A price per room is not a bill. The bill is that price, times the rooms you are billed for, plus any other line the agreement adds. Pricing models differ, so the only fair way to compare two quotes is to make each one produce the same number: your total for one month, in writing.
Here are eight questions that get you that number. Ask them of anyone you are considering, including us — we answer each one for ZimmerStack in the same place, because a checklist we would not answer ourselves is not worth sending.
The bill itself
1. What is the smallest monthly bill for my room count?
Ask for the smallest amount you could be charged, as a number, for your exact rooms. If there is a minimum, that minimum is the real price for a small property.
Our answer: your bill is your room count times your plan price. The minimum is 5 rooms, so on Essential at ₹199 per room per month the smallest possible bill is ₹995 a month. Tax is added on top, as the law requires.
2. What counts as a room?
A per-room price depends on what the vendor counts as a room. Ask whether dormitory beds count one by one, and whether rooms you cannot sell count at all. Two quotes at the same price per room can still produce different bills.
Our answer: a room is a sellable unit on your booking board — a room, cottage, villa, dorm-room (not per bed) or apartment. Blocked staff quarters and the owner's rooms are not counted.
The lines that get added
3. Which connections are included, and what does an extra one cost?
Hotels connect things: a channel manager, a kitchen display, a thermal printer, an accounting export. List what you need, then ask for each one whether it sits inside the quoted price or is billed separately.
Our answer: nothing extra. If it is in your plan — channel manager with 170+ OTAs, kitchen display, printers, Tally export — it is connected at the same printed price.
4. Are staff users and devices unlimited?
A front desk, a manager, a housekeeper with a phone, an accountant: a hotel needs more logins than it has computers. Where logins are counted, the usual workaround is a shared password, and a shared password ends the audit trail. Ask what is included and what each extra login costs.
Our answer: unlimited staff users and unlimited devices, on every plan, so every action stays attached to the person who took it.
5. Does the booking engine take a commission?
Your own website is the channel that exists to avoid commission, so the fee on it matters as much as the monthly price. Ask for three numbers: the percentage on a direct booking, any per-booking fee, and anything called a handling charge.
Our answer: zero, on every plan. The only fee on a direct booking is your own payment provider's standard charge, and that goes to them, not to us. We record the payment; we do not process it.
One-time fees, and year two
6. What are the one-time fees, and who does the migration?
One-time fees, where they exist, land in the first invoice rather than in the monthly price, so they are easy to overlook while comparing per-room numbers. Ask for setup, onboarding, training and data migration as separate figures, and ask whose job the migration is.
Our answer: no setup fee, and migration is free. We move room types, rate plans, seasons, future bookings, guest history, company accounts and OTA connections off your current system, and re-point your OTA logins safely. A typical cutover takes about 48 hours, with a parallel-run window while both systems are live. On Scale, a dedicated onboarding manager runs it.
7. What is inside my plan, and what is a separate subscription?
Ask for two lists: what the quoted price includes, and what is priced separately. Name the expensive items out loud — revenue management, analytics, extra apps — and have each one placed on one list or the other.
Our answer: the pricing engine is inside Growth at ₹299 per room per month, with the channel manager. It reads your own hotel's data: rooms already sold for the date, your recent booking pace, days to arrival, day of the week, length of stay, the special dates you type in, and an anchor from your own realised rates around that time of year. You set a floor and a ceiling for each room type. It runs through the day and again whenever a booking lands, and the new rate leaves ZimmerStack on the next push — within the hour, or straight away when a booking moves — with no extranet to open and nothing to re-type. Deeper analytics, including 30/60/90-day forecasts and RevPAR by channel, sit in Scale at ₹499.
8. What does my rate become at renewal?
The quote covers the first term. Ask what the per-room rate becomes at renewal, whether it can rise while you remain a customer, and what happened to existing customers the last time the list price changed. Ask for that in the agreement, not on the call.
Our answer: your per-room rate is locked for as long as you stay subscribed. If our list price rises later, yours does not. Monthly plans cancel in any month, and annual plans exist because two free months is a fair trade for commitment.
The checklist to send any vendor
- What is the smallest monthly bill for my exact room count?
- What counts as a billable room, and what does not?
- Which connections are included, and what does each extra one cost?
- Are staff users and devices unlimited?
- What is the commission and the per-booking fee on bookings from my own website?
- What are the one-time fees for setup, training and migration, and who does the work?
- What is inside my plan, and what is a separate subscription?
- What does my rate become at renewal?
- Is support the same on every plan, 24/7, in writing?
- Can I export all of my data, in full, on any day?
Where we stand
Our numbers are printed on the pricing page: ₹199, ₹299 and ₹499 per room per month, with the contents of each plan beside them. Smallest bill ₹995 a month, no setup fee, no per-user fee, no charge for connections, 0% booking-engine commission, free migration, and a rate locked while you stay subscribed. Support is the same on every plan: a person answers on WhatsApp or phone, day or night, and they have worked hotel desks. Your data exports in full on any day, backups run daily and encrypted, and each property's data stays isolated from every other.
Send the checklist to your whole shortlist, and send it to us. If you would like our answers defended line by line, with your own room types on screen, book a demo.