BNBCalc Alternative for Short-Term Rental Buyers

The core difference is who does the searching. In BNBCalc you type in an address, and you get a revenue prediction with seasonality, expense and mortgage modeling, and ROI and cash-flow projections. The analysis is unlimited on the paid plan. It is a tool for checking a property you have already found.

STR Yield starts one step earlier. Every morning it pulls newly listed for-sale homes in five markets (Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Hocking Hills, Blue Ridge and Ellijay, Big Bear, and Redding), drops listings whose descriptions say short-term rentals aren’t allowed, and scores the rest. You open the feed, sort by cash-on-cash or year-1 write-off, and the work of finding candidates is done. There is also an email digest of up to 15 new deals, filtered to your price cap and minimum return.

Each score is built on 25% down, a 30-year loan at a current average rate plus an investor premium, 20% management, a 3% platform fee, 5% maintenance and STR-grade insurance. You can change the down payment, loan term and cash versus mortgage right in the feed. We couldn’t find a feed or alerts of newly listed for-sale homes on BNBCalc’s site, so if you use BNBCalc you would source listings elsewhere and bring them in.

If you need to analyze an address outside the feed, STR Yield’s analyzer takes any US address: three analyses without an account, ten a day with a free one. It is not as configurable as a paid calculator, and it doesn’t export.

BNBCalc has a real tax feature. Its free STR tax calculator estimates income, tax savings, interest, tax and depreciation for an Airbnb using bonus depreciation, and the paid Calculator plan includes a tax calculator with depreciation. Its page also points to a partner for cost segregation studies. So if you’re searching for a “BNBCalc tax calculator,” it exists, and it’s free to use.

What differs is when it runs. On BNBCalc it is a separate calculator: you open it, enter the property, and read the result. On STR Yield the estimate is already on every listing in the feed. It splits the purchase into components such as appliances, furniture, flooring and site work, treats the 5- and 15-year pieces as eligible for 100% bonus depreciation, and shows a year-1 write-off next to cash flow. It also shows a more conservative floor figure, and you can refine the estimate with a short questionnaire.

Be careful with what this number is. STR Yield’s figure is an estimate, federal only, and not a cost segregation study. A study is done by an engineer and is what a CPA would rely on when filing. We haven’t compared our estimate against BNBCalc’s calculator, so we can’t say which is closer. Whether you can use the deduction against other income depends on your average guest stay and how involved you are, so talk to a CPA before you rely on either number.

At the time of writing, BNBCalc’s Calculator plan is $199 billed yearly and its Markets plan is $399 billed yearly. Both start with a free 7-day trial. For a tool that analyzes unlimited properties and produces PDF reports, that is inexpensive, and it is easy to justify if you’re about to make a six-figure purchase.

STR Yield is free. There is no paid plan, trial or card. A free account unlocks the daily email digest and raises the analyzer allowance from 3 analyses in total to 10 a day. We’re honest about the tradeoff: free is easier to offer because the product is narrower. You get five markets, no exports and no mobile app, not a global database.

Do the arithmetic for your case. If you’re comparing two Gatlinburg cabins, the feed may answer your question for nothing. If you’re evaluating a condo in Lisbon and a cabin in Colorado, $199 is a small price for the wider reach.

BNBCalc says its Markets product, launched in June 2026, ranks and explores 2,300+ short-term-rental markets in 157 countries, with 3+ years of history and rankings by revenue or ROI. Analyses for Pigeon Forge addresses appear on its homepage, so it covers our markets too. For choosing where to invest, that breadth is far beyond what we offer.

STR Yield’s feed covers five US markets, and the market statistics (revenue, occupancy, ADR and RevPAR trends, seasonality by month) exist only for those five. Outside them you can still use the analyzer on any US address, but nothing arrives unprompted.

So the honest split is by stage. Choosing a market from scratch is a BNBCalc job. Once you’ve settled on one of our five, watching new listings is ours.

Use STR Yield to watch the five markets and see which new listings pencil out, including the tax estimate. When one looks good, run the address through BNBCalc’s calculator for a second opinion and a PDF you can share. If you’re still deciding where to buy, start with BNBCalc’s market rankings, then come back to the feed once you’ve picked.