For six years, my guest room hosted exactly one guest: a treadmill wearing a bathrobe as a coat rack. Also, at various points, four boxes from a move I’d rather not date myself by naming, a keyboard I was “getting back into,” and a gift blender still in its box because it felt rude to admit I already owned one.
I’d thought about actually renting the room out more times than I could count. I got as far as starting a listing on Airbnb once, then looked at what the platform keeps… a percentage of every single future booking, indefinitely… and closed the tab. It felt less like listing a room and more like taking on a permanent, invisible roommate who does none of the vacuuming and collects rent forever.
So the treadmill kept its bathrobe.
A few weeks ago I found Plan B Rentals, which works differently. Instead of an ongoing cut of every booking, there’s a flat fee to actually activate your listing (currently $99) and after that, the booking is yours.
No invisible roommate taking a percentage indefinitely. They also hand you free templates for the parts I’d been dreading, like the rental agreement and security deposit terms, and the renters coming through tend to already be specific about what they want and verified before you even talk to them, which took a lot of the “stranger in my house” anxiety off the table.
I did the math on what a commission platform would take over a year of bookings versus the one-time fee here, and it wasn’t even close.
The treadmill has since been relocated. The room has had actual paying guests. None of them, as far as I know, have worn the bathrobe.
This is where I ended up: Plan B Rentals. If you’ve got a room quietly running its own private museum of things you meant to deal with, or you know someone whose garage has secretly become a bed and breakfast for boxes, this is worth passing along.