Meet AptBook — Tour, compare, see true rent

Lifestyle

AptBook

Tour, compare, see true rent

What AptBook does

Tour six apartments in one weekend and by Monday they blur together: which one had the in-unit washer, which bedroom had zero bars of signal, which quoted rent came with a valet-trash fee stapled to it. Then the first bill lands and the $1,850 apartment costs $2,110 — admin fee, amenity fee, package locker, mandatory internet. The advertised rent was never the real number.

AptBook is the renter's tour log and decision engine. Capture a unit in about sixty seconds while the leasing agent is still talking: photos filed by room, quoted rent and deposit, and a built-in ten-point checklist for the things everyone forgets to verify — cell signal in the bedroom, water pressure, street noise, outlet placement, natural light. No thumb-typing into a spreadsheet in a hallway.

Then AptBook does the math listing sites won't. Log every mandatory fee the leasing office quotes plus any move-in special, and the true-monthly-cost engine adds recurring fees, spreads one-time charges across the lease term, and subtracts amortized concessions to give each unit one honest number. A $1,700 unit carrying $240 in required fees stops looking cheaper than an $1,850 unit with none — and six weeks free finally shows up as what it is worth per month.

Application fees get their own ledger. Every $30 to $75 application and admin charge is tracked with its building, date, and status, so you always know where you have applied and what this search has actually cost you.

When it is decision time, open the compare board: your finalists side by side on true cost, price per square foot, checklist flags, and a weighted score tuned to what you care about — cost, location, condition, amenities. Rank them, share a comparison sheet with a partner or co-signer, and sign with your eyes open.

AptBook is fully offline: no account, no listings scraped, no data leaving your phone. Your budget and your notes about a leasing office are nobody's business but yours.

• Sixty-second unit capture with photos filed by room • True-monthly-cost engine: mandatory fees plus amortized one-time charges and concessions • Ten-point tour checklist for signal, water pressure, noise, and light • Application and admin fee ledger with statuses and running total • Weighted side-by-side compare board with rankings • Comparison sheet sharing for partners and co-signers • Fully offline, no account, no subscription

A look inside

Tap any screenshot to open the full-resolution version.

What's inside

• Sixty-Second Tour Capture — Add a unit mid-tour in under a minute: nickname, source, quoted rent, deposit, lease term, beds/baths/sqft, concession, and photos filed by room — built for one-handed entry while a leasing agent talks.
• True Monthly Cost Engine — Logs every mandatory fee (admin, amenity, valet trash, package, required internet, parking, pet rent), amortizes one-time charges and move-in concessions across the lease term, and outputs one honest monthly number per unit with a delta badge against the advertised rent.
• Tour Checklist — A bundled ten-point checklist answered with two taps per item — cell signal by room, water pressure, street noise, outlets, natural light, laundry, storage, smell, parking, commute — so no unit gets signed with an unchecked dealbreaker.
• Compare Board — Finalists side by side on true cost, price per square foot, checklist flags, and a weighted score (cost, location, condition, amenities sliders), with rank badges and a shareable comparison sheet.
• Application Fee Ledger — Every application and admin fee recorded with building, date, amount, and status (submitted, screening, approved, denied, withdrawn), plus a running spend report so the cost of the search itself stays visible.

Why we built it

Renters tour 5-10 units in a compressed window and the details blur together; they sign on the advertised rent and discover mandatory fees added $100-300/month, after spending hundreds on untracked $30-75 application fees. The incumbent tool is a Google Sheets template that is miserable mid-tour and does no fee-normal…

What makes it different

TrueTours is homebuyer-framed tour rating (no fee math, no lease-term fields, no application-fee tracking); ShowingScan is room-by-room defect documentation, not a compare-and-decide tool. Zillow's Total Price display and Apartments.com's fee calculator only cover landlord-supplied, often incomplete fee data on their…

Who it's for

Hobbyists who want a tool that respects their time, their gear, and their offline life.

In one line: Tour, compare, see true rent

Try it

See the Tour, compare, see true rent for the full feature list, the info table, and support links.

Use AptBook, found a bug, or have a feature request? Comments are open below — anonymous is fine.