StayFi 2026 Review: Turning Guest WiFi Into an Email List

Paying for StayFi, or sticking with the handful of guest emails Airbnb lets you see? Well, that comes down to one thing: whether you'll email the list once you've built it. StayFi turns the WiFi your guests log into on arrival into a branded email and SMS list, and in 2026 the base version costs nothing. So for most hosts the honest answer is yes, start capturing. The catch sits one layer down, in the hardware and the marketing you still do yourself.

Our team hosts short-term rentals and runs guest-marketing tools like this across a few portfolios, so I'll write from the operator's chair, not the brochure. I pulled StayFi's pricing off its own page this month, read what named users say on Capterra and GetApp, and sat through StayFi's own 2026 webinars to see what shipped since this page was last written.

Think about the operator this is built for. Someone running four or five cabins, watching Airbnb keep every guest relationship, wanting those guests back without the OTA cut. That is the reader I keep in mind here. What follows is what StayFi does, what it costs in 2026, how it sits against the nearest alternatives, and where it falls down.

What Is StayFi?

That falling-down only makes sense once you can see the shape of the thing.

StayFi is a guest-WiFi marketing platform built for short-term rentals. It is not a general email tool with a vacation-rental skin bolted on.

The mechanism is one idea. StayFi puts a branded splash page in front of your property WiFi, and every guest who wants the internet types in a name and email first.

You capture the whole party, not only the name on the Airbnb reservation.

From that one hook it has grown outward: an email tool, SMS journeys, a guest homepage with upsells, and, since October 2025, a direct-booking metasearch called StayFinder.

It has held Capterra's Best Value badge two years running, and it aims at hosts, property managers, small hotels and multifamily operators who already run their own WiFi.

StayFi Features

Those operators run their own WiFi, and the email capture is the front door, so start there and follow the guest through the house.

Branded WiFi Splash Pages And Email Capture

This is the part that earns its keep.

A guest reaches your four-cabin property, opens their phone, and hits your splash page before Netflix. To get online, they hand over a real email.

StayFi runs those addresses through a verification partner, ZeroBounce, so what lands in your list is a working inbox, not a typo.

The payoff for an operator is coverage. A full house of six adults becomes six contacts, not one masked Airbnb relay address that dies at checkout.

Email Marketing Built For Rentals

Capturing the email is the easy part. Doing something with it is where StayFi's own tool, built on Campaign Monitor, comes in.

You get one-click templates and automations written for rentals: a WiFi welcome, a post-departure note, and a stay anniversary that fires ten months out for the guest who rebooks the same cabin each year.

Property AutoFill pulls live availability and photos from your PMS, so filling a dead weekend is a two-minute campaign instead of a copy-paste chore.

SMS And Review Screening

Text sits next to email as the faster channel.

StayFi runs automatic SMS journeys and welcome texts, which get opened far more often than email. It also bundles a rate-and-review screening tool that routes happy guests toward a public review and unhappy ones toward a quiet word with you.

Texts bill per credit rather than by subscription, which I'll come back to under cost.

The Guest Homepage And Upsells

Beyond messaging, every guest gets a branded homepage.

It holds your guidebook, your direct-booking link, and upsell storefronts through The Host Co and Viator. A guest can pay for early check-in or book a boat tour without texting you.

Set the tiles once and the requests arrive on their own. It is a second branded touchpoint that earns a little passive commission on the side.

StayFinder And WiFi Monitoring

The newest piece is the most ambitious.

StayFinder, live since October 2025, is a direct-booking metasearch. A guest can reverse-search your Airbnb listing and book with you instead, and a Chrome extension shows them the savings in real time.

On the plumbing side, StayFi watches your access points for outages and runs occupancy alerts off device counts. In one customer testimonial, the Tiny Pines operator describes catching an unregistered extra guest because the WiFi saw more devices than the reservation paid for.

StayFi Pricing and Plans in 2026

All of that runs on a pricing model that looks nothing like the one this page described in 2024. The old per-access-point ladder is gone. Here is the current shape, as of August 2026, read off StayFi's own pricing page.

