The spreadsheet years
My wife and I own two properties — one in Kalispell, Montana and one on Whidbey Island in Washington. We list both on Airbnb and VRBO, and over time we started getting direct bookings too — friends of friends, repeat guests, people who found us through word of mouth.
For a while I tracked all of it in a Google Sheet. Columns for guest name, dates, source, payment status, notes. It worked, kind of, until the day I forgot someone was checking in and didn't set up their door code. After that I started looking at the existing software.
Why I didn't pick an existing tool
I tried a few. Hospitable, Hostaway, Guesty. They're all real products built by smart people. But every single one felt aimed at hosts running 10, 20, 100 properties — pages of settings, integrations I'd never use, prices that made sense at scale but were tough to justify for one cabin in Montana.
The pitch was always the same: complexity dressed up as power. I just wanted to stop double-booking and get a reminder before each check-in. I didn't need a CRM.
What hostdawg is
A tool I would have paid for two years ago. Small. Focused. Priced for hosts who run 1–3 properties as a side income, not for property management companies with a team of operators.
The whole thing fits on one page in your head:
- One dashboard for every booking — direct, Airbnb, VRBO.
- Calendar sync so the platforms never collide.
- Pre-arrival reminders and cleaner SMS, automatically.
- Optional custom website per property, if you want one.
That's it. No mobile app I'd never finish. No tiered analytics dashboard. The features I have, I want to make sure they just work.
What hostdawg isn't (yet)
Some things bigger tools have that hostdawg doesn't:
- Direct Airbnb / VRBO API access (calendar sync is via iCal, which works for blocking dates but doesn't read guest messages).
- Dynamic pricing or revenue management.
- Smart-lock integrations.
- A mobile app.
If those things are essential for you, hostdawg probably isn't the right tool — and that's fine. I'd rather be honest about what this is than try to sell it to everyone.
Where I want to take this
I want to keep hostdawg the tool I'd recommend to a friend who just bought their first cabin: cheap enough to be obvious, simple enough to be obvious, and good enough at the basics that it just disappears into the background of running your rental.
If you're hosting one or two places and you've been getting by on a spreadsheet, I built this for you.