PayHOA vs Condo Control: one publishes the price, the other publishes the promises

The short version

A board comparing these two is not choosing between a cheap product and an expensive one. It cannot: only one of them will say what it costs — see the pricing posture row above.

The real choice is between two theories of what a buyer deserves to know upfront. PayHOA publishes its entire rate card, then asks you to sign an agreement that promises very little. Condo Control publishes an unusually complete set of service commitments, and names one number before a call: a starting price for small self-managed communities, and nothing for anyone else. Which half is your association worse at negotiating alone? For most self-managed boards, the price.

Where they differ

Pricing and contract transparency

PayHOA’s pricing page is the most complete we have read in this category. Every unit band carries a figure, monthly and annual, and beneath them sits a rate card for the things that usually surface only on an invoice: ACH and card processing, printed-and-mailed letters, mailed checks, bookkeeping, tax filings. All of it is in the fact table above; none of it requires a call.

Its Terms of Service match. There is no fixed term and no auto-renewal trap: a subscriber can terminate at any time by email, effective at the end of the current paid term. The catch is stated as plainly — all fees are non-refundable, and PayHOA “will not provide any refund for any remaining prepaid period.”

Condo Control does the reverse. Its pricing page shows three plans across six unit bands and a matrix of roughly thirty modules — amenity booking, violation tracking, e-voting, visitor parking — each marked as a priced add-on with a bare dollar sign and no amount. Its default “Self-Managed” tab does render one figure, “$67.50 per month” as a starting price for communities under 50 units, stepping up by unit band to a “Contact Sales” above 500; the managed-community plans show no number at all. What a board can read instead is the contract, published in full: a Software and Services Agreement and a Statement of Standard Services, twenty pages between them. The agreement runs twelve months and renews automatically; the customer must give thirty calendar days’ written notice to stop it, Condo Control ninety. On renewal it “reserves the right to increase subscription rates to reflect market factors by 5% annually” — a capped, disclosed escalator, applied to a base the buyer cannot see before the call.

One dollar figure does appear in that stack, and it is the exit. Termination assistance, where “exporting of all of the Customer’s data in Excel format” lives, is billed at “$125 per hour, with a minimum of two (2) hours,” only in a ninety-day window before termination, and only if both parties “agree as to price and scope.” PayHOA’s equivalent is free but short: data is kept thirty days after cancellation, supplied on request, then may be deleted.

Security, permissions and data ownership

Here the gap is widest, and it runs the other way.

Condo Control operates a real trust centre at /trust/, last updated October 2024, and it is specific where most vendor security pages are atmospheric. It names ten sub-processors and what each does, states that all client data is stored in Canada wherever the client is, and says data leaves production immediately on termination, with backups purged after twelve months. It is careful about what it does not claim: SOC 2 Type 2 is attributed to Microsoft Azure as its host, and the compliance tab says outright that Condo Control is not itself PCI compliant, because Stripe holds all card data. The agreement adds that Customer Data “shall be and remain the sole and exclusive property of Customer,” plus an audit right.

PayHOA publishes a security page too — at /payhoa-feature/security/, not the /security a buyer would guess — and it is one paragraph: AWS infrastructure, backups every four hours across multiple geographic zones. Its privacy policy, revised March 2026, is a website policy: personal information may go to “contractors, service providers, payment processors, and other third parties,” none named, with no data-residency statement, no breach-notification commitment and no statutory-rights section. The Terms of Service contain one security undertaking, PCI DSS — the one thing Condo Control tells you it does not do itself.

Be clear what this is. PayHOA’s pages exist; they are thin, not absent — a disclosure finding, not a product finding. Nothing here says PayHOA’s security is worse, only that a board cannot check.

Support and onboarding

Both staff support Monday to Friday, roughly nine to five Eastern. The difference is whether that is contractual.

Condo Control’s is. The Statement of Standard Services commits to 99.95% monthly uptime, with credits at ten times the pro-rated fee for the affected period; to a support response no later than 5pm the next business day, with a credit of 25% of the year’s fees after four misses in a year; to four-hour disaster recovery; and to 120 days’ notice before a feature is retired, which triggers a right to terminate. Its support metrics page claims a median first response of 6.5 minutes — vendor-reported, unaudited by us, and far better than the contract guarantees. A public status page carries ninety days of rolling uptime.

PayHOA’s is not. Its support page describes free, unlimited, US-based support; the pricing FAQ adds chat, email, phone and screenshare from 9am to 5pm ET and an onboarding specialist who handles data migration; the contact page aims at a reply within 12–24 business hours. None of it appears in the contract, which reserves the right to “suspend, discontinue, or otherwise modify the Services at any time or for any reason without notice,” disclaims all liability for downtime, and caps liability at twenty dollars or two months of fees. There is no status page.

