I make Roost, so read this with that in mind and follow the links. Every number below about Touch Stay is quoted from a page of theirs, linked where it is used, read on 13 October 2026 and checked again on the 20th. Nothing here is marked missing from their product because I could not find it.
If you have a handful of rentals and a property management system, buy Touch Stay. That is not a polite noise before the pitch. Their integrations page lists twenty-nine partners, Guesty, Hostaway, OwnerRez, Lodgify, Escapia, Streamline, Track, Mews and Cloudbeds among them, and a guide built out of reservation data you have already typed once is worth more than the difference in price. Roost connects to none of that and is not going to.
If you have one rental, or two, and the job in front of you tonight is that your guests keep texting you about the wifi, Roost is free and takes about two minutes. That is the whole of the case and the rest of this page is the detail behind it.
Their pricing page is a calculator: you set the guide type, the number of homes, the currency and monthly or annual, and it works the price out. There are no amounts in the text of the page, so the figures below are the ones they publish themselves in their own posts, and the calculator is the authority if the two ever disagree.
From their welcome-book comparison post (bylined February 2024, updated since): $99 per year for the first property, which they also give as $12.50 a month; $51 for the second; $45 each for the next three. Their own comparison with Hostfully says managers above five properties go lower, eventually reaching $20 per property per year. There is a fourteen-day free trial with no card required, and no free tier after it.
So five properties is $285 in the first year, by their own ladder.
Your first rental is free and always will be. Extra rentals will be $9 a month however many you have, and they are free for everyone who joins now, for as long as you have them.
Which makes the same five properties $108 a year, and that is the ceiling rather than a step: a sixth and a tenth are the same $108. Right now it is nothing at all, because there is no checkout built yet and everybody who joins before there is keeps their extra places free for as long as they have them. That is a real reason to start now and it is also the reason to be careful about what you are buying, which is covered further down.
Price is the least interesting difference between these two and I would not choose a guidebook on it. Nine dollars is not what is stopping anybody. What should decide it is the next two headings.
Everything above is a list. This is the one difference worth thinking about, because both products have noticed the same problem and answered it in opposite directions.
The problem is a guest with a question the guide does not answer. Touch Stay puts an AI chatbot in front of them: it reads your guide and replies instantly, at three in the morning, without waking you. Roost does the opposite. It tells the guest it does not know, sends the question to your phone, and when you answer it the answer becomes part of the book for every guest after them.
Theirs is faster for this guest. Ours is the only one of the two that leaves the guide better than it found it. Which you want depends on an honest answer to one question: is your guide finished, or is it still full of holes you have not noticed? A chatbot over a thin guide confidently makes something up about your thermostat. A chatbot over a good guide is better than anything Roost does.
I have not used their chatbot and this page is not going to tell you how well it works. What it can tell you is which problem each of us decided to solve, because that is a design decision and it is written on both of our pages.
Keep it. There is no import in either direction, so moving means retyping your own answers, and a finished guide that works is worth more than nine dollars a month of difference. The time to look at Roost is when you are starting a guide, not when you have one.
Roost is free for your first place, takes about two minutes, and you can see what it produces before you decide anything. If the answer afterwards is Touch Stay, that is a fine answer.
If you have five properties and a property management system, almost certainly yes. Their own integrations page lists twenty-nine partners, so the guide can be built from reservation data you have already typed once, and at that size the per-property price falls a long way. If you have one rental and a phone, you are paying for a scale you do not have.
No. Their own pages offer a fourteen-day free trial with no credit card required, and no free tier after it. Roost’s first place is free with no end date. That is the clearest difference between the two and it is the only one that matters before you have written anything.
No. Touch Stay’s features page offers one, and it answers your guest out of your guide text immediately. Roost sends the question to you instead, and the answer you type becomes part of the guide for every guest after that one. If you want a guest answered at 3am without waking you, theirs is the right design and ours is not going to change.
Not automatically, in either direction. There is no import. You would be copying your own answers across by hand, which for a finished guide is an evening. If yours is already written and you are happy with it, that is a real reason to leave it where it is.
No, for both. Touch Stay states plainly that guests do not download an app, and Roost’s guest page takes a link and nothing else. Anything in this category that asks your guest to make an account is the one to rule out first, whoever makes it.
Touch Stay describes its guide as a progressive web app a guest can open offline once it has been loaded. Roost does not do that, and the answer here is the same one it has always been: print the book and leave it in the kitchen drawer. Roost will print it in one page. A printed sheet beats both of us on a phone with four percent battery.