Five logins and a spreadsheet
A channel manager, a PMS, a booking engine, a cleaning app, and then owner statements assembled by hand every month. Each tool bills per listing. None of them talk to each other well.
Milestone M0 in progress. Nothing an operator can use yet.
The PMS for people who manage properties for other people.
Channel manager, reservations, turnover operations, unified inbox, owner statements and a direct booking engine in one fair-code platform. Run it on your servers or ours, on top of the Channex.io connectivity API.
- Licence
- Sustainable Use
- Deploy
- Docker Compose
- Connectivity
- 40+ OTAs via Channex
- specification documents, public from day one
- 17
- personas with scoped permissions, owner to cleaner
- 15
- OTAs reachable through Channex.io
- 40+
- bookings silently lost, by design and by test
- 0
The problem
Managing 40 apartments should not need five subscriptions.
Short-term rental managers and independent hotels pay repeatedly for software whose hardest part none of the vendors built themselves.
Paying twice for the same hard part
The expensive half of every vendor is certified connectivity to Booking.com, Airbnb, Vrbo and Expedia. Channex already does that half and sells it as a plain API. Everyone else resells it wrapped in a mediocre calendar.
The report your clients actually see
Owners judge you on the monthly statement. It is the one document no channel manager produces, so it is built in Excel, late, with errors, by the person who should be selling.
How it works
Channex is the connectivity layer. We are the product layer.
Every closed vendor rebuilds the OTA plumbing and then runs out of budget for the product. We skip the plumbing.
- 01
Connect Channex
Bring your Channex.io account, or let the hosted service provision one. Channex holds the certified two-way OTA adapters, ARI delivery and booking normalisation.
- 02
Onboard the portfolio
Import listings from Airbnb, clone from templates, bulk-map channels. Onboarding listing 2 through 40 is the cost that dominates everything, so it is under three minutes each.
- 03
Run the operation
One calendar for every listing, rates and restrictions without spreadsheets, turnovers assigned, guests answered, statements generated. Local state is authoritative; the provider is a mirror we keep verifying.
Booking.comAirbnbVrboExpediaAgoda40+ more
│ certified two-way connections
Channex.io
OTA adapters · ARI · bookings · messaging · reviews
│ REST + webhooks, behind a provider port
Channex PMS
calendar · rates · roles · turnovers · inbox · owners · booking engine · dashboards
Capabilities
One platform for the whole operation.
Everything the closed vendors do, done properly, plus the owner module none of them have.
Portfolio-first channel manager
Connect OTAs, map inventory, push rates and availability, watch channel health. Every screen defaults to all your listings, and it holds up at 200 of them.
Reservations with a memory
Every OTA booking with its full revision history, reconciled continuously. Duplicate webhooks, out-of-order revisions and provider outages are tested, not hoped against.
Turnover operations
Cleaning coordination, same-day changeovers, cleaner routing, access codes, self check-in and maintenance. Hotel-kind properties get a real front desk instead.
Unified guest inbox
Booking.com, Airbnb and Expedia conversations in one place, with templates, automation, pre-arrival flows and response-time SLAs.
Owner management
Agreements, auto-generated monthly statements, expenses, payouts and an owner portal. The module no channel manager ships, and the biggest reason to switch.
Direct booking engine
Commission-free, multi-property search, server-rendered for speed and search. Treated as a first-class channel, not an afterthought.
Dashboards per role
Occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, pace and channel mix, answered without exporting to Excel. Owners see their units, managers see the portfolio.
Fifteen real roles
From org owner to revenue manager to cleaner to property owner. Scoped grants, so a cleaner is never one click from deleting a rate plan. Everything audited.
Self-host or cloud
Your servers or ours. Same code, same features.
The hosted service exists so operators without an ops team can still use the product. It is not a way to hold features back.
Self-hosted
Free, foreverOne Docker Compose file: web, worker, Postgres, Redis, object storage. Your data on your servers, exportable in full at any time.
- The complete product, no community edition
- Under sixty minutes to the first OTA booking on screen
- Bring your own Channex account
- Sustainable Use License
$ docker compose upHosted
Same codebaseFor operators who do not want to run servers. Managed upgrades, backups and Channex connectivity, billed per property. Coming with milestone M8.
