iGMS has a free plan, and it stops after five reservations

iGMS runs a free plan, and on 9 October it published the page that spells out what the plan actually includes. If you have been told iGMS is free, this is the document that says where free ends.

The headline is $0 a month. The limits are the story.

What you get

Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com calendars sync into one calendar, with a single inbox covering all three channels. You get suggested replies in that inbox and automated guest messages, within the message limit below. You can give cleaners and co-hosts access. The web app and the iOS and Android apps are all included.

Direct payments work too, through your own Stripe account, using iGMS's direct booking tools.

Some paid features are excluded, and iGMS points to section 3.2 of its Free Plan Terms rather than listing them on the page.

Where it stops

Five reservations. Ten guest messages. Both are totals, not monthly allowances.

When you hit a limit, iGMS says the affected feature may pause until you upgrade. The plan is for short-term rentals only, and one account per host business.

Five reservations is one busy week for a single listing. So this is not a free tier in the sense of a small operator running a property on it indefinitely. It is a trial with no expiry date, which is a reasonable thing to offer and a different thing from what "free plan" usually implies.

The actual price

There is no commission on Airbnb, Vrbo or Booking.com reservations, and none on payments you collect outside iGMS.

The one fee is 4% of direct payments taken through Stripe, excluding taxes and refundable deposits. Stripe's own processing fee sits on top of that.

For a direct booking business, 4% plus card fees is the number to model, and it is not obviously cheap. On a €1,500 week that is €60 to iGMS before Stripe takes its cut. The comparison to make is not against the other free plans, it is against what you would pay on a paid iGMS tier with lower or no direct-payment fees, and against the OTA commission you are trying to avoid.

How to get on it, and the paid tiers

Access is for new iGMS customers, through the Free Plan page or with the code FREEPLAN. Signing up the ordinary way instead starts a 14-day paid-plan trial, no card required.

Above free, iGMS names three tiers: FLEX, charged per booked night, and PRO and PRO+, charged per property per month. Prices are on the pricing page rather than this one.

Two things to be careful about

iGMS describes the free plan as a pilot programme, run under its own separate terms. Pilot programmes change and they end. Do not build a workflow for a growing portfolio on top of it.

And iGMS gives no launch date anywhere on the page, so there is no way to tell from the source how long this has been running or whether anything about it changed recently. If it matters to your decision, ask.

For a host testing whether channel consolidation is worth paying for, five reservations is enough to find out. For anything beyond that, read the tier pricing first.