HOA Start vs HOA Express: one publishes every price, the other is mid-rebuild

The short version

These two arrive on the same shortlist because they answer the same first question — our HOA needs a website — and because, when this piece was first published, both put prices on a public page, which most of this market does not. Since then HOA Start has taken its figures down. They are not the same size of tool. HOA Express is a website builder that grew payments, blast messaging and directories around it. HOA Start is closer to a management platform in a website builder’s clothes: the modules in the fact table above include violations, architectural requests, amenity reservations and bookkeeping, none of which HOA Express claims at all.

So the question is not which ticks more boxes. It is what each will put in writing before you hand over the community’s data — and there the answer reverses.

Where they differ

Pricing and contract transparency

HOA Express publishes a complete rate card. Its pricing page asks how many households are in your community and returns a figure for each plan, from the smallest band up into the thousands, monthly or yearly — no form, no call. There is a free tier for small communities, the page’s own FAQ says “Nope!” to setup fees, and the terms put a 30-day refund window on subscription payments, restated on a guarantee page.

HOA Start’s pricing page no longer shows a figure. It says “Your software price is based on the number of homes or units in your association” and the level of support you choose, then sends you to a “Get my pricing” form. The support levels are named (software only, guided onboarding, concierge), but none has a price, and the homeowner app is now listed as included. A board reading that page learns nothing about the bill until it asks. When we first checked, on 13 September, the same page did publish three starting figures, and the app was a separate one-time charge on the two cheaper plans; see Corrections below.

Two of HOA Start’s own pages also disagree. The pricing page advertises “No long-term contracts” and “Cancel anytime”; the terms of service, the binding document, say the agreement runs for an indefinite term, that the card on file is charged yearly, and that “Websites subscription payments are non-refundable unless Membershine, in its sole discretion, should choose to do so.” No cancellation window or notice period appears in them at all. “Cancel anytime” stops the next renewal; it does not refund the year you paid for. Both vendors, for what it is worth, may change their terms at any time without notice.

What you are buying, and for how long

This is the finding that separates them, and it is HOA Start’s own disclosure, not ours. Its privacy policy, effective 5 August 2026, opens by explaining that the company runs “two systems at the same time”: the legacy platform, which it identifies as the current HOA Start application, and a new Membershine platform “which we are rolling out to replace it.” Nothing on the pricing page, the FAQ or the homepage mentions this. A board signing an annual subscription this quarter is buying a product its vendor has already described in writing as the one being retired — with no published timetable, no migration commitment and no statement of what changes.

That is not a reason to rule HOA Start out. Vendors replatform, and saying so in a dated legal document beats doing it quietly. It is a reason to ask, in writing and before signing, when the migration lands, what it costs, and what moves.

HOA Express has the opposite profile and makes rather a lot of it: seventeen years on the same product, no outside investors, one office. The trade-off is the feature list — a board that needs violation tracking or an architectural review queue will not find one here.

Security, permissions and data ownership

Here the documents swap sides again.

HOA Start’s privacy policy is the stronger of the two by a wide margin. It is dated, it names ten specific third parties that receive data — payments, email, hosting, identity, SMS, push, analytics, bank linking, CRM and marketing SMS — states a retention position, and commits to answering access, correction, deletion and opt-out requests in about 45 days. Very little in this category publishes a subprocessor list at all. Its Google Play “Data safety” panel is harder to square with that: the listing declares that no data is shared with third parties, that the app may collect personal information and messages among other categories, that data is encrypted in transit — and that data cannot be deleted. Both are the vendor’s own declarations about the same product, and they point in different directions on the question a homeowner is most likely to ask.

HOA Express’s privacy policy is four short sections and carries no date. It lists the categories of data collected, says sharing is limited to service providers of a few named kinds without naming any of them, and sets out no retention schedule, no access or export rights, no deletion process and no regional privacy section. Its security page is a feature list — HTTPS with strict transport security, spam filtering, registration approval, per-member privacy preferences, granular admin rights, a password strength meter. Real controls, but controls a buyer uses, not a posture a buyer can audit.

Neither publishes a certification report, a data-processing addendum, an encryption-at-rest statement, a breach-notification commitment or a service-level agreement, and both disclaim responsibility for data loss. Where a contract can actually help you, HOA Express’s is the more useful: the community owns its domain and may transfer it to another registrar. HOA Start’s says nothing about domains or getting your data out; its FAQ asserts that export is available, which is a marketing page rather than an obligation.

Support and onboarding

HOA Express publishes what it will do and when. Its help centre gives support hours — weekdays, an eight-hour window, in a stated time zone — alongside phone, email and in-product chat, and the plan table marks which tiers get faster responses and personalised onboarding. Behind that sit two things almost nobody in this market publishes: a status page with ninety days of uptime broken out by component and maintenance posted in advance, and a public changelog.

