VacaOps is short-term rental management software for the host with 1–10 properties and a real job. Direct booking site per property with Stripe deposits. Smart-pricing engine that pushes to VRBO + Airbnb in one click. AI that categorizes your receipts into Schedule E. Renter and cleaner comms that actually go out. Starting at $49/month.
No credit card. No "talk to sales." Reply directly to a real person — me.
Forward any receipt — PDF, photo, HEIC, even the body of a Home Depot email — to your VacaOps inbox. Gemini reads it, categorizes it under the correct Schedule E line, and assigns it to the right property. You stop touching spreadsheets in February.
Check-in code on arrival day. Beach-flag color and AM/PM weather every morning of their stay. Pool-heat reminder the day before. All from the email address your renters already know — yours, not "noreply".
One branded site per property — your domain, your photos, your guide. Same live rates that go to VRBO and Airbnb, but the renter pays you directly through Stripe. Card or ACH (with a discount the renter sees). No 15% off the top.
Four steps. No "implementation team." No 30-day onboarding.
Email me. I create your account by hand for the first 10 customers. You get the link.
Forward your Airbnb & VRBO emails to your VacaOps inbox. Bookings auto-import.
SMS them a portal link. No app. No login. They open their schedule, check off cleans.
Bookings flow in. Receipts categorize themselves. Renters get the right text on the right day.
Forward the Home Depot email. Snap a phone photo of the gas-pump receipt for the dock light bulbs. Drop the HVAC invoice PDF. They all land in the same place.
VacaOps reads every receipt with Google Gemini, pulls vendor / date / amount, infers the property it belongs to from the last 500 expenses you've approved, and slots it into the correct Schedule E line. HEIC photos from your iPhone work. Forwarded HTML emails from Amazon work. PDFs from your contractor work.
At tax time, one click exports a clean CSV your CPA actually wants to receive.
Good morning Sarah! ️
Today on Santa Rosa Beach: YELLOW flag — medium hazard, moderate surf.
AM: ☀️ 78° / breezy / 10% rain
PM: ⛅ 84° / calm / 30% rain
Pool was heated last night. Check-in code is 4421. Reply to this for anything.
— Bas
Every morning of your renter's stay, VacaOps emails them a personalized briefing: today's beach-flag color, AM/PM weather, pool-heat status, and check-in/check-out reminders on the right days.
Sent from your property-specific email address (`[email protected]`, not "noreply") so renters can reply and you actually see it. The same renter portal also shows your house guide, WiFi password, and a one-tap "message host" form.
Every property gets a real direct booking site under your name — not vacaops.com/property/123. Live calendar pulled from the same rates feed that goes to Hostex, so the price the renter sees here matches Airbnb to the penny.
Pick dates → see the deposit + balance schedule → pay with card or ACH (ACH gets a discount the renter sees inline) → DocuSeal slides the contract in for signature → renter lands in their portal with check-in details, weather, your local guide. All powered by Stripe with your keys; we never touch the money.
Card-processing-fee uplift is per-channel. Decide whether the renter or you absorbs it — same on VRBO, Airbnb, and direct.
One SMS, one link. Your cleaner sees their next 90 days of cleans, marks each one done, posts notes ("ran out of pods, picked up trash from the deck") that show up in your booking record.
No App Store account. No password. No "we updated the app, please update." Just a link.
I'm Bas de Laat. I'm Dutch, I live on 30A in Florida, and I spent 17 years at Accenture leading delivery for systems that were nothing like the one you're looking at — large-scale enterprise rebuilds where every decision went through six committees.
A few years ago my wife and I bought our first vacation rental. Then a second. Suddenly my evenings were Excel spreadsheets, my Sundays were texting our cleaner, and every March was a Schedule-E disaster of trying to reconcile Venmo screenshots with hardware-store receipts. My wife — diplomatic about it — pointed out that for a guy who builds software for a living, my own life was being run by sticky notes.
So I built VacaOps. Not as a startup, not on a pitch deck — as the tool I actually wanted to use for our two rentals. It auto-ingests our Airbnb and VRBO bookings, texts our cleaner when a checkout is incoming, sends a contract through DocuSeal, watches the renter portal, files receipts into Schedule-E categories by reading photos of paper receipts I take with my phone, and tells me — in a little tag in the bottom-right of the screen — what color flag the lifeguards just put up.
