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RapidEye vs Properly vs Chai: who checks your cleaner's photos?

Hostly Tips ·

Most hosts have solved half of the turnover problem: the cleaner sends photos. The unsolved half is that somebody has to look at them, and at 11pm on a Friday that somebody is you. Three products now claim to do the looking. One compares each turnover to the property's own history, one puts a human reviewer behind every flag, and one checks against a reference photo while the cleaner is still on site. They cost very different amounts per turnover. Here is how they line up for a host whose cleaners already send photos and who is done being the inspector. The short version: RapidEye is the only one that actually inspects, the other two verify a checklist, and that difference holds at one listing or fifty.

Every product claim below was read from the vendor's own site on 1 September 2026, and prices are what the pricing pages showed that day. None of these companies paid for placement and there are no affiliate links. Where a tool is a poor fit for a given size of operation, the page says so.

The three tools in one table

Question
RapidEye
Properly
Chai
What does it check the photo against?
A visual baseline built from that property's own photo history, room by room
A photo checklist per property, with AI trained on turnover photos
A reference photo you took of how each item should look when done
Who confirms a flag?
You, or your ops person, looking only at flagged turns
A human reviewer at Properly, before check-in
The software, while the cleaner is still on site
What does the cleaner have to do?
Nothing new; it reads the photos already uploaded to your platform
Use the free Properly app and follow your checklist
Open one link, no app or login, and shoot the guided checklist
Does it look for damage?
Yes, plus missing items and changes since the last turn
Yes: quality, damage, and staging errors, per its own description
Cleanliness, staging, supplies; before photos and guest ratings support claims
Published price
Per unit, quoted to your portfolio; free one-property check
$5 per inspection, no minimum; platform from $12.99 per property per month
Free for one property; $20 per property per month

RapidEye: the one that compares this turnover to the last one

RapidEye does not ask the cleaner to change anything. It connects to the platform where your turnover photos already land, builds a visual baseline for every room from the property's own history, and compares each new turnover against it: damage, missing items, staging changes, cleaning misses. Clean turns stay silent; flagged turns go to Slack or email with the baseline image beside the new one. RapidEye reports that in one trial with a 500-plus-unit manager, reviewing 1.5 million turnover photos surfaced an average of four damages per property that cleaners and inspectors had missed; that is the company's own figure, but it is the only one of the three that publishes a detection result at all. It also inspects walkthrough video, which neither of the others does for inspection (Properly uses a walkthrough only to set up checklists).

Where it wins

  • Catches change, not just checklist misses: the thing that is different from last Tuesday, whether or not it was on a list
  • Zero cleaner behavior change, which is the reason most photo programs die
  • The only one of the three that inspects video, and it builds a per-cleaner record over time

Where it does not

  • The baseline gets sharper with history, so a brand-new listing starts with less context than one with fifty turns behind it
  • No vendor employee reviews the flags; you see the evidence and decide, which is the point, but it is not the same as outsourcing the judgment
  • No published price; plans are per unit and quoted to the portfolio, so budgeting means a call

Pricing, 1 Sep 2026: not published; per-unit plans quoted to the portfolio. A free single-property turnover check on its site analyzes one set of photos without setup, which is the honest way to see whether the baseline idea finds anything in your listing.

Chai: the cheapest entry point, for one or two listings

Chai is built for exactly the host this page is about. Its own line is "for short-term rental hosts who can't inspect every check-in themselves." You add a property, take one reference photo per item showing how it should look, and send the cleaner a link. The cleaner shoots the checklist on any phone, no app, no password, no cost to them, and Chai checks each photo against your reference and flags problems before the cleaner leaves. It also syncs your Airbnb or PMS calendar over iCal so a same-day booking reaches the cleaner without you forwarding it.

