Direct Booking Break-Even: When Does Your Own Website Pay for Itself?
Every OTA booking costs you the host-side service fee. A direct booking avoids it — but the website and channel manager that make direct bookings possible have a monthly cost. The break-even question is simple:
Bookings you need per month = tool cost per month ÷ host fee you keep per booking
Example: your average booking subtotal is $810 and your host fee is 3% ($24.30). If your tool stack costs about $50/month, you break even at roughly 3 direct bookings a month — everything beyond that is fee money you used to give away. Hosts on the 15% host-only fee break even far sooner.
Run your own figures in the payout calculator — the "keep per month" line is your fee pool. Tools built for small hosts (a direct-booking website plus channel manager, e.g. Lodgify) are discussed on our About page, together with how we test them.