The line item nobody quotes you.
Capture is a one-time cost. Hosting is not. Here is what keeping tours online actually costs over five years, using published pricing.
The arithmetic
Matterport's published pricing includes hosting at $20 per month per active tour, or subscription tiers — Starter $9.99/mo for 5 spaces, Professional $69/mo for 25, Business $309/mo for 100.
Run that forward:
- 5 tours on Starter — $9.99/mo = $599 over five years
- 25 tours on Professional — $69/mo = $4,140 over five years
- 40 tours on Business — $309/mo = $18,540 over five years
- 100 tours on Business — $309/mo = $18,540 over five years
iGUIDE includes hosting, and the files are yours — you can download the walkthrough and host it on your own infrastructure at any point. Five-year hosting cost: $0.
The costs underneath the hosting line
Published add-ons stack on top: a schematic floor plan at +$50, an E57 point cloud export at +$150, a MatterPak bundle at +$100, video flythrough at +$150 per minute. On our side the floor plan and the DXF measured geometry are in every project.
None of this makes one platform universally right. It makes the total cost of ownership very different once you are past a handful of spaces — which is exactly where builders, property managers and facilities teams live.
Ask this before you sign anything
"If I stop paying in three years, what do I still have?" The answer tells you whether you are buying an asset or renting access to one. For marketing content with a short shelf life, renting is fine. For a warranty record, a life safety drawing or a claim file, it is not.
Are these Matterport's real numbers?
They are their published 2026 pricing. Plans change — check your own quote against them.
Does iGUIDE hosting really cost nothing?
Hosting is included in what you pay at capture. And because you receive the files, you are never dependent on that remaining true.
What if I only need one tour?
Then this comparison does not matter much, and a free tier somewhere is a perfectly good answer. This argument is about volume.
Five years, run the numbers
Subscription hosting is usually quoted per tour per month, at a figure small enough not to argue about. The problem is not the figure, it is that the figure has no end and the library only grows.
| Library size | At $10/tour/month | Over 5 years |
|---|---|---|
| 5 buildings | $600/yr | $3,000 |
| 20 buildings | $2,400/yr | $12,000 |
| 50 buildings | $6,000/yr | $30,000 |
| 100 buildings | $12,000/yr | $60,000 |
Rates vary by platform and tier; use your own number. The shape does not change — it is linear in library size and linear in time, and neither of those stops.
The three costs that are not on the invoice
- The ratchet. Every capture you commission raises the recurring bill permanently. The decision to document one more building is also a decision to increase a monthly obligation forever, which is a strange incentive to build into a documentation program.
- The cancellation cliff. The cost of stopping is not zero — it is every embedded link, every listing, every marketing PDF and every archived email pointing at a dead URL. That is what makes the subscription sticky, and everyone selling one knows it.
- The renewal you will not audit. Nobody reviews a line item that small. Portfolios routinely pay for tours of buildings they sold years ago, because cancelling individual tours is more effort than the line is worth.
What we do instead
Hosting is included in the capture price with no recurring fee, and the underlying files — DWG, DXF, PDF, images — are delivered to you regardless. There is no per-view charge, no seat license, no storage tier and nothing that lapses. Documenting a hundredth building costs exactly what documenting the first one did, because there is no tail.
This is not generosity; static files are cheap to serve, and the recurring model exists to create switching costs rather than to cover a cost. The ownership question underneath this is the one that actually matters.