HOA Start: Features, Pricing, Integrations & AI Visibility

HOA Start is a mobile web app plus a community website for HOAs, condos and POAs, and the vendor in the community engagement category with the plainest published pricing. Its mobile-app page describes real-time announcements, direct messaging, emergency notifications, newsletters, discussion forums, event registration and RSVPs, facility reservations, online voting, a boardroom, payments, violations, architectural requests and a resident directory, and claims thousands of HOAs. The pitch on that page is that residents expect mobile experiences in every part of their lives while HOAs struggle with communication with residents. The facts panel below is rendered from our vendor database with a source and verification date on each entry.

Who it fits

The database tags HOA communities. The buyer is a board, or a small management company, that wants a resident channel beyond email and a website that the same product keeps current, at a price that does not need a budget vote. Pricing by the number of homes in the neighborhood, a free trial and a mobile web app rather than a native one all point at self-managed associations and small portfolios.

A large management company running hundreds of associations, or a condo tower with a front desk, will find the feature set thinner than TownSq’s or Condo Control’s, and should look at those first.

Pricing

HOA Start publishes three tiers on its pricing page: Professional at $39 per month, Premium at $49 per month and White-Glove at $149 per month, each billed annually and priced by the number of homes in the neighborhood. A native mobile app is $500 one-time on the lower tiers. Text message bundles are $25 per 1,000. There is a free trial. Ask what home-count bands the three figures apply to and where the price steps up, what White-Glove adds for the extra $100, and whether payments carry a per-transaction fee to the homeowner. Then estimate the text volume, because an association that sends an emergency notice to 300 homes by SMS uses 300 messages each time, and that line grows in a bad storm season.

Integrations

The database records no named integration. The mobile-app page refers to generic property management software, payments and access control, and offers an open API. For a self-managed board the roster lives in a spreadsheet, and the question is how it gets in and who keeps it current. For a management company the question is whether the association’s accounting system can feed the owner list and balances through the API, and whether anyone has built that connection before. Ask for a named accounting system HOA Start has connected to, and if there is none, budget the manual work.

Limitations and questions to ask

Mobile web first. The base product is a mobile web app, and the native app is a $500 add-on. Ask what a resident loses on the web version, whether push notifications work without the native app, and whether the emergency notification reaches a homeowner who has not installed anything.

Voting second. Online voting is on the feature list. Ask how a vote is verified against the owner list, how a proxy is handled, what the audit trail looks like, and whether the vendor will state that the process meets your bylaws and your state’s rules.

Moderation third. Discussion forums and direct messaging are described; moderation is not. Ask who can remove a post, whether posts can be held for review, and what the board sees.

Adoption fourth. Thousands of HOAs is a customer count. Ask for the percentage of homeowners registered and active at an association like yours after a year, and how the free trial is meant to test that before the annual bill.

Alternatives

The list of community engagement vendors compares all eleven with the same facts. TownSq is the management-company channel at scale, with announcements, events, violations, payments and community websites and 3 million or more active users, quote-based. Condo Control adds surveys with e-voting and proxy voting, amenity booking and its own accounting, with three plans tiered by unit count and no published figures.

AI visibility

The AI Shortlist Index will measure community engagement apps when a prompt set for the category is approved, and the HOA Start row will appear here from that edition on.