is the contracting party and neither should you. It is one email to hello@nowistay.com, and the answer belongs on the invoice before any card details do.

The same page gives 3 different founding years. The opening line says "founded in 2025 by Bassel Abedi". The "Our Story" section three paragraphs below says "Nowistay was born in 2023 in France". The milestone list underneath starts "2024 - Founded in France by Bassel Abedi". Their llms.txt file, written for AI assistants rather than for readers, votes for 2023.

The scale figures move the same way. The home page banner reads "1000+ property managers" and "1 min response time". The About page says "over 300 property managers" twice, and "a 3-minute average response time" once. The pricing page closes by inviting you to "Join 300+ property managers". Every one of those is their number, published by them, and I am reporting the spread rather than picking the flattering end of it.

On "avis" specifically: the reviews displayed on the home page are not customer reviews of the software. The section is headed "Real Airbnb reviews from stays fully managed by the AI co-host" and shows 3 guest reviews - Adeline, Carine, Aurelle - of stays at the founder's own listings, beside a badge reading "Bassel - Superhost - founder of nowistay", "4.87 average rating", "369 guest reviews", "2 yrs as a host". Those are guests rating an apartment. They are evidence the AI did not embarrass him in front of his own guests, which is worth something, and they are not 1 host saying what the software was like to pay for and live with. The contact page lists an email address and a status page, with no telephone number and no form.

Who is Nowistay built for?

Their FAQ answers it without hedging: "Anyone who manages short-term rentals, whether you have 1 property or 100+", and "Individual hosts, concierge companies, and property managers all use Nowistay." The billing definition reaches further than most of this category does: "A property could be a villa, an apartment, or a room in a hotel."

That is a 100x span of customer on one price list, and it tells you where the product's weight sits. Software that has to serve a concierge company with 80 units carries calendar permissions, team roles, mission assignment and per-channel rate rules. A host with one apartment on Airbnb pays $15 a month, $180 a year, and a fair slice of that is the channel manager. The welcome guide on its own is $3 a month, $36 a year - a $144 difference that comes down to whether calendar syncing is work you actually have.

We are built for the other end of that span and say so on every page: individual hosts with 1 to 5 listings, not property management companies. That is a boundary, not modesty. A host with 30 units producing owner statements needs software we do not make, and the accounting-software overview is where that search should start instead. Worth saying plainly: I could not find an owner-statement or trust-accounting feature published on nowistay.com either. The nearest thing their FAQ offers is that once ChatGPT or Claude is connected to the account you can ask it to build an owner statement for you, which is a different kind of promise from a ledger.

If you are still working out which layer you are shopping for, what a co-host actually is and where AI fits into property management separate the job from the job title.

How does Nowistay compare with BnBGenius?

Nowistay is a property management system by its own description, and we are not an alternative to one. If the reason you are here is that you need one calendar across four platforms, nothing below replaces that, and the honest end of the comparison is this sentence. What follows compares the layer we both work in.

Read down our column and the absences are the point. No channel manager, no calendar sync, no direct bookings, no pricing engine, no owner accounting, no SMS, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, no Booking.com and no Expedia. What is there: we answer messages, ask for and publish reviews, raise cleaning and repair tasks after checkout, answer calls with a voice agent, and sell empty nights and early or late departures. Five jobs, done in the host's own browser rather than by handing over a login - which is the row the table cannot show, because an extension reading a dashboard you are already signed into never holds a password or an API key in the first place.

Where they are stronger they are stronger, and pretending otherwise would not survive a reader opening both sites in two tabs. Where we are stronger on this table is one row: VRBO. Their own FAQ rules out automated VRBO messaging and offers WhatsApp as the workaround, and automated messaging on VRBO is a job we do.

Which one should a host with three listings choose?

Take Ferran, who runs 3 units in Savannah and lists every one of them on both Airbnb and VRBO. Six listing pages, three rentable homes. He is not switching platforms and he is not adding a fourth unit this year.