HOA Start’s contact page is a phone number and a form — no hours, no email address, no response-time commitment, and the only thing resembling one, “We’re lightning fast to respond”, is marketing. Its FAQ promises onboarding specialists, a setup wizard, an in-house team and a searchable knowledge base, and the top plan sells hands-off management as its whole proposition; we could not reach a public knowledge base to confirm one exists. That same FAQ still answers the mobile-app question with a plan to ship iOS and Android “by the 4th quarter of 2024” — two years stale, and wrong, because both apps shipped.

Resident experience

HOA Start has homeowner apps on both stores and HOA Express has none — we searched rather than assumed. HOA Start’s listings are current, maintained this year, and describe the resident job properly: dues, event registration, amenity reservations, surveys, neighbour chat, push notifications. The iOS listing also sets a minimum operating system of the newest major release, which excludes residents on older phones until they upgrade. We are not printing either app’s star rating; both have fewer than ten, too small a sample to mean anything.

HOA Express’s answer is a responsive website and no app. For owners who mostly want documents, a calendar and a way to pay, that is a smaller gap than it sounds — but it is a gap, and it is the clearest thing HOA Start’s extra cost buys.

Where they are the same

Both are small, independent US vendors selling to volunteer boards rather than management companies, and both lead with a website rather than an accounting ledger. Both take card payments through the same processor, bill in advance, disclaim warranties, cap or disclaim liability, and may amend their terms without telling you. Neither publishes a security certification or an enforceable uptime guarantee, and neither has been scored against our rubric.

Which one, for whom

• A board that wants the cost settled before anyone calls → HOA Express. It is the only one of the two where a community of any size can read any price off the page.
• A community that needs violations, architectural requests or amenity reservations → HOA Start. No amount of pricing clarity substitutes for a module that is not there.
• Homeowners who expect a phone app → HOA Start, which now lists the app as included; confirm it on the quote.
• A board that may change its mind → HOA Express, whose terms refund a subscription payment inside 30 days. HOA Start’s say nothing is refundable.
• A board that has to answer “who else sees our data?” → HOA Start, which names its subprocessors — then ask it to reconcile that with its Play listing’s deletion declaration.
• An association planning three years out → ask HOA Start about the Membershine migration first, in writing. Everything else is secondary to the answer.
• Anyone who needs an audited security posture → neither publishes one.

What we evaluated, and how

This comparison rests entirely on published documentation. Neither product was used, no demo was run, neither vendor was contacted, and neither has been scored against our rubric. Where a vendor asserts something about its own product, we say so rather than repeating it as fact.

One limitation belongs in the open. hoastart.com serves an automated-traffic challenge, and partway through this sweep it stopped returning page bodies to us altogether. Everything cited above — homepage, pricing, terms of service, privacy policy, contact page and FAQ — was read in full before that happened. Other pages linked from the vendor’s own navigation, its mobile-app and product-roadmap pages among them, are recorded as unread, not as missing: nothing here treats a page we could not fetch as a page that does not exist, and HOA Start is not marked down for the block. HOA Express’s site answered every request, so the two were not swept to the same depth, and that asymmetry runs against HOA Start.

App-store facts come from the listings themselves — versions, update dates, seller of record, declared minimum operating system, and the Play “Data safety” panel — which for app-delivered features is better evidence than a web page the product was never going to have. HOA Express’s per-size prices reach visitors through a selector that renders in the browser, so the band table was read out of the page’s own script bundle: the same data any visitor sees.

Sources

• HOA Start pricing — accessed 2026-09-13 and again 2026-10-03; terms of service, privacy policy (effective 5 August 2026), contact and FAQ — accessed 2026-09-13
• HOA Express pricing, terms of service, privacy policy, guarantee, security and about — accessed 2026-09-13
• HOA Express help centre, status page and changelog — accessed 2026-09-13
• App Store and Google Play listings for HOA Start, and App Store and Play searches establishing that HOA Express ships no native app — accessed 2026-09-13

Related

• PayHOA vs EasyHOA for self-managed associations — the same question about published prices, asked of two platforms that start from accounting rather than a website.
• TownSq vs Buildium for HOAs — what a resident app looks like when it is the product rather than an add-on.

Corrections

3 October 2026. HOA Start changed its pricing page after this piece was published. On 13 September it showed three plans with starting prices, and the homeowner app was a one-time add-on on the two cheaper ones. On 3 October it showed no price at all, only a request form, and listed the app as included. The pricing section, the verdict and the recommendations now describe the current page. The fact file records both versions, and the opening line says that only one of the two still publishes prices. The pricing page also no longer says “No contract or credit card required”. It now says “No long-term contracts” and “Cancel anytime”, and the contract paragraph quotes those words instead.