Free Rentometer Alternative: Comp Your Own Rent in 10 Minutes

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Rentometer used to be the quick free answer to “what should this unit rent for.” As of July 2026 it no longer has a free tier at all: plans run $16 to $49 a month (less on annual billing) with a 3-day trial, and the thing you are paying for is a database of asking rents scraped from listings. Useful, but not magic — and for a house hacker who needs a rent estimate a handful of times a year, not $200 a year useful.

Here is the honest secret about rent comps: the data Rentometer aggregates is mostly visible to you for free on Zillow, Facebook Marketplace, and Craigslist. What the subscription buys is convenience. The worksheet below replaces the convenience with ten minutes of method.

Prefer a full page: open the Rent Comp Worksheet here.

The 10-minute comp method

Open Zillow’s rental search (or Facebook Marketplace, which often has the small landlords Zillow misses) and filter to your unit’s exact bedroom count within about a mile. Collect five listings from the last 60 days that are within roughly 20% of your square footage. For each one, write down the asking rent and square feet, then apply one honest adjustment: if the comp is clearly nicer than your unit (renovated kitchen, in-unit laundry, garage), subtract $25–$75 per feature; if it is clearly worse, add the same. The worksheet medians the adjusted rents, computes rent per square foot, sizes that to your unit, and blends the two into an estimate with a range.

Two sanity checks make the number defensible. First, compare it against HUD’s Fair Market Rent for your metro — free at huduser.gov, and the House Hack Calculator has one-click FMR chips for a dozen affordable metros. Second, remember every listing is an asking price. If comps in your search have been sitting for 30+ days, the market is telling you they are priced high; lean toward the bottom of your range.

Rentometer vs. doing it yourself

Fair is fair: if you analyze dozens of units a month, batch tools and an API are worth paying for, and Rentometer’s Pro tier does things a worksheet cannot. There are also free lookups worth knowing — Zillow’s Rent Zestimate and RentCast’s free tier (five nearby comps per lookup) both give you a quick second opinion. If you’re pulling comps regularly, RentCast’s paid tier lifts the five-comp cap and adds full market data—worth it only if you’re analyzing enough deals to need it. But a one-unit decision deserves your own eyes on five real listings, not a black-box average.

Why the rent number matters more than any other input

Every deal metric downstream — cash flow, cap rate, cash-on-cash, your effective housing cost — moves almost dollar-for-dollar with rent. A $100/mo rent miss on a duplex is $1,200 a year, which at typical small-multifamily cap rates is a five-figure error in what the building is worth to you. It is the input most worth ten careful minutes. Once you have it, run the full numbers in the House Hack Calculator, or see how to run the numbers on a rental for the complete walkthrough. If the plan involves buying under market and renovating, the free BRRRR calculator picks up from there.