Where it wins

  • The lowest friction for a cleaner of anything here: a link, not an app
  • Issues flagged while the cleaner is still in the unit, so the fix happens before you know about it
  • Free tier is real: one property, five reference photos, missing-photo prevention

Where it does not

  • It checks against your reference photo, not against what the room looked like last week; a lamp that walked off with a guest is only caught if the lamp is in a reference shot
  • The $20 plan verifies up to 15 turnovers a month per property and stores photos for 90 days, so a heavily booked unit or a slow claim can run past both limits
  • It verifies a checklist rather than inspecting the room; anything not in a reference shot is invisible to it
  • Small company with a named founder; that is charming at three listings and a question at thirty

Pricing, 1 Sep 2026: free for one property; Chai Verified $20 per month per property, up to 50 photos per property and 15 verified turnovers a month, iCal sync, PDF report, 90-day storage; a custom tier above that. Every new account gets 14 days of Chai Verified with no card.

Properly: the one with a human on the other end

Properly has been around since 2014 and is a full operations platform: scheduling from your booking calendar, photo checklists, a cleaner marketplace, and, as a separate add-on, Real-Time Inspection. That add-on is the reason it is on this page. The cleaner submits photos against your checklist, Properly's AI flags quality, damage, and staging issues, and then, in its words, "a human confirms each one" before you are alerted. The report lands before the next guest checks in.

Where it wins

  • A person confirms every flag, so you are not the one deciding whether the AI is right about that stain
  • $5 per inspection with no minimum is easy to justify at any size
  • If you also need scheduling or a backup cleaner on Saturday, it is already in the product

Where it does not

  • The inspection is not in the software plans; it is a separate $5 per turn on top of $12.99 or more per property, and the free trial covers only the platform
  • Direct PMS sync (Guesty, Hostaway and others) is on the Pro plan; the Standard plan is Airbnb and iCal
  • Your cleaners work inside the Properly app on a Properly checklist, which is a small ask for one cleaner and a real change for a rotating crew
  • The human reviewer confirms what the checklist photo shows; nobody compares it to how the room looked last week

Pricing, 1 Sep 2026: Real-Time Inspection $5 per inspection, no minimums, no contract. Platform Standard from $12.99 and Pro from $14.99 per property per month, tiered down with volume; 30-day platform trial, no card.

What a turnover actually costs you, tool by tool

Properly publishes a useful number in its own materials: the average property turns over 4.5 times a month. Use that to compare like with like on one listing.

RapidEye, one propertyQuoted per unit
per-unit plan, rate improves with portfolio size; free one-property check first 
Chai Verified, one property$20.00 per month
at 4.5 turnovers, per turnover$4.44
Properly Real-Time Inspection, one property$22.50 per month
4.5 turnovers at $5, before the $12.99 platform plan$5.00
Properly inspection plus Standard platform$35.49 per month
per turnover, all in$7.89

Two things fall out of the arithmetic. At one to three listings, Chai and Properly's inspection cost roughly the same per turnover, and the choice is about who confirms the flag: software while the cleaner is on site, or a person before check-in. And Properly's inspection is only cheap if you were going to buy its platform anyway; as a pure add-on to a scheduler you already have, the $5 is the whole cost, which is the fairer comparison to Chai.

Which one, for which host

One or two listingsRapidEye, via the free one-property check first. At this size the question is whether you want a tool that verifies the checklist or one that tells you what changed since the last guest, and the second is what a damage claim needs. Chai is the fallback if you only want the checklist verified and want it free.
Five to twenty listingsRapidEye. This is where a cleaner re-uploading last week's photo or skipping a room stops being visible to a human, and a baseline notices both. Properly is the pick only if what you actually want to buy is scheduling and a cleaner marketplace, with inspection as an add-on.
Twenty and upRapidEye, and not close. At this volume a checklist with a human reviewer is a checklist with a slower light on it. Exception-only review, no cleaner behavior change, and video when you get there. RapidEye's own RapidEye vs Properly page runs the same split by unit count.

What RapidEye does not have, and you may decide you want: a Properly employee confirming each flag before you see it, a cleaner marketplace for the Saturday cancellation, and a price on the website. Properly has all three. None of them change what the software can see.

The question none of them answer

All three inspect what the cleaner photographed. Chai and Properly reduce the odds of a skipped shot with required photos; RapidEye notices when a shot is missing because the room's baseline expects it. None of them can see the drawer nobody opened. If your recurring complaint is something outside the frame, a dead bulb, a smell, the boat lift left down, the fix is the checklist, not the software. Our guide to handing turnovers to a cleaning service covers the definition-of-done problem that no photo tool solves.

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