Trying to track four rentals without paying for another subscription

Your sheet is doing real work, and the instinct to not pay for something you do not actually need yet is sound.

A few people in similar spots use a free tier of a lighter tool to bridge the gap between a spreadsheet and full property management software. Two worth looking at:

Notion or Airtable (free tiers). Both let you build a relational database, meaning each unit is one record, and you can attach maintenance requests, lease dates, and notes to that record rather than keeping separate tabs. The big difference from a sheet: you can filter by due date or status across all four units in one view instead of switching tabs. The free tiers handle four to ten units comfortably.

Stessa (free). Built specifically for rental owners. It tracks rent, expenses, and documents, and it generates a basic profit and loss report at tax time. It does not handle maintenance ticketing as cleanly, but for finances it removes a lot of manual work.

Neither of those replaces Buildium at ten-plus units, but they are designed to hold their value past the first few months because the data you put in is genuinely useful, not just a setup exercise. That addresses the abandonment pattern you are watching for.

One thing worth confirming before you pick anything: whether you want to track maintenance conversations inside the same tool as your financials, or keep those separate. That single decision changes which option fits.

What does your current sheet do poorly that is actually costing you time right now? That would help narrow this down to something concrete.

Month 14 is when that notes column usually eats the whole thing.

Buildium's break-even is closer to six units once you factor in the time you're bleeding on reconciliation.

The sheet works until you have a maintenance call at 11pm and you are squinting at a tab trying to remember whether the Canton Tuscarawas unit has the HVAC under warranty or not, and the answer is buried in a notes cell you wrote in February. That is the actual breaking point, not the unit count.

I ran a similar setup through eight units across two markets before I stopped arguing with myself about it. What I did between four and eight was not software, it was structure. One master tab with a row per unit, a column for every date that matters, lease expiration, last inspection, next HVAC service, warranty expiry on every major appliance. Separate Google Sheet entirely for maintenance, linked by unit ID, with a status column that I actually updated. Cost nothing and it bought me two years before I needed anything else. Buildium at six units is still about $58 a month on their Essentials tier, which against four units collecting maybe $4,800 a month gross is not ruinous, but the ROI argument does not really close until you are losing time or money that costs more than the subscription. At four units you are probably not losing either yet, so the honest move is to fix the sheet you have, not buy a solution to a problem you haven't hit.