Answers · Problems
The honest drawbacks of every product we sell.
Every vendor has this list. Almost none publish it, so you find out during onboarding — after the contract. Here's ours up front: what each product depends on, doesn't do, or does worse than you'd hope. If any of these is a dealbreaker for your operation, better you know now.
SherpaFolio
- Integration depth is uneven. Our deepest PMS integration is the one we run ourselves; newer PMS connections get the core data flowing but may lag on edge cases. Ask us specifically about yours.
- Folio reconciles to QuickBooks Online. If your books live elsewhere — or nowhere — onboarding starts with an accounting cleanup, and that's real work.
- It's opinionated. Folio reflects how we think owner reporting should work (cash-forward, reconciled, date-attributed). If your owners are used to a different statement format, there's an adjustment conversation.
RateAlpha
- It requires PriceLabs. RateAlpha is a layer on top of a pricing engine, not a pricing engine — no PriceLabs subscription, no RateAlpha.
- It recommends; you decide. If you want fully autonomous pricing that never asks you anything, that's not what this is — by design, but still a drawback if that's what you wanted.
RatePulse
- The Airbnb price comes from scraping, because Airbnb doesn't offer a price API. It's scraped live on each search (with only a few-minute cache for repeat lookups) — the honest drawback isn't staleness, it's dependence: if Airbnb blocks or changes something, lookups can fail until we adapt, and the widget shows the comparison without the Airbnb row rather than a made-up number.
- The VRBO figure isn't fetched from VRBO at all — it's calculated from your direct rate and your configured channel markup. That makes it instant and reliable, but it's only as accurate as your markup settings.
Sherpa Vantage
- It depends on Airbnb's host dashboard continuing to exist in scrapeable form. Airbnb changes things; when they do, Vantage can go dark until we adapt. It always has so far — but you should know the architecture.
- It's Airbnb-only. There is no equivalent conversion funnel data for VRBO or Booking.com, so Vantage can't see those channels.
Listing Studio
- It tells you exactly what to fix and drafts the content — but publishing to the OTAs is still partly on you, depending on channel and PMS. The accountability queue exists precisely because the last mile is human.
Sherpa Sites
- It's built on WordPress. That's a deliberate choice (mature booking themes, your team can find help anywhere), but if you were hoping for a headless modern stack, this isn't that.
- A direct booking site only pays off if you drive traffic to it. We give you the site and the price-comparison widget; the marketing is still your job.
Hearth
- It supports Sensi thermostats. If your properties run Nest or Ecobee, Hearth can't control them today.
Sherp
- It's in beta, and we label it that way on purpose. Answer quality is genuinely good most days and confidently mediocre some days — the feedback buttons exist because we're still tuning it.
- It's Slack-only. If your team runs on Teams or WhatsApp, Sherp has nothing to read.
Why publish this?
Because we'd rather lose a deal at the pricing page than lose your trust in month two. Every limitation above is something we'd tell you on a demo call if you asked exactly the right question — this page just deletes the "exactly the right question" requirement. If something here got better since we wrote it, the page changes; if something new breaks, it gets added.