- Feature parity with self-hosted, guaranteed
- Feature flags are never paywalls
- Leave any time with a full export
- Enterprise licence for resellers and white-label
$ planned for v1.0Fair-code
Source-available, self-hostable, sustainable.
We use the same licence model as n8n: the Sustainable Use License for the platform, an enterprise licence for a handful of clearly marked files, Apache-2.0 for everything you might embed or extend.
You can
- Read every line of the source, always
- Self-host for your own portfolio, of any size
- Modify it and keep your changes private
- Offer consulting, setup and support around it
- Build plugins and integrations on the Apache-2.0 SDK
- Embed the Apache-2.0 booking widget on any site
You need an enterprise licence to
- Host it and charge other operators for access
- White-label it inside a product you sell
- Use files marked .ee. in production without an enterprise licence
This is fair-code, not OSI open source, and we say so plainly. It is what lets a small team fund the work while every self-hoster keeps the full product for free. Read the Sustainable Use License and the Enterprise License.
Roadmap
Nine milestones to v1.0. Each one usable on its own.
Design partners ride the early releases on real portfolios while later milestones are built. The full plan, including what each milestone deliberately leaves out, is public.
- M0
Foundations
nextMonorepo, CI, Compose, domain value objects, generated permission matrix.
- M1
Connectivity core
Channex adapter, ARI engine, fake provider, property-based tests. Highest risk, done first.
- M2
Inventory and calendar
Portfolio calendar, rates, restrictions, channel connection. First release design partners can run.
- M3
Reservations and operations
Booking ingestion and revisions, turnovers, cleaner app, access codes, front desk.
- M4
Messaging
Unified inbox, templates, automation, SLAs.
- M5
Owners
Agreements, statements, expenses, payouts, owner portal.
- M6
Dashboards
Occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, pace, channel mix, per role.
- M7
Direct booking engine
Multi-property search, payments, guest portal.
- M8
Hosted service and v1.0
Billing, quotas, operator console, hardening, certification.
FAQ
Questions people ask first.
Is there something I can run today?
Not as an operator. The specification is complete enough to build against and milestone M0 is under way: the monorepo, the framework-free domain layer with its first value objects and tests, Docker Compose and CI are in place. Contributors can run it today; a property cannot. The best thing you can do now is read the spec and tell us where a real property would break it.
Do I need a Channex.io account?
Yes for self-hosting: Channex provides the certified OTA connectivity and you bring your own account. For the hosted service we are working out with Channex whether tenants can share one master account. Channex sits behind a provider interface, so other connectivity providers can be added later.
Is this open source?
It is fair-code and source-available under the Sustainable Use License, the same model as n8n. You can read, self-host and modify it for your own business for free. You cannot resell it as a hosted service or white-label it without an enterprise licence. The SDK, plugin interfaces and booking widget are Apache-2.0.
Will the self-hosted version be crippled?
No, and this is a guarantee written into the specification. Self-hosted and hosted run from the same repository. Feature flags are never paywalls. The only enterprise-gated code is explicitly marked .ee. and always visible.
Hotels too, or only short-term rentals?
Both. The product is optimised for short-term rental managers operating 5 to 300 units on behalf of owners, because that is where the tooling gap is worst. Hotels and guesthouses are fully supported through a hotel property kind with room types, many identical units and a real front desk.
What is the tech stack?
TypeScript throughout. A full-stack Next.js app for the console, booking engine, portals and API, a plain Node worker on BullMQ for the sync engine, PostgreSQL and Redis. All domain logic lives in a framework-free core package shared by both.
Why the name Channex PMS?
It is a working title, and it borrows a trademark, so it will change before the public launch. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Channex.io.
Still undecided items live in the open questions. Opinions from people who run properties are the reviews we lack.
Be the portfolio that shapes v1.0.
We are looking for one short-term rental manager with 20 to 60 units and one small hotel to run the early releases on a real portfolio. A real portfolio on the M2 release matters more than anything else on the roadmap.