Eighteen nights sold at R60 below what they cost you is R1 080 handed back, and the calendar looks full while it happens. That is how most small hosts lose money: not on the empty nights, which at least cost nothing to service, but on the cheap ones they were pleased to get. Ask a host "how to price my Airbnb" and the answer is always about the ceiling: what the market will bear, what the neighbour charges, what December is worth. Almost nobody talks about the floor, which is odd, because the floor is the one number in pricing that belongs entirely to you. It is the rate below which the guest is no longer paying you; you are paying them to sleep in your flat. Every host has one. Few have written it down, and fewer have it right.
How to price my Airbnb: start with what a stay costs
The floor goes uncalculated because the costs arrive in different shapes and at different times, so they never appear in one place. The levy is monthly. The cleaner is per turnover. The electricity is a mix of the geyser running for a guest and the fridge running for nobody. The platform fee comes off before you ever see the money. The linen wears out over years. Each of those has to be turned into a cost per night before it means anything, and each one turns differently.
Fixed monthly costs exist whether the flat is booked or not: the levy, municipal rates, insurance, fibre, the base charge on electricity and water, any software subscriptions, and the share of the bond you are honest enough to count.
Variable costs per stay happen every time a guest checks out: the clean, the laundry, the consumables (coffee, soap, loo paper, the dishwasher tablet), and the small wear that accumulates until something needs replacing. How heavily they weigh on a night depends on how long your guests stay, which is not the same in June as in December.
The fee is the one hosts forget, because it never arrives as a bill. Airbnb has moved hosts outside the EU onto a single host-only service fee, reported as taking effect on 15 September 2026: most hosts pay 15.5 percent of the booking subtotal, with host-charged fees such as the clean included in the base. LekkeSlaap takes 15 percent excluding VAT, and Booking.com sits in the same neighbourhood before you buy any visibility. Whichever channel you list on, what survives the commission has to cover the costs, and that is a different sum on each channel.
A night sold below the floor is a loss, and a loss dressed as a booking is worse than an empty night: the empty night costs you no clean, no laundry, no consumables and no risk of the guest who, at a bargain rate, treats a Sea Point flat like a hostel. A night sold exactly at the floor pays every bill it caused and contributes nothing to you. That is the line, and it has to be drawn in rand, rounded up, never down because a rounder number looks better in the settings box.
Where the arithmetic goes wrong
Hosts who do attempt the sum tend to get it wrong in one of two places. The first is spreading the fixed costs over the wrong number of nights, which makes the flat look unviable at exactly the prices that would fill it, or viable at prices that quietly lose money. The levy is the cost of owning the flat, not of hosting in it, and where it belongs in the floor is not where instinct puts it.
The second is the fee, handled the way it looks like it should be handled. Take a flat whose nights cost R440 to service, and a host who adds 15.5 percent on top: they list at R508, the commission takes R79, and they keep R429. R11 short every night, forever, and the arithmetic feels correct while it happens. Small, cumulative, and exactly the sort of sum a nightly rate calculator should do for you, never your head at midnight.
The floor is not the price
A floor is a boundary, not a target. Most nights your rate should sit well clear of it, and on the best nights of the year very far clear of it. The floor earns its keep on the handful of nights when a tool, or a panicked host at 23:00, is tempted to keep cutting: the wet June Wednesday that has been open for a fortnight, the gap night between two bookings, the last-minute cancellation. On those nights the floor is the sentence that ends the argument. Above it, a sold night beats a dark one. Below it, the dark night wins.
The same boundary guards against the standard failure of automated pricing, which is the instinct to keep dropping until something books. Cutting works, right up to the point where the booking costs more to service than it pays, and an algorithm rewarded for a full calendar cannot feel where that line sits in your building. So the question to ask of any short term rental pricing tool is not how clever its algorithm is. It is whether the tool will honour your floor on the night you are most tempted to abandon it. Most tools offer a minimum-price box. Most hosts fill it with a number that felt about right.
The floor also moves. The levy rises at the body corporate's year-end, the cleaner puts their rate up, City of Cape Town electricity and water tariffs step every 1 July with the municipal financial year, and the platform fee has just changed for hosts here. A floor set in 2024 is a fiction in 2026. If the draft Short-Term Letting By-law does what it proposes and moves some listings onto commercial property rates from July 2027, the fixed costs jump, and the floor with them. We worked through what that would cost in The 182-night calendar.
What members get
That boundary is the part of RateVeld we refuse to touch. You set a minimum per property, and nothing in the system may recommend a rand under it. Above the line it does the work that does not fit into an evening: it reads comparable listings and nearby hotel rates in your suburb every day, and prices every night for the next six months, in rand. Where that evidence points below your floor, the recommendation stops at your floor. Every night shows its reasoning: when a rate sits just above the floor you can see which comparable listings put it there, and when it sits far above it you can see that the schools are out or the Cycle Tour has taken your suburb. It is calibrated on South African data, not a US pattern with rand signs pasted over it, and the Cape Town events calendar behind it is curated by hand and moves the curve on the day an event is announced. An event week can more than double an ordinary week, the subject of event-driven pricing, and what that adds depends on your suburb, your season and how you price today. The floor is what stops that upside being handed back in June.
The floor is one number. The 365 above it move every week, and they move by suburb rather than by market average. That is the part we do for you. Plans start at R333 a month, in rand: pick one before the next wet June Wednesday tests your nerve. And if your floor feels too low already, read Furnish for the second guest: the replacement cycle is the cost most hosts leave out entirely.