How to collect rent online

The ways landlords collect rent today

Most rent still moves one of three ways, and the difference between them is not how the money travels. It is who keeps the records.

Checks and cash move money, and nothing else. Every other part of the job is yours: the trip to the bank, the spreadsheet, the memory of who has paid and who has not. When a check is late you find out by noticing, and when a tenant says the rent was dropped off, the only record of whether it arrived is whatever you wrote down. The money works. The bookkeeping is entirely on you.

Personal payment apps like Zelle, Venmo, and PayPal are built for sending money between people, and at that job they are quick. But they move money without keeping books. A payment arrives in your account carrying whatever note the sender typed, tied to no unit and no lease. There is no due date, and no autopay you control: the tenant sends when the tenant sends. And because the transfer is instant, a partial payment is in your account before you ever see it. If your lease says rent is due in full, the app gives you no moment to say no. You are left reconstructing a ledger from a transaction feed at tax time.

Dedicated rent software starts from the lease instead of the transfer. The rent charge posts against the lease, the tenant pays it by bank or card, and the payment lands as an entry on that lease's ledger. Autopay runs on a schedule tied to the due date, both of you see the same balance, and the record keeps itself as a side effect of the money moving. That is the whole pitch, and the rest of this page is what to look for in one.

What it costs

There are two costs in online rent collection: the software and the payment processing. Here is how both work in Sahab Key, since its numbers are published.

The software is two dollars a unit a month, with a fifty-dollar monthly minimum that covers your first 25 units. Twelve units is $50 a month. Forty units is $80. There are no setup fees and no contracts, and there is no free trial: you start when you are ready and can cancel anytime. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.

Payment processing works like this. Stripe moves every dollar, and by default the processing fee is shown to the tenant on the payment screen before they pay, so nobody discovers it afterward. Debit and prepaid cards are never charged a fee. If you would rather your tenants see no fee at all, you can choose to absorb it for each payment method, and what you absorb books as an expense in your ledger, so the accounting stays exact.

If you want more than collection, add-ons are flat monthly prices: texting at $15 sends rent reminders from a local number under your business name to tenants who opt in, lease e-signature is $15, online rental applications are $29, and AI Insights is $49. None of them are required to collect rent.

Setting it up in Sahab Key, start to finish

The whole setup is a working session, not a project plan.

1. Create your workspace. Every new workspace is reviewed before it opens, usually within one business day.
2. Add your buildings, units, leases, and tenants. You enter your portfolio in the app yourself; there is no data-import service. You type it in once, and the software carries it from there.
3. Connect each building's Stripe payout account. This is required before tenants can pay, and it is why the money stays clean: each building's rent routes to that building's own bank account.
4. Invite your tenants. They can pay online the same day and turn on autopay from their portal.
5. Let the rest come to you. Maintenance requests arrive in the app with photos, and every payment posts to the right lease on its own.