PayHOA vs EasyHOA: both publish a price, only one publishes the whole bill

The short version

These are the two self-managed HOA platforms that publish a price, which is why they end up on the same shortlist. Both post a table keyed to unit count, both start at the same headline figure, and both sell to a volunteer board rather than a management company. See the pricing rows in the table above.

The difference is what the table leaves out. PayHOA’s bands are the subscription, and everything else it charges — payment processing, printed mail, bookkeeping, tax filings — is published beside them on the same page. EasyHOA’s table advertises “No Hidden Fees, Add-ons, or Extra Charges,” but its own FAQ answers “How much does it cost?” with a setup fee that appears nowhere on the pricing page, and the instruction to “call or email us today to get an exact quote.” We are not calling either page false — only reporting that two of EasyHOA’s own pages describe different buying processes, and that just one vendor here lets a board reach a number without a sales conversation.

Where they differ

Pricing and contract transparency

PayHOA publishes nine unit bands, an annual and a monthly rate for each, and a per-unit rate above 500 units with a stated minimum. Below that sits a fee schedule most vendors in this category do not publish at all: incoming ACH and card payment costs, per-letter printing and postage, mailed cheques, and starting prices for bookkeeping and tax filings — all in the fact table above rather than typed here. That schedule cuts both ways: a board can model its real annual cost before signing, and the headline band is plainly not the whole bill for an association that mails a lot of paper or takes a lot of card payments.

EasyHOA offers the opposite trade — one flat monthly fee with the website, phone system, accounting module, communications, violation tracking and voting all marked “Included,” and no transaction fees published anywhere we looked. For a board that wants a single predictable budget line, that is genuinely attractive.

The FAQ is what stops us calling it the more transparent one. A setup fee “based on the size of the association,” disclosed on a different page from the prices and quantified on neither, is the kind of thing a board discovers on an invoice. The same answer adds that EasyHOA will “match any price” and has “the lowest prices in the industry” — assertions we did not test, and ones that sit oddly against a fixed rate card. On that basis we have moved EasyHOA’s pricing posture in our fact file from published to partially published.

The contracts widen the gap. PayHOA’s Terms of Service were updated three weeks before we read them. EasyHOA’s EULA is dated 30 January 2023 and its cancellation and refund policy 1 December 2021 — and the two disagree about the one thing a departing customer needs to know. The EULA says cancel at least 48 hours before your next charge; the refund policy says give 15 days’ notice before the end of your term. Follow the EULA, miss the refund policy’s window, and you pay for another term.

Neither refunds anything, both bill in advance, and both make you contact them to cancel rather than doing it in the product. PayHOA’s pricing FAQ says there are no long-term contracts or cancellation fees; EasyHOA renews monthly until cancelled in writing. Both may change prices on notice, and PayHOA’s terms let it revise the agreement itself at any time, with the customer waiving the right to specific notice of each change.

Security, permissions and data ownership

Both vendors say the right thing about card data and very little about anything else.

PayHOA’s contract is the more specific document. It states that the subscriber owns all user data, commits PayHOA to maintaining PCI DSS certification as a service provider, and gives a defined exit: on cancellation, data is preserved for 30 days and made available to the subscriber on request, after which it may be permanently deleted. A named retention window and an export right, written into the contract, is more than most vendors here commit to.

EasyHOA’s EULA runs the other way on exactly that point: EasyHOA “has no obligation to back up your Content,” the customer is “solely responsible” for doing so, and “you may not have access to Your Content” after termination. It also asserts PCI DSS compliance, and its perpetual licence over aggregated data is expressly conditioned on the customer’s consent — a narrower grant than some competitors take.

Beyond the contracts, both are thin. PayHOA’s security page is a single paragraph naming AWS hosting and four-hourly backups; the nav promises “military-grade security,” which is marketing, not a control. Neither publishes a certification report, subprocessor list, data-processing addendum, status page or service-level agreement, and /security, /trust, /status and /dpa are absent on both domains. Neither privacy policy commits to breach notification, and EasyHOA’s was last updated in December 2021. Liability is capped hard on both sides, lower at PayHOA: twenty dollars or two months of fees, against fifty dollars or twelve months at EasyHOA.

Support and onboarding

Both do better here than their category norm, and the published evidence favours neither obviously.

PayHOA says support is US-based, free and unlimited, and its pricing page lists chat, email, phone and screenshare sessions on weekdays during stated hours, with an onboarding specialist handling basic data migration. Its contact page commits to a personalised reply within 12–24 business hours — a falsifiable target, which is rare here. Behind it sits a large knowledge base with admin and homeowner sections, videos and published release notes.