It runs my rentals while I run my life. After a few friends in the neighborhood asked to use it, I decided to make it available.
I'm one person. If you sign up, I'm the one who replies to your email.
The work VacaOps replaces is 10–15 hr/wk at $30/hr — that's $1,300–$1,950/month of your time. Every tier costs less than one week of it.
For 1–2 properties
For 3–10 properties
For 11+ properties / small PMs
Yearly plans save 2 months — paid up front, refundable during trial.
Managed Onboarding — $499 one-time. We migrate your bookings, set up your email forwarding, wire up your cleaner, run a test booking end-to-end. Live in 5 business days.
Payments: Venmo (@bas-de-laat), PayPal (paypal.me/basdelaat), check, or ACH. No Stripe. We pass the savings on.
Hostfully and Guesty are built for property managers running other people's homes — they price for that ($179+ floor), they sell to that audience, and they ship for that audience. VacaOps is built for owners who actually own and operate the property. The receipt-ingest, the beach-flag, the Schedule-E categorization, the per-property mailbox — those are all owner concerns, not PM concerns.
Both, now. VacaOps pushes nightly rates and minimum-stay rules to VRBO, Airbnb, and Booking.com through Hostex — one click syncs your edits across every channel plus your direct booking site. The pricing engine builds rates from per-property defaults, seasons (Peak Summer / Spring Break / school breaks / federal holidays), weekend uplifts, comp-property snapshots, and historical actuals; the Insights layer (Gemini-powered) surfaces nudges you can accept or ignore. Pin a price on a single date, a week, a season, or shift the property-wide default — your override always wins and the engine recomputes around it.
Layered. Property defaults set the floor (nightly rate, min nights, changeover day, weekend premium %). Seasons sit on top — Peak Summer, Shoulder, Winter, each with its own targets. Events nested under seasons handle one-offs (Juneteenth, MLK weekend, regional school breaks pulled from a public calendar). On top of that, market signals: comp snapshots from properties you mark as benchmarks, historical actuals from your own past bookings, and a velocity check. Every layer is visible in the drill-down — no black box. Operator overrides at any level short-circuit the math; the engine never overrides you.
Yes — one site per property, branded to your name (not VacaOps). Live calendar pulled from the same rates feed that goes to Hostex, so the nightly price the renter sees matches what's on Airbnb to the penny. /reserve takes a Stripe deposit (card or ACH — ACH gets a configurable discount, the renter sees the savings inline), drops the contract into DocuSeal for signature, then hands off to the renter portal. Card-processing-fee uplift is configurable per channel; you decide whether the renter or you absorbs it.
A token-based portal — no account, no password. Signed contract on file, payment status, balance due dates, check-in / check-out details, weather forecast for their stay, and a curated local guide you fill in once. If you're using SmartThings locks, the portal surfaces their access code at the right time. They don't get drowned in app notifications or onboarding emails.
SmartThings (Samsung). One-time OAuth, then VacaOps maps each lock to a property. You see the live state on the Smart Home dashboard and can lock / unlock from your phone. Per-booking access codes for renters and cleaners are on the immediate roadmap; today you create codes in SmartThings and we surface them.
Every receipt lands as a draft expense row with the AI's suggested category + property + reasoning. You review with one click. Wrong categories take seconds to fix. The AI learns from your last 500 corrections, so by month two it's mostly right.
Your CPA does the form. They don't sort your receipts into the lines, allocate by property, or chase missing ones in February. VacaOps does. Then your CPA gets a clean export and you spend $0 of their hourly rate on data entry.
It's not overkill if you'd rather not be the unpaid sysadmin of your own life. One property still has bookings to ingest, receipts to file, a cleaner to coordinate, and a renter to text. Starter is priced for exactly this case.
We host it (app.vacaops.com). Your data is yours — CSV export is one click on every plan. Self-hosted Docker deployment is an option on Studio if you want it.
Cancel during the 14-day trial for a full refund. After that, monthly is month-to-month — cancel any time. Yearly plans are refundable pro-rata in the first 30 days.
Me. Bas. The guy who built it. I read every support email. Until I can't — and when that day comes, I'll tell you on the homepage who you'll actually be talking to.
Request access — first three customers get 3 months free, then 10% off for life.
I read every one. Reply within 24 hours.