Accounting and financial controls

Both document this seriously. Condo Control’s accounting page describes a double-entry general ledger with a per-association chart of accounts, payables with approval routing and spending thresholds requiring board sign-off, real-time aging reports, and bank reconciliation with lockable closed periods — period locking and threshold approval being exactly what an auditor asks about. PayHOA carries its scope as line items on the pricing page instead: custom chart of accounts, fifty-plus report types, bank reconciliation and syncing, managed payables with approval workflows and OCR, all unlimited within the subscription.

The difference is packaging, not capability: PayHOA’s accounting is included in every published band, while Condo Control’s matrix lists it among the unpriced add-ons.

Resident experience

Condo Control ships homeowner apps on both platforms; see the iOS and Android rows above. The iOS listing was last updated 24 August 2026 and requires iOS 16 or later.

PayHOA has no native mobile app. We searched the App Store and Google Play afresh on 9 September 2026 and found no listing on either; residents reach the product through a browser. That matters little for an association whose homeowners pay dues a few times a year, and a great deal for a high-rise where residents book amenities, register guests and track packages weekly. We quote neither app’s store rating: the samples are not comparable.

Where they are the same

Both are established products — see the founding-year row above — both cover the core association workload, and both bill in advance and put a real onboarding person on a new account. And both ask a volunteer board to take something on trust: PayHOA the service, without a contractual commitment to it; Condo Control the price, without seeing it.

Which one, for whom

• Must approve a budget line before it can buy → PayHOA, the only one whose cost can be established without a sales call.
• Facing a diligence questionnaire → Condo Control. Named sub-processors, stated data residency and a contractual SLA are answers you can hand a board or an insurer; PayHOA publishes none of the three.
• Downtime is an operational emergency → Condo Control, which commits to 99.95% with credits and publishes its history.
• Expects to switch systems again in a few years → PayHOA’s exit is free; price Condo Control’s hourly export rate in first.
• Residents who live in the app → Condo Control. PayHOA has no homeowner app.
• Paying annually → neither refunds a prepaid remainder if you leave mid-term.

What we evaluated, and how

This comparison rests entirely on published documentation. Neither product was used hands-on, no demo was run, and neither has been scored against our rubric — so nothing here is a verified capability claim.

Every URL was hash-checked against a known-bad control path on the same domain before we treated a page as real, and that earned its keep twice: PayHOA’s /trust returns HTTP 200 but redirects to a blog post about tax time, and Condo Control’s /docs returns 200 by redirecting to the homepage. It cuts the other way too — PayHOA’s security, support and contract pages are not at the paths a buyer would guess, and stopping at /security or /terms-of-service would have reported a vendor that publishes none of the three, which is the opposite of the truth.

Every PayHOA source below was re-read on 9 September 2026 before publication: the pricing bands, the transaction rate card, the Terms of Service, the privacy policy, the security and support pages and the absence of a mobile app were all unchanged from the first sweep. Condo Control’s pricing page was re-checked the same day and still publishes no figure of any kind.

Two limits, both on Condo Control. Its help centre returned a 403 to our client, so we did not read it and do not report on it — our limitation, not a gap in their support. And its terms page labels both contract PDFs “Last Updated July 2, 2026” while the documents themselves are stamped “Revised: August 2, 2023”; we quote them as published and flag it.

Sources

• PayHOA Pricing — accessed 2026-09-09
• PayHOA Terms of Service (Last Updated 2026-08-21) — accessed 2026-09-09
• PayHOA Privacy Policy (Last Updated 2026-03-11) — accessed 2026-09-09
• PayHOA Security and Support & Onboarding — accessed 2026-09-09
• PayHOA Contact — accessed 2026-09-09
• Condo Control Pricing — accessed 2026-08-31, re-checked 2026-09-09
• Condo Control Master Terms and Conditions, the Software and Services Agreement and the Statement of Standard Services — accessed 2026-08-31
• Condo Control Security & Trust centre (Last Updated 2024-10-16) — accessed 2026-08-31
• Condo Control Support Metrics and Property Control status page — accessed 2026-08-31
• Condo Control Accounting — accessed 2026-08-31
• Condo Control App on the App Store — accessed 2026-08-31

Corrections

6 October 2026. This piece said Condo Control publishes no price. Its pricing page’s default “Self-Managed” tab renders a starting figure, $67.50 a month for communities under 50 units, with higher bands by unit count; the figure is drawn by JavaScript and was missed by our first read. The managed-community plans and every add-on remain unpriced, so the comparison’s conclusion stands; the description, verdict and pricing paragraph now say “only a starting price” rather than “no price”, and the fact file records the figure as partially published.