For a self-serve Airbnb host, Lodgify is usually the best no-commission direct booking software: its website builder and booking engine take 0% of bookings. Stayful fits hosts who already run a PMS, Boostly is the done-for-you option, Q-Book suits UK self-catering owners. Nobody is truly free, card processing still applies.
Transparency: Zugrow publishes this page and Zugrow is one of the tools compared. We have kept it factual and flagged where a rival is the better fit.
What does "no booking commission" actually mean?
It means the software company takes 0% of the booking value. It does not mean the money arrives whole. Your card processor still takes a cut of every payment, and some booking engines add their own fee on top of that. Read the two layers separately: platform commission, and payment processing.
Three things get bundled under the word "fees", and they are not the same thing:
- Platform commission. A percentage of each booking taken by the software. Lodgify, Stayful, Boostly and Q-Book all publish a 0% position on this. That is the claim being made when a tool says "commission free".
- Software subscription. A flat monthly or annual fee, usually per property or per tier. This is how commission-free tools make their money instead. It is a fixed cost, so it gets cheaper per booking the more you book.
- Payment processing. Stripe, PayPal or a bank gateway takes a percentage plus a small fixed amount from every transaction. No booking software can remove this, because it is not their fee to remove.
The honest headline is this. Direct booking software can take your platform commission to zero. It cannot take your cost per booking to zero, and any page that implies otherwise is selling you something.
Which direct booking tools charge no commission?
Five tools cover most of the realistic options for an Airbnb host. Four of them take no cut of bookings. One of them, Hostaway, does charge on reservations made through its own booking engine, which matters if commission-free is the specific thing you are shopping for.
Which of these should you actually pick?
Pick by how much work you want to do, not by the feature list. Lodgify if you will build it yourself. Stayful if you already have a PMS you like. Boostly if you want it built for you. Q-Book if you are UK self-catering and want UK support. Hostaway if operations matter more than commission.
If you have 1 to 10 properties and will do it yourself
Lodgify. It is a website builder and a booking engine in one product, it states 0% booking fees across its plans, it connects Stripe and PayPal, it supports your own custom domain, and it can push your listings to Google Vacation Rentals. There is also an embeddable booking widget if you already have a Squarespace or WordPress site you like.
If you already run a PMS and just hate your website
Stayful. It does one job: a good looking front end that reads live availability and pricing from Hospitable, Guesty, Hostaway, Lodgify, OwnerRez or Hostfully, then hands the guest to your PMS checkout. It charges a flat fee, takes no commission, and never handles payment or guest data itself. If your PMS booking flow already works, this is the cheapest way to fix only the shop window.
If you know you will not do the marketing
Boostly. This is a UK based done-for-you service rather than a self-serve tool. They build and launch the site, integrate with your existing PMS, and publish a direct bookings guarantee with a refund attached. You are buying execution and accountability, which is a fair trade if the honest answer is that a self-serve builder would sit half finished.
If you are a UK self-catering owner
Q-Book. Built by a UK company, aimed squarely at cottages, apartments, self-catering, B&Bs and campsites, with channel connections, automatic deposits and balance payments, promo codes and gift vouchers, and website design available as a service. It states no Q-Book commission on your bookings.
What will a commission-free booking really cost you?
Roughly the card fee plus a share of your monthly subscription. Card processing is a percentage of the booking plus a small fixed amount on every transaction, and the rate is higher for premium and non-UK cards. So a booking advertised as 0% commission still carries a processing cost, before any software fee. Check your processor's own published rates for the figure that applies to you.
Add the subscription. If your builder costs a mid-tier monthly amount and you take four direct bookings a month, that subscription is a meaningful per-booking cost. Take twenty, and it rounds to nothing. This is why direct booking maths works far better for hosts who already have demand, and far worse for hosts hoping the website itself will create demand.
Compare that with the OTA side honestly. Airbnb is moving every remaining host onto the single host-only service fee, with the final cutovers dated 15 September 2026 outside the EU and 13 October 2026 inside it. Airbnb publishes the rate on its own fee page, so check it against your listings. Against card processing alone, direct booking is clearly cheaper per booking. The catch is that Airbnb also supplies the guest, and your website does not.
Do you actually need a bookable website yet?
Probably not on day one. There is a ladder, and most hosts try to skip to the top of it. Fix the Airbnb listing first, capture the guests you already have, then build a simple site, then make that site bookable with payments. Each rung is cheaper and faster than the one above it.
- Fix the listing. The cheapest revenue in short lets is usually the listing you already have. Photos, title, first three lines, amenity coverage. Zugrow's free Airbnb listing score audits a live listing on 100 points in about 60 seconds with no signup and no card, and photo enhancement is priced per photo with no subscription. If you want a human opinion, there are expert listing reports.
- Capture the guests you already have. Every stay is a guest who has already paid to trust you. A branded digital guidebook at £2.95 a month puts your name, not the OTA's, in front of them during the stay, with Google Places recommendations and optional Stripe upsells. The guest view is a public link, no app and no login.
- Build a simple site. One page, your properties, your story, an enquiry form. No booking engine yet. This is enough to test whether anyone actually searches for you by name.
- Make it bookable. Now the tools above earn their subscription, because you have traffic to convert.
Steps one and two cost very little and pay back regardless. Steps three and four only pay back if you are willing to drive traffic, which is the part no software does for you.
Does Zugrow sell direct booking website software?
No. Zugrow does not sell a direct booking website builder and has no booking engine. If a bookable, commission-free site is what you need today, use Lodgify, Stayful, Boostly or Q-Book. We would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.
What Zugrow does sell today is the earlier rungs: the free listing score, the £2.95 a month guidebook, per-photo enhancement and expert listing reports. Separately, Zugrow's wider PMS, which includes a unified inbox, unified calendar, channel manager and AI agents, is currently early access by waitlist and is onboarded in waves, so pressing "start free" on the early access pricing page joins a waitlist rather than opening an account. That early access platform takes 0% booking commission and charges nothing for channel connections, but it still does not build you a direct booking website. Zugrow is UK based, was called LetGrow until 27 July 2026, and is built by a host running a 24 property portfolio on it.
How we assessed this
We checked each vendor's own live pages and support documentation in August 2026 for what the product is, whether it takes a cut of bookings, and who it is aimed at. We deliberately publish no competitor prices here, because those change and a wrong figure is worse than none. Check the vendor's pricing page before you buy.
We have not run all five products side by side on the same portfolio, so treat the "best for" column as a fit judgement based on what each tool is built to do, not a performance benchmark. Where a rival is the better answer, we have said so. Fee structures in this market change often, so verify the commission position at signup rather than trusting any comparison page, including this one.