On Nowistay he pays 3 x $15 = $45 a month. The AI answers his Airbnb guests; on VRBO he gets calendar and booking sync but no automated replies, so the VRBO inbox stays his. If Airbnb carries two thirds of his bookings, he has bought automation for roughly two thirds of his messages and calendar sync for all three units.

On BnBGenius the same three units come to $30 a month, because a home listed on two platforms is one unit and not two. The AI answers on both Airbnb and VRBO, so all of his messages are covered - and none of his calendars are, because we do not sync them. He goes on setting minimum stays twice, once per platform, exactly as he does now.

$15 a month apart, $180 a year. That is not the deciding number, and treating it as one is how hosts end up paying for the wrong layer. The deciding question is which sentence Ferran would write down if you asked what is actually wrong with his week. "I answer the same six questions at midnight" is our sentence. "I double-booked the Jones Street apartment in June" is theirs, and no amount of message automation fixes it - syncing Airbnb and VRBO is a calendar problem with a calendar answer.

Three situations flip the verdict outright. If Ferran adds Booking.com or Expedia, we cannot touch either channel and they can - our guide on connecting Airbnb and Booking.com exists precisely because that work is not ours to do. If he wants his own booking page taking cards, that is theirs too. And if he wants guests outside the EU told when they are talking to software, that is a question to put to them in writing, because their published default is that the disclaimer appears for European guests only.

If his three calendars are already synced by something he pays for and likes, buying a second PMS to get an AI is the expensive way round. That is the case we are built for: the messaging, the reviews, the cleaning handoffs and the phone, sitting on top of the stack he has.

What do you check before signing up to any of these?

Eight checks, in the order the money moves. Nowistay publishes an answer to most of them already, which is a mark in their favour and also the reason this list is short.

1. Which legal entity takes the payment. Two names appear on their site - 938 031 838 on the terms and privacy pages, 939 997 474 on the About page. Get the one that will be on the invoice in writing.
2. What counts as one billable thing. Their FAQ says a property "could be a villa, an apartment, or a room in a hotel", and bills per property. Ferran's 3 homes on 2 platforms are 6 listing pages; ask any vendor which of those two numbers they are counting before the first invoice, not after.
3. The price at next year's count. Theirs is published: the rate steps down at 5, 10, 50 and 100 properties, so 5 units cost $70 rather than $75. A vendor who will not tell you the rate at double your size is telling you something.
4. The billing currency. $15 and EUR 12 are two ladders, not one converted. Ask which one is on your invoice and whether tax goes on top - their pricing page marks the figures tax free.
5. Whether the trial needs a card. Theirs is 30 days with all features, and the FAQ says creating an account needs no credit card. Ours starts with the first 500 messages free, also with no card. Either way, run one real guest through it before the trial ends.
6. Whether every channel you sell on is actually covered. A platform listed as supported is not the same as every function working on it. Their VRBO support is calendar and bookings, not messaging, and they say so. Test the function you are buying, on the channel you use.
7. What you can export. Theirs is specific: guests as CSV, bookings and missions as CSV, the calendar as iCal, the welcome guide as PDF. Ask every vendor the same question about guest conversations, because those are the records people discover they wanted only after they have left.
8. What happens when you stop paying. Their subscription is monthly with no commitment and access runs to the end of the month; account deletion takes effect 30 days later and is permanent after that. Those are two different clocks, and a host who reads only one of them can lose the data by cancelling too tidily.

The ninth check is the one behind the "avis" search, and it does not fit the list because there is no published answer to check. If the reviews you find are guests rating an apartment rather than hosts rating the software, you have read something real about the product and nothing at all about the company you are about to pay. Ask for one customer of your own size and your own platform mix, and put the same sheet in front of everybody - 3 units, 2 platforms, 4 jobs, in Ferran's case. The host-app overview and the task-management comparison are where that sheet meets the rest of the field.