What You Can Do With Nestingbird Before Spending a Dollar
Key Takeaways:
- The free Community plan is free forever — no credit card, no sales call, no trial countdown — and covers far more than most boards expect.
- Assessment collection works from day one (1.2% card / 1% ACH, max $8 per transaction), with manual invoicing that gives small boards full control over timing.
- Track finances on the free plan by manually uploading your transactions, and budgeting plus reserve planning are included — automated bank syncing via Plaid is part of Autopilot.
- Document storage and search, Ask Birdie AI (20 free responses), board meetings, elections, polls, fines, and ticketing are all on the free plan.
- Upgrading to Autopilot ($25/mo) adds automation, unlimited usage, and lower fees — worth it once you’re collecting roughly $12,500/mo online or ready to stop doing things manually.
One of the most common questions we get from new signups is: “So what can I actually do with this?”
It’s a fair question. Most HOA software makes you sit through a demo, talk to a sales rep, and commit to a contract before you see the product. Nestingbird works differently. You create an account, and you’re in — no credit card, no sales call, no trial countdown. The free Community plan is free forever, and it covers far more than most people expect.
This post walks through what you can set up on day one, what your board members and owners will see, and where the free plan ends and the paid plan begins.
Setting Up Your Community
When you first sign in, you’ll set up your community profile — your building’s name, address, and basic details. From there, you can start adding units and members.
Units and members. Add every unit in your building along with the ownership percentage from your declaration. This is what drives assessment calculations, since most buildings don’t charge a flat rate — each owner’s share is based on their relative percentage of ownership. You can invite board members and owners directly, and each role sees a different view of the platform. Board members get full access to financials, documents, and administrative tools. Owners get a read-only view of their account — their balance, payment history, shared documents, and community announcements.
This distinction matters. One of the first things new board members ask is “what can owners see?” The answer: enough to stay informed, not enough to accidentally change anything. Owners can view shared documents, see their own payment status, and participate in polls and elections. They can’t access other owners’ financial details, edit budgets, or modify association records.
Collecting Assessments
Assessment collection is available on the free plan from day one. Owners can pay by credit card or bank transfer (ACH) directly through Nestingbird, powered by Stripe. The platform fees on the free plan are 1.2% for card payments and 1% for ACH, with a maximum of $8 per transaction. Paper checks are always free to process manually — you just log the payment when it arrives.
On the free plan, invoicing is manual. You create invoices and send reminders when you need to. This works well for small buildings where the board is already in regular contact with owners, and for one-off charges like special assessments or reimbursements.
If you want invoices to go out automatically on a recurring schedule — say, the first of every month — that’s part of the Autopilot plan. But for boards just getting started, manual invoicing gives you full control over timing and messaging while you get your sea legs.
Tracking Your Finances
On the free plan, you can track your building’s finances by manually uploading your transactions. Bring in your income and expenses, categorize them, and you’ll see everything in one place — a big step up for boards that have been working from spreadsheets or not tracking finances at all. From there you can generate reports off your historical data.
The automated version is part of Autopilot. It connects your HOA’s bank account through Plaid — a read-only connection, so Nestingbird can see transactions but can never move money or access your login credentials (it’s the same service used by Venmo, Mint, and most major financial apps). Once connected, your transaction history imports automatically. Autopilot also adds rules-based categorization — so recurring expenses like insurance, utilities, and vendor payments get tagged automatically each month — along with ongoing monthly financial report generation and accrual-based reporting.
Budgeting and Reserve Planning
The budgeting tool lets you build an annual operating budget and a reserve plan side by side. You define your expense categories, set projected amounts, and track actual spending against the budget throughout the year.
The reserve study tool is also available for free. You can map out your building’s major systems — roof, plumbing, HVAC, exterior walls, common areas — estimate their remaining useful life and replacement cost, and see what your monthly reserve contribution should be. This is the same process I described in an earlier post about building a reserve fund, and having it built into the platform means you don’t need to maintain a separate spreadsheet.
Documents and Search
Every board accumulates documents — declarations, bylaws, amendments, insurance policies, vendor contracts, inspection reports, meeting minutes. On Nestingbird, you can upload and organize all of them in one place, and every document is searchable.
The Document Mailbox feature lets you import up to 20 documents per month on the free plan (unlimited on Autopilot). And when a unit sells in Illinois, you can generate one 22.1 seller disclosure packet for free, with additional packets available as a one-time purchase or unlimited on the Autopilot plan.
Ask Birdie: Your AI Assistant
Birdie is Nestingbird’s AI assistant, and it’s one of the features that surprises people most. Upload your governing documents — bylaws, declaration, rules and regulations — and Birdie can answer questions against them in plain English.
“Who’s responsible for window replacement?” “What’s the process for approving an alteration?” “How much notice is required for a board meeting?” Instead of digging through a 40-page declaration to find the answer, you ask Birdie and get a response with source citations pointing you to the exact section.
On the free plan, you get 20 Birdie responses. After that, you can purchase additional responses in packs of 50 for $10, or upgrade to Autopilot for unlimited access. For a board that’s just getting set up and learning their governing documents, those first 20 responses go a long way.
Meetings, Elections, and Governance
Nestingbird includes tools for scheduling and documenting board meetings, generating minutes, running board elections, and conducting community polls with anonymous voting. All of this is available on the free plan.
You also get one free video meeting with AI-generated minutes — Nestingbird hosts the call, records it, transcribes it, and produces a summary. Additional video meetings are $5 each on the free plan, or unlimited on Autopilot.
For boards that have been taking minutes by hand or not taking them at all, this alone can justify the signup. Having a searchable archive of meeting minutes means decisions don’t get lost when board members turn over — which, as I’ve written about before, is one of the biggest institutional knowledge problems self-managed boards face.
Fines, Tickets, and Communication
The free plan also includes fines and violation tracking, a member request ticketing system, a board inbox, and community polls. These are the operational tools that most boards cobble together across email threads, group texts, and shared Google Docs. Having them in one system means nothing falls through the cracks, and there’s a record of every interaction.
When Does It Make Sense to Upgrade?
The Autopilot plan is $25 per month and adds three categories of value:
Automation. Recurring invoices go out on schedule without the board lifting a finger. Transaction categorization happens automatically based on rules you define. Monthly financial reports generate themselves.
Unlimited access. Birdie responses, video meetings with AI minutes, 22.1 disclosure packets, and document mailbox imports are all unlimited — no per-use charges.
Lower fees. Platform fees drop to 1% for cards and 0.8% for ACH, with a maximum of $5 per transaction. For communities collecting $12,500 or more per month in online payments, the fee savings alone can exceed the subscription cost.
The honest answer is that many small buildings will do just fine on the free plan for a long time — especially if you’re just getting organized and want to see what’s possible before committing. The upgrade makes sense when you’re ready to stop doing things manually and let the system handle the recurring work.
Getting Started
The fastest path from signup to “this is actually useful” looks like this:
Add your units and ownership percentages. Upload your transactions so your financial history is in one place. Upload your governing documents and ask Birdie a few questions to test it. Create your first budget. Invite your fellow board members.
That’s an afternoon’s worth of setup, and by the end of it you’ll have a clearer picture of your building’s finances, documents, and operations than most boards achieve in a year of spreadsheets and email chains.
No credit card. No demo. No sales call. Just sign up and start.
About the Author: Nathan Jones is the founder of Nestingbird, a platform that helps HOA boards and property managers handle finances, maintenance, and communication — free to start, with no per-unit fees and no resident limits.
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