Changelog — What's New in Hatchkeep

Every feature below is live on every plan. The only thing that changes between plans is how many properties you manage.

July 2026 Latest

Payment links — collect from anyone, no login. Create a shareable link with itemized line items and get paid by bank transfer or card. The payer just opens the link and pays — no Hatchkeep account required. Make it single-use or reusable, and you see the exact total, fee, and what you receive before you send it. Same fees as rent: bank 1.3% (max $8), card 3.5% + 35¢.
Add a tenant without an invite. Set up a tenant directly when you already have their details — no need to wait on an invitation email.
Flexible late fees. Set a flat-dollar or percentage late fee per lease, after a grace period you choose — with an optional recurring amount per day or week (with a day limit and a maximum cap). Fees apply and escalate automatically, and pay out to you. You confirm the policy meets your local and state rules.
Split rent between payers. Divide a charge into separate portions by payer — for example a housing-assistance share plus the tenant’s share — each tracked and paid on its own.
Tenants can pay part of a charge. A tenant can pay just their share of the rent online when someone else is covering the rest.
Stronger payment security. Card payments now require your bank’s 3-D Secure verification (a quick “confirm it’s you” step) and a US-issued card, plus billing-address (AVS) and CVC checks. This shifts fraud liability to the card issuer and protects your money and your tenants’ payments. Most cards support it with no extra steps; anyone whose card doesn’t can pay by bank transfer (ACH) — which is also the lowest fee. We’ll keep revisiting this as fraud tooling matures.
New-account safeguards. Brand-new accounts have short payout holds and per-payment limits that lift automatically after their first few days — a standard marketplace protection that keeps bad actors out without getting in the way of real landlords, PMs, and vendors.
Payout safety hold. Vendor and property-owner payouts settle on a short safety delay before reaching their bank account — a window that lets us catch and reverse a fraudulent payment before the money leaves. It costs legitimate recipients a few extra days, and we think that trade is worth it to keep everyone’s funds safe. (Bank-transfer/ACH payments already work this way.)

June 2026

Founding-member offer. The first 1,000 owners and property managers to choose a paid plan get a full year free — no credit card required.
Always-on infrastructure (June 5). Automatic server failover went live. If the primary server goes dark, a standby promotes itself and traffic repoints on its own — with a live database replica seconds behind, so your data is never at risk. Details below.
Pay rent from your phone. Tenants can now pay rent directly inside the iOS app, not just on the web.
Free tools, no login. Late-fee, prorated-rent, and rent-receipt calculators plus security-deposit limits by state — all free at hatchkeep.com/tools.
Help & QA center. Role-based how-tos and real walkthrough videos built into the app.
Faster on mobile. The web app is now fully responsive down to phone screens.

May 2026

Owner portal. Property managers can give each owner a scoped login to see just their own portfolio — statements, properties, and payments.
Tenant screening. TransUnion SmartMove credit, criminal, and eviction reports, ordered straight from an application.
Rental listing generator. Generate platform-ready listing copy for your vacancies in seconds.
Accounting & financial reports. Owner statements, income/expense reporting, and a tax tracker.
Recurring inspections. Schedule routine property inspections on a repeating cadence.
Two-factor authentication & account lockout. Optional 2FA (app, email, or SMS) and brute-force protection on every account.
SMS notifications. Text alerts for the moments that matter.
iOS app. The Hatchkeep mobile app for owners, tenants, and staff.
Reliability. Automated daily backups and standby failover servers.

Launch — Spring 2026

The core platform went live. Properties and units, leases, and bulk CSV import.
Online rent collection. ACH (1.3%, capped at $8) and card payments, autopay, and late fees — funds settle straight to your own bank.
Maintenance & vendors. Tenant maintenance requests with vendor dispatch, quotes, and invoices.
Tenant portal. Pay rent, submit requests, message, and view documents and the lease.
Built-in AI assistant to help you get things done faster.
A genuinely free plan — up to 50 properties, free forever, with every feature included.

Built to stay up — and keep your data safe

Hatchkeep runs on redundant infrastructure with automatic failover. No single machine, database, or backup is a point of failure.

2×

Servers, with auto-failover

A live primary and a warm standby, linked by an encrypted private tunnel. A watchdog detects a dead primary and repoints traffic to the standby automatically — no human needed.

2×

Databases, replicated live

Your data streams continuously to a second database that stays seconds behind the primary. If we fail over, the replica is promoted with no data loss.

2×

Backup data buckets

Files, database snapshots, and configuration are stored in object storage and copied daily to a second, independent bucket — two separate copies of everything.

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Encrypted & isolated

Bank-level AES-256 encryption, account-scoped data isolation so tenants never see each other's data, and full audit logging across the platform.

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Automated daily backups

Database, files, and full system images are backed up on a daily schedule — kept both locally and off-site.

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Your money, your bank

Rent is processed by Stripe and settles straight to your own bank account. Hatchkeep never holds, escrows, or touches your funds.

Inbound email is also protected by a backup mail server that queues your mail during an outage, so nothing bounces.

What’s new in Hatchkeep