Plan	Price (as of August 2026)	Billing	What it covers
WiFi Essentials	Free	No charge	Branded splash pages, unlimited guest-data capture, PMS integration, outage and occupancy alerts, email up to 200 contacts
Email Essentials	From $19/month	Monthly, scales by contact count	Everything free, plus unlimited sends, automated campaigns, drag-and-drop builder, templates
Email Plus	Quote / demo only	Monthly	Email Essentials plus pre-arrival data collection and PMS-integrated templates
Managed Email Marketing	Quote / demo only	Monthly	Done-for-you service where StayFi writes and sends the campaigns
Text (SMS) marketing	$0.0175 to $0.0425 per credit	Pay-as-you-go	Per-message credits, cheaper at volume, 2 to 3x for non-US/Canada
Hardware	$99 to $284	One-time	StayFi Express adapter ($99) for existing routers, or Aginet access points ($139 to $284)

Free! That word was nowhere on this page in 2024, and it is the single biggest change since the last review.

Two things to read carefully, though.

First, StayFi's page carries no monthly-versus-annual toggle. The prices above are the monthly, pay-as-you-go rates. The two upper email tiers, and any multi-listing deal, are quote-only behind a demo that sorts you by whether you run 1 to 3, 4 to 19, or 20-plus listings.

An annual prepay option was announced for 2026, but I could not see it live on the page yet. Treat annual as coming, not bookable today.

Second, set that $19 against one thing it recovers. Rebook a single guest direct for one $200-a-night week and you skip roughly $210 of OTA commission, which covers Email Essentials for most of a year.

The free tier, meanwhile, means the capture itself costs you a splash page and nothing else.

StayFi Pricing vs Alternatives

That free capture is what makes the comparison awkward, because almost nothing we have reviewed does the same job the same way.

I judge these on one axis: what actually gets the guest's email and gets them rebooking. That is what a purchase here turns on.

So what genuinely competes with it? Less than you would think.

The closest like-for-like is WiFi Porter, which also captures guests through the WiFi login rather than through messaging. We have not reviewed it, so I will not quote a price or tell you what it lacks. If you want a second WiFi-capture quote before committing, that is the name to set beside StayFi.

Everything else we have reviewed solves an adjacent problem.

Yada AI is the nearest reviewed competitor in guest marketing, but it drives repeat bookings through guest messaging over SMS, email and WhatsApp, and its pricing is demo-only. It captures at a different doorway than the WiFi.

Enso Connect overlaps on the upsell and guest-homepage idea, yet it is a guest-experience platform, not an email-capture tool. It complements StayFi more than it replaces it.

Uplisting is a property-management system StayFi plugs into, not a substitute at all. If you already run Uplisting, StayFi rides on top and reads your calendar. Keep that distinction in mind, because a demo rep will happily blur it.

StayFi Pros and Cons

Blur or not, the pitch underneath is a cheap front door onto a guest list you could never build off the OTAs. So where does it hold up, and where would I warn a friend?

The capture rate is the real strength, and it is now free to try.

A CEO running four villas in Croatia, writing on GetApp, says "setup was easy, guests connect smoothly, and data collection works great so far." That matches every operator account I have read.

The list compounds, too. That same Tiny Pines host got five bookings from fifty emails in one holiday campaign, which is the direct-booking flywheel doing what it is sold to do.

Now the part I would flag. Capturing the email was always the easy part, and StayFi charges you in two places for what comes after.

The first is hardware, per door. Bonnie F., a founder on Capterra, writes that the "access point cost per unit is very high and the wifi speed doesn't come anywhere near the speed of ethernet speed."

Abbas K. on the same page puts it plainly: "Hardware cost is too expensive."

The mechanism is structural. StayFi needs a compatible access point or its $99 Express adapter in every property, so a five-cabin operator is $500 to $1,400 into hardware before a single email lands.

And you have to be on site to fit it, which Tina J. also on Capterra calls slow for anyone whose rental is a plane ride away. Make sure you factor an install trip into setup, not the software price.

