Consumer complaint received 2025-10-22 00:00:00
Product: Money transfer, virtual currency, or money service — Domestic (US) money transfer
Issue: Unexpected or other fees — 
Company: AppFolio, Inc.
State: KY

Complaint narrative:
In XXXX, I moved to a new apartment complex located in XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX. The apartment is managed by a property management company named XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX. I signed the lease and paid the first and last month 's rent and deposit before I moved in. The lease only mentioned payments in one section, and all it says is that tenants are required to make rent payments via the online tenant portal website. Appfolio is the third party provider of this payment website. 
It is only upon making your first payment through this website that you discover, AppFolio apparently thinks it is legal to charge you a {$9.00} transaction fee. This fee was never listed in the lease and I never consented to paying it. Furthermore, this particular landlord does not allow payments to be made any other way. This means all tenants are trapped in the sense that they can only make the payments through the website, and therefore they are charged a {$10.00} fee, no matter what type of card they're using to make the payment. 
After doing some research and trying to determine how this is actually legal, it seems like it's not. Appfolio has a merchant agreement with XXXX and XXXX, and their merchant agreements, as well as federal law, explicitly prohibits surcharges on debit cards. In my opinion, the only way they should be allowed to charge this fee is if it is clearly disclosed up front in the lease so that tenants can make a choice, rather than find out after they've moved in and paid a ton of money and are kind of stuck. Either that or they should be required to accept other forms of payments that won't incur such a ridiculously high fee. 
This is a low income apartment complex, in a semi rural area where poverty is higher than the US average. Personally, I am so cost burdened and so low income, I'm forced to pay my rent weekly because I literally do not have {$800.00} to make a payment for the month in full. Adding up all of the fees that are charged, I'm paying {$40.00} to {$60.00} per month just in these arbitrary and capricious fees. That is a couple of days worth of groceries, or a couple of weeks of gas that I literally can not afford to just give away to some greedy corporation. 
It is so, so demoralizing that this is the current state of things. Be aware if you rent from a landlord that uses AppFolio, you will be charged fees that you haven't consented to and you won't find out how much they are til you make that first rent payment. In my state, somehow they get away with charging {$9.00} a payment instead of {$2.00}, and I'd really love to know how the XXXX they get off charging different amounts to different people in different situations, and why they think it's legal to XXXX these fees against low income tenants without obtaining prior consent and clearly disclosing this up front. I intend to join the class action lawsuit regarding these illegal fees because this is just ridiculous. I want my money back

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation