Questions we hear,
answered straight

Yes, for HOAs up to 25 active units. Free includes the full ledger, meeting minutes, feed posts, the work-request workflow, dues collection via Stripe, 500 MB of document storage, and 1,000 emails a month. No credit card on signup. We make money on the Pro tier ($29/mo, up to 100 units) and on the convenience fee homeowners pay when paying dues online (1% on Pro, 2% on Free).

Two simple lines: • Your HOA pays: $0 a month on Free (up to 25 units), $29 a month on Pro (up to 100 units). Over 100 units, you talk to sales for a custom tier. • Your homeowners pay: a small online payment fee at checkout when they pay dues by card or ACH. 1% on Pro, 2% on Free, shown as its own line item on the Stripe checkout page so it is never a surprise. No coupon dynamics, no hidden enterprise pricing, no onboarding fees. Stripe's own processing (2.9% + $0.30 cards, 0.8% capped at $5 ACH) rides on the gross charge.

Nothing. Boards invite and remove members by email; removing a member (or even a whole outgoing board in one sitting) does not delete the HOA or touch its dues ledger, documents, or history. The incoming treasurer logs in and picks up where the old one left off. Every write is timestamped in the ledger, so the new board can see exactly what changed and when.

No. SpotHOA is software for a board that runs itself. If your community is above ~100 units, has commercial amenities, or needs ongoing on-site maintenance dispatch, a property manager will serve you better than we can. For legal matters, the state guides and statute references at /resources/state-guides are informational only — consult an attorney in your state for anything involving liens, foreclosure, or material contract disputes.

Yes, on every tier including Free. SpotHOA connects to Stripe (Connect Standard), so your HOA's Stripe account collects dues directly. The money never passes through ours. Homeowners pay by card or ACH on a hosted Stripe checkout; the board can also record manual payments (check, cash) in the same ledger. Refunds are board-initiated and execute against your Stripe account. Your Stripe dashboard is the source of truth for payouts, disputes, and 1099s.

Yes, a small one. The homeowner sees their dues, plus a labelled "Online payment fee" line at checkout: 1% on Pro, 2% on Free. That fee covers SpotHOA so your HOA never gets a platform bill. Stripe's own processing (2.9% + $0.30 cards, 0.8% capped at $5 ACH) rides on the gross charge by default. Your board can toggle "HOA absorbs Stripe fees" in the billing settings if you would rather eat the card fee yourselves.

Save your spreadsheet as CSV (Excel: File → Save As → CSV UTF-8). Upload it on the imports page inside your HOA. Common columns (name, email, unit number, role) map automatically; the importer shows a preview before writing anything so you can catch formatting issues. Units, members, ARC requests, vendor contacts, and dues assessments all have separate importers — each one documents the expected column layout inline.

Only your members. SpotHOA is strictly per-HOA: members of one HOA never see data from another HOA, and we enforce that in both code (isolation tests gate every query) and architecture (every lookup scopes by hoa_id). Platform admins at SpotHOA can see aggregate operational data (signup counts, error reports, cron runs) but do not read member data unless you explicitly ask us to support a specific issue. Impersonation is read-only and fully logged — see our privacy policy at /legal/privacy for the full list of what we can and cannot access.

Yes. SpotHOA has six fixed HOA roles: board_president, board_treasurer, board_secretary, board_member, owner, and tenant. Each role has a documented permission set — only the president + treasurer can assess new dues, only the president can manage membership, only board roles can post to the feed, and so on. The full permission matrix lives in code and is summarized on /product. Per-HOA custom permission tweaks are deliberately not supported; simple, known, auditable roles beat configurable ones at this scale.

You own your data. Any member can export a full JSON + CSV bundle of everything tied to their account (profile, memberships, dues, documents, feed, ledger events) from the Data settings page at /settings/data. Account deletion runs with a 14-day grace period during which you can reverse it; after that a scheduled cron permanently removes the record. HOAs wanting to leave as a whole should email hello@spothoa.com and we'll produce a full D1 snapshot within a week. One-click HOA-level export is on the roadmap.

Your HOA pays $29/month flat (the Pro plan at /pricing). Homeowners pay a 1% online payment fee at checkout: about $30/month total spread across all paying homeowners (assuming ~$3,000/month in online collections). For comparison, Buildium runs around $220/month and AppFolio around $280/month at this size. SpotHOA saves a 30-unit HOA roughly $190 every month, before any homeowner-side fees.

Same $29/month flat to your HOA. Homeowners pay a 1% online payment fee at checkout, roughly $60/month total (assuming ~$6,000/month in online collections), spread across the homeowners actually paying online. If your homeowners mail checks and the treasurer records them manually, no online payment fee at all.

$29/month to your HOA, the same Pro plan. Homeowners pay a 1% online payment fee at checkout, roughly $100/month total at typical online-collection rates. At this size, the headline price gap to Buildium and AppFolio (~$220 to $280/month) is at its widest because SpotHOA does not charge per-unit. Above 100 units, talk to sales for a custom tier.

Up to 25 active units, 500 MB of document storage, 1,000 emails per month, the full ledger, dues collection via Stripe, the violations log, meetings + minutes, and the basic vendor directory. No credit card required at signup, no trial timer. Homeowners cover a 2% online payment fee at checkout. Free is one HOA per owner account; a second HOA prompts an upgrade or a sales conversation.

Homeowners pay 1% on Pro (or 2% on Free) when they pay dues online via Stripe. The fee shows as its own line item on the Stripe checkout page, on top of dues. Worked example on Pro: 30 homeowners each paying $200/month online means $6,000 collected, so homeowners pay roughly $60/month in convenience fees in total, spread across them. If homeowners mail checks and the treasurer records them manually in the ledger, the fee is $0: only money that actually flows through Stripe is fee-bearing. Stripe's own processing (2.9% + $0.30 per card transaction, 0.8% capped at $5 ACH) rides on the gross charge.

If what you have works, keep it. We're not built to displace a functional property management setup. If you're using something like Buildium, AppFolio, or Vantaca and the price or complexity is wrong for a small self-managed HOA, migrating in is straightforward: export your units + members as CSV, import them into SpotHOA, and stop renewal with your old vendor when you're ready. We can answer migration questions at hello@spothoa.com.