The second charge is per contact. Michael S., a cofounder reviewing on Capterra, notes the "email marketing is charged per contact, which can add up quickly if you recycle contacts on multiple lists."

That matters more than it sounds. A list you never email is not an asset, it is rent.

Keep in mind that the host who captures 5,000 addresses and sends two campaigns a year is paying to store a spreadsheet. Be aware, too, that the built-in email tool is fine for newsletters but thin on segmentation, so a serious marketer often exports to a heavier platform anyway.

What StayFi Is Best Used For

That export habit is the tell for who this fits and who it does not.

StayFi is at its best for a multi-listing operator who will run campaigns. Picture four, ten, thirty doors, an owner who wants a repeat-guest channel Airbnb can never revoke, and who will send at least a few emails a year to make the list earn out.

If you manage for owners, the branded touchpoint and upsells fit there too.

Who should skip it? The single-property host who will never email anyone.

The free tier means you can capture at no cost, so nobody has to pay to try. But remember that a dormant list does nothing, and the paid tiers only make sense once you are marketing in earnest. Watch out for the trap of buying hardware, capturing for a year, and never pressing send.

One boundary worth drawing. StayFi answers how you get this guest back, not whether a property pencils out before you buy it. That is the underwriting side of the business, where BNBCalc and BNBCalc Markets do their work, the second of them across roughly 2,400 markets in more than 150 countries, a different job in a different part of the workflow.

The Bottom Line

All of that still leaves the one question you came here with.

Yes, StayFi is worth it for a growing portfolio whose owner will email the list. It is a free, obvious yes for anyone who wants to start capturing guest emails at no cost.

The condition is the whole review. If you will not send campaigns, even the free tier is data you are sitting on, and the paid tiers are money you are lighting up.

So start on the free WiFi Essentials tier, capture for a season, and upgrade only once the list is worth marketing to.

The capture was always the easy part. The half that pays is whether you ever show up in your guests' inbox, and no tool can do that bit for you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does StayFi Require Special Hardware?

StayFi needs a compatible WiFi setup. It works natively with Ubiquiti UniFi and Ruckus, and it plugs into Amazon eero, TP-Link Deco or Omada, and Aruba systems through a $99 StayFi Express adapter. Alternatively, hosts can buy StayFi's own Aginet access points, which run from $139 for WiFi 5 to $284 for WiFi 7. Installation is plug-and-play, but someone has to be on site at each property to fit the device before the splash page goes live.

Is StayFi Free?

There is a free tier, called WiFi Essentials, and it is the biggest change since 2024. It covers branded splash pages, unlimited guest-data capture, PMS integration, outage and occupancy alerts, and email marketing to as many as 200 contacts. Paid Email Essentials starts at $19 a month, as of August 2026, once a list grows past 200 contacts or needs higher volume. Hardware and SMS credits are separate costs on top.

How Does StayFi Collect Guest Emails?

StayFi places a branded splash page in front of the property WiFi, so any guest who wants to get online enters a name and email first. Because everyone in the party connects their own phone, the host captures every adult, not only the person who booked through Airbnb or Vrbo. Addresses are verified through a partner service before entering the list, which keeps the data cleaner than an OTA export of masked relay emails.

Does StayFi Send Marketing Emails and Texts?

Yes, capture is only the start. StayFi includes an email tool built on Campaign Monitor with vacation-rental templates and automations, such as a WiFi welcome, a post-departure follow-up, and a ten-month stay anniversary. It also runs SMS journeys billed per credit, from $0.0175 to $0.0425 depending on volume. A newer done-for-you Managed Email service, priced by quote, will write and send campaigns for operators who would rather not.

What Is StayFinder?

StayFinder is StayFi's direct-booking metasearch, launched in October 2025. Guests can reverse-search an Airbnb listing, drop in the URL, and book with the host directly instead, and a Chrome extension shows the savings against the OTA price in real time. StayFi customers who opt in are marked as preferred and listed first, and their properties are folded into StayFi's marketing emails to a guest database the company says has passed 100,000 travelers.

Last verified: August 2026. Pricing and features were checked against StayFi's own site on the date above, and every third-party opinion links to its source.