Why renters pay nothing

What free actually means for renters #

Free means the price is zero, everywhere, with nothing hidden behind it. You don't pay to create an account, browse homes, submit an application, verify your identity, sign a lease, set up rent, or ask for a repair. There is no premium renter tier that unlocks the parts that matter.

The rent you pay is the rent your landlord set. Haven does not add a service charge, a processing fee, or a percentage on top of it. When your rent is €900, you pay €900, and €900 arrives with your landlord.

Your deposit is your deposit. It's held in a separate escrow account, not spent, not lent, and not treated as Haven's money. At move-out it's returned according to the lease and the condition of the home, with a record of every step.

The fees you'll never see with Haven #

Renting through a traditional agency usually means paying to be considered and paying to move in. Haven removes those charges entirely.

• No application fee. Applying costs nothing, whether you're approved or not.
• No agency or finder's fee. No one month's rent handed to a middleman for making an introduction.
• No rent markup or convenience fee. SEPA autopay moves your exact rent, nothing is added for the privilege of paying on time.
• No charge for maintenance requests. Reporting a problem in the app is free; who pays for the actual repair is set by your lease, as it always was.

If a cost isn't set by your landlord or your lease, Haven doesn't invent one to sit between you and your home.

How Haven sustains itself instead #

Haven is a business, and it's honest to say how it makes money, because it isn't from you. Haven charges the owner, not the renter.

When rent is collected through Haven, the owner pays a small percentage of that rent, on the order of one percent, so an owner keeps roughly ninety-nine cents of every euro. There's also a modest one-time fee when Haven helps place a tenant. That's the whole model: the side of the market that used to pay an agency now pays far less, and the renter is taken out of the fee chain completely.

This alignment is deliberate. Haven earns when a tenancy is set up well and rent flows smoothly month after month. Charging renters to apply would reward volume over fit. Charging owners a fraction of rent collected rewards durable, working tenancies, which is what a good home is.

What you get for zero: the full renter app #

Free doesn't mean stripped down. The renter app is the whole tenancy, start to finish, on iOS and web.

• Discovery and application. Find homes, apply in one place, and reuse your profile instead of refilling forms for every listing.
• Identity verification and e-signature. Verify once, then review and sign your lease digitally, with your own copy kept and timestamped.
• Rent and deposit. Set up SEPA autopay so rent leaves on schedule, and see your deposit held in escrow rather than disappearing into a landlord's account.
• Maintenance, invoices, and renewal. Report an issue with photos, track it to done, keep every receipt in one place, and handle renewal or move-out without paper.

Every payment is recorded with double-entry accounting, so your history is a clean, verifiable ledger you can trust, not a balance someone can quietly edit.

No catch, stated plainly #

There's no trial that expires, no free tier that nags you to upgrade, and no data-for-access trade. Haven doesn't sell your information, and it doesn't monetize you in place of a fee.

The reason renters pay nothing is simple: the owner is the customer for the paid parts, and the fee is small enough that everyone comes out ahead of the old agency model. You get the full app; your landlord gets lower costs; Haven earns a thin, honest slice of rent that's collected.

Haven is in private beta, starting in Malta and expanding across Europe. Where it operates, the deal for renters is the same everywhere: all of it, for free.