EasyHOA publishes a support number, address and weekday hours on its contact page, and runs a real help centre organised by module. We nearly missed it: nothing on its homepage, pricing page or FAQ links there. The caveat is contractual — its EULA says EasyHOA “is not obligated to provide you any support” and “makes no specific service level guarantees,” and may discontinue what it does provide at any time, while the pricing page sells “Unlimited Support.” Both are EasyHOA’s own words; the binding one is the EULA.

Resident experience

EasyHOA ships native homeowner apps on both mobile platforms, both recently maintained — the store links are in the table above. PayHOA has no native app on either store; we searched rather than assumed, and its homeowner experience is the browser. For a community whose owners expect to pay dues from a phone that is a real difference, though a mobile web portal covers much of the same ground. We are not publishing either app’s star rating: EasyHOA’s iOS listing carries single-digit ratings, too small a sample to compare.

Where they are the same

Both are small, independent US vendors selling to self-managed associations, with no parent company recorded in our fact file, and both cover the association core — dues and payments, accounting, communications, violations, requests, documents, voting and a website. Both bill in advance, refund nothing, disclaim all warranties, cap liability hard, route disputes to AAA arbitration and sell bookkeeping as a paid add-on. Neither has been scored against our rubric.

Which one, for whom

• A board that wants the cost settled before a sales call → PayHOA. Its bands are the price, its extras are itemised, and the 30-day trial needs no card.
• A board that wants one predictable monthly line → EasyHOA, if it confirms the setup fee in writing first. Get that number, then price it against PayHOA’s band plus its per-item fees at your real mail and payment volume — those fees can outrun the headline difference.
• An association whose owners live on their phones → EasyHOA, on native apps alone.
• Anyone who may need to leave → PayHOA, for the contractual 30-day retention and export right. Ask EasyHOA in writing how you get your data out, and how much notice cancelling takes — its own two documents disagree.
• Diligence that requires published security paperwork → neither. Ask both for a current SOC 2 report and treat the answer as data.

What we evaluated, and how

This comparison rests entirely on published documentation read on 4 September 2026. Neither product was used hands-on, no demo was requested, 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 host before being treated as real.

Two findings from that sweep cut against a lazy reading. PayHOA’s security and support pages are not at /security or /support — those paths 404 — but sit under a feature-directory path we found only in a secondary sitemap; probing the obvious URLs alone would have produced a false “no security page” against PayHOA. And EasyHOA’s binding EULA, privacy policy and refund policy are linked only from a footer column whose links are script click targets rather than ordinary links, so our first read reached them through the sitemap instead; its help centre we reached through a subdomain guess. Absence from a nav bar is not absence, and we have tried not to score either vendor down for our own search being shallow.

Related

• CINC Systems vs Vantaca — the same contract questions at the management-company end of the market, where neither vendor publishes a price list.
• TownSq vs Buildium for HOAs — what happens when a published rate card stops short of association accounting.

Sources

• PayHOA Pricing — accessed 2026-09-04
• PayHOA Terms of Service (updated 2026-08-21) and Privacy Policy (updated 2026-03-11) — accessed 2026-09-04
• PayHOA Security, Support & Onboarding and Contact — accessed 2026-09-04
• PayHOA knowledge base — accessed 2026-09-04
• EasyHOA Pricing and FAQ — accessed 2026-09-04
• EasyHOA EULA (updated 2023-01-30), Cancellation and Refund Policy (updated 2021-12-01) and Privacy Policy (updated 2021-12-01) — accessed 2026-09-04
• EasyHOA Optional Services, Contact and help centre — accessed 2026-09-04

Corrections

6 October 2026. This piece said EasyHOA’s EULA, privacy policy and refund policy were “linked from neither its homepage nor its pricing page”. That was wrong: both pages carry a footer “Legal” column linking all three, and the same links are in a July 2026 archive copy of the site. The links are JavaScript click targets rather than ordinary links, which is how an HTML-only read missed them. The sentence has been corrected, and the fact file’s section citations for the EULA’s support disclaimer (§5, not §7) and its no-backup clause (§4(a), not §5(a)) were corrected at the same time; the page itself quoted neither number.

27 September 2026. The related-reading line for CINC Systems vs Vantaca said that neither vendor publishes a price at all. For Vantaca that was too absolute: two posts on its blog give a rate of $0.54 per door per month. A post of 15 July 2026 gives it as the rate HOAi, Vantaca’s AI product, “runs at”; a post of 2 July 2026 calls it “a rack rate” at which “the platform is a rounding error against the labor it returns.” We found no price list for either vendor. The line now says that neither vendor publishes a price list.