How much do unsigned fees actually cost you per year?

A common pattern in r/airbnb_hosts threads: a host posts about a smoking case that didn't pay. Replies cluster into two camps. One camp says "yeah, that's just the cost of doing business, you eat it." The other says "you should have had the guest sign something." Both camps are right, and both camps are missing the next step: how big is "the cost of doing business" in dollar terms, per year, for a host running a normal portfolio?

Most hosts don't size it. They intuit it. The intuition is usually "annoying but not enough to do anything about," because each individual case feels small. Then you add them up across a year and the number is usually four-figure, sometimes five-figure, and almost always larger than the cost of the tool that would have produced the signed record.

This post walks the math, then runs three realistic profiles. There's a calculator that does the arithmetic for you; the point of the post is the mental model, so the number a calculator spits out feels grounded instead of arbitrary.

The math

Documented fee exposure across a year is a single line:

exposure = sum over incident categories of (stays × incident_rate × fee)

That's it. Three numbers per category, summed across categories.

• Stays per year. How many reservations the property runs annually. A weekend-only condo might do 60. A nightly studio in Nashville might do 180. A multi-property operator might do 1,200 across the portfolio.
• Incident rate. What fraction of stays trigger that category of incident. The honest range from operator chatter is 2-10% per category, with parties at the low end (1-2%) and extra-guest violations at the high end (5-10%).
• Fee. The dollar amount you'd charge if the incident were documented cleanly. This is the fee in your house-rules packet, not a wishful number.

The product of those three is the documented exposure. It is not what gets recovered. The Resolution Center weighs evidence at its discretion, and AirCover decides on the file in front of it. What this number actually is: the face value of the disputes you would be entitled to bring across a year if the file were clean enough to bring them.

Why "documented" and not "recovered"

This distinction matters and is easy to elide. The number above is what the file is worth on paper, not what gets paid. Three reasons to size it anyway:

1. The file has to exist before it can be paid. A category where you don't have a documented case has zero recovery potential. A category where you do has some non-zero recovery potential, even if not 100%. The first dollar of recovery requires the file.
2. The cost to produce the file is fixed, the exposure scales. A signed-acknowledgment tool costs the same monthly fee whether you run 60 stays or 1,200. The exposure scales linearly with stays. There's an obvious point at which the math gets one-sided.
3. Sized exposure changes pricing behavior. Hosts who know they have $X of unsigned-fee exposure per year tend to write tighter fee schedules, list more conditional fees, and pay closer attention to the disclosure half on their listing. The number is not the point; the discipline the number produces is.

So: size it as documentation, not as recovery. The recovery question depends on what platforms and adjusters do with the file, which neither this post nor any tool can predict.

Three profiles

Numbers below use category rates from the middle of the operator-chatter range. Adjust to your portfolio with the calculator.

Profile A — Solo weekender (60 stays/year)

A weekend-only second home in a regional market. Maybe two adult guests, sometimes four. Light party risk, moderate extra-guest pressure.

Category	Fee	Rate	Incidents/yr	Exposure
Extra guests	$150	6%	3.6	$540
Smoking	$500	2%	1.2	$600
Unauthorized party	$1,500	0.5%	0.3	$450
Unapproved pet	$250	3%	1.8	$450
Late checkout	$100	4%	2.4	$240
Total			9.3	$2,280

A Solo-tier subscription on the kind of tool this post is about costs around $108/yr. The documented exposure is about 20× that cost.

Profile B — Small operator (240 stays/year across 3 listings)

Three properties in an urban market, mostly couples and small families. Higher overall volume, similar per-stay risk.

Category	Fee	Rate	Incidents/yr	Exposure
Extra guests	$150	7%	16.8	$2,520
Smoking	$500	2%	4.8	$2,400
Unauthorized party	$1,500	1%	2.4	$3,600
Unapproved pet	$250	4%	9.6	$2,400
Late checkout	$100	5%	12.0	$1,200
Total			45.6	$12,120

This is the cohort where "the cost of doing business" starts not being a small number. A $19/mo tool at this volume is $228/yr against $12k of documented exposure.

Profile C — Co-host portfolio (1,200 stays/year across 12 listings)

A small property-management firm running short-term rentals for owners. Mix of unit types; higher party and pet risk because the marketing leans into "good for groups."

Category	Fee	Rate	Incidents/yr	Exposure
Extra guests	$200	8%	96	$19,200
Smoking	$500	2%	24	$12,000
Unauthorized party	$1,500	1.5%	18	$27,000
Unapproved pet	$250	4%	48	$12,000
Late checkout	$100	5%	60	$6,000
Total			246	$76,200

At this scale, the math isn't really about subscription cost anymore — it's about whether a 12-listing portfolio can afford to walk past $76k of documented exposure per year without writing it down. The honest answer is no, even if the recovery rate on a clean file is only 30-50%.

What the calculator does and doesn't

The calculator on the site runs this same arithmetic interactively. You set your stays, you tune the fees and rates to match your portfolio, and the total updates as you type. The URL encodes the form state, so you can paste your scenario into a Reddit thread and get back specific feedback, or send it to a co-host and have them tweak it from their phone.

It doesn't predict recovery. It doesn't estimate what AirCover will or won't accept. It sizes the documented exposure, which is the only number that lives on your side of the platform's discretion. That's the only number worth knowing, because it's the only one you control by changing your packet.

If the number surprises you (it usually surprises people on the high side), the next step is usually obvious: produce the file before you need it. The Additional Rules post covers the disclosure half; the how-it-works page covers the acknowledgment half. Both halves together are the file the exposure number is anchored to.