Live occupancy grid
See every room across every floor of every hostel in real time. Colour-coded for available, occupied, expiring and maintenance — the same visual the mobile owner app uses.
SastyBed is a free hostel management system for student hostels, PGs, dormitories, boarding houses and staff accommodation — room and bed allocation, online & walk-in bookings, rent and fee collection, mess menu publishing, staff attendance, complaints and monthly reports, all from one dashboard on web and mobile. No subscription, no card required.
A hostel management system is software that runs the daily operations of a shared-accommodation property from a single place: which resident is in which bed, who has paid and who owes, what the mess is serving this week, which rooms need maintenance, and what the property actually earned this month.
The distinction that matters is bed-level control. Hotel software tracks rooms, because a hotel sells a room to one party. A hostel sells individual beds inside a shared room, often on monthly or semester terms rather than nightly ones, with a mess, staff, deposits and recurring charges attached. Software built for hotels handles none of that cleanly — which is why this exists as its own software category rather than as a hotel feature.
In practice it replaces three things at once: the paper register at the desk, the spreadsheet where rent is tracked, and the WhatsApp group where everything else happens. Instead of three partial records that disagree with each other, you and your staff work from one that is always current — and residents get their own app for the parts that concern them.
In short: it answers three questions on demand — which beds are free right now, who owes me money, and did I make a profit last month. If your current setup cannot answer all three in under a minute, that is the gap it fills.
These are the modules that separate real hostel software from a spreadsheet with extra steps. Every one of them is included free on SastyBed — there is no premium tier holding the useful half hostage.
See every room across every floor of every hostel in real time. Colour-coded for available, occupied, expiring and maintenance — the same visual the mobile owner app uses.
Run your hostel online, walk-in only, or both. Students browse and book in-app; you accept from your phone, or enrol a walk-in in 30 seconds at the desk.
Stop chasing rent. Connect your WhatsApp Business number once and SastyBed sends rent-due nudges 5 days before, on the day, and 3 days after — automatically, every month, to every student.
Publish a different breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack for each day of the week. Tag dishes Veg or Non-veg, mark slots unavailable, and students see the menu live on their app.
Track every unit of money in and out. Log utilities, salaries, groceries and maintenance. Mark recurring expenses once and they auto-appear every month. Monthly PDF report ready for your accountant.
Every enrolment and every payment generates a branded receipt. Print it, or share on WhatsApp in one tap — students get a signed link that opens without logging in.
Run one hostel or fifty branches from a single dashboard. Create login accounts for your managers and staff — each limited to specific hostels and specific modules with role-based access, so everyone only sees what you allow.
Mark a 7-day staff attendance register in seconds — tap Present, Absent, Leave or Half-day for each cook, cleaner and guard. Month-to-date present counts roll up automatically, no biometric machine required.
Log resident complaints by category and severity, assign them to staff, and track each one to resolution. Rooms move to maintenance automatically on checkout — assign a cleaner, then mark them available again.
Track every asset — furniture, electronics, kitchen, fixtures — and whether you own it or inherited it from the previous owner, with a live valuation per hostel. Know exactly what's on your floor.
Bill more than just the bed. Add Mess, AC, Internet, Laundry or Security as per-student charges — the monthly fee and the receipt breakdown calculate themselves, and feed straight into your reports.
A free Android & iOS app for owners (run the hostel from your phone) and a separate app for students (search hostels, book, view the mess menu, pay). Plus WhatsApp announcements to every resident in one tap.
Student hostels, paying-guest properties, boarding houses, dormitories and staff accommodation all run on the same underlying operations — beds, residents, rent, mess, staff, maintenance. SastyBed serves each of them from one account, with a setup tuned to how that property type actually works.
Block and bed allocation, warden accounts, semester fees or monthly rent, gate-side attendance, complaints and occupancy reports for the office.
Student hostel management systemMonthly rent cycles, deposits, per-tenant charges for mess, AC, laundry and internet, automated reminders and instant receipts.
PG management softwareBedspace-level occupancy, mixed long- and short-stay residents, meals, house rules and maintenance — run from a phone instead of a logbook.
Boarding house managementCamps and blocks by employer, employee records, catering, maintenance requests and occupancy reporting for HR and compliance.
Staff accommodation softwareSastyBed covers beds, bookings, payments, housekeeping and reporting — but not OTA channel sync. If your beds come mainly from Hostelworld or Booking.com, you need a hostel PMS with a channel manager instead.
Honest answer: not our strengthThree tools get used for this job. Only one of them was designed for it.
Works until it doesn't. One person holds the truth, staff can't safely share it, nothing reminds anyone about anything, and a month-end profit figure takes an evening to assemble.
Excellent at nightly stays, OTA channel sync and rate management. But it thinks in rooms and nights, not beds and months — so mess, deposits, recurring charges and long-stay residents all end up shoehorned in.
Beds, not rooms. Months, not nights. Residents, not guests. Everything a shared-accommodation property actually does, including the parts hotel software ignores — and on SastyBed, at no cost to the owner.
Ask every vendor these before you commit. The answers separate software that fits how hostels actually run from software that will fight you every month.
Shared rooms are the whole point. Room-level tracking cannot tell you that bed 3 of a 6-bed room is free, which means you will keep a second record anyway.
Most hostels fill most beds from walk-ins. Software that only handles internet bookings solves half your problem and creates a second system for the other half.
Do the arithmetic at your actual bed count, not the headline price. Per-bed pricing scales against you exactly as you grow.
Cash and bank-transfer rent is money the software had no part in collecting. Any percentage taken on it is pure loss.
A manager needs to enrol residents without seeing your profit report. Without per-hostel and per-module access, you either over-share or do everything yourself.
Mess, AC, laundry, internet and security are how hostels actually bill. If those need manual maths each month, the system is not saving you time.
Residents who can see their dues, receipts and mess menu stop calling you about them. That is a large, invisible saving.
Even if you have one hostel today. Migrating later, once a year of records exist, is far more painful than choosing correctly now.
Your resident and payment history is your business asset. If you cannot export it, you are renting your own records back from the vendor.
Commercial platforms in this category price one of two ways: per bed per month, or a percentage commission on bookings. Both are structured so that the better your hostel performs, the more you pay — a per-bed subscription grows with every bed you add, and a commission grows with every booking you take.
For a 50-bed property that typically means a recurring monthly cost before you have earned anything, plus a cut of bookings on top. For an owner running on thin margins in a price-sensitive market, that is often the exact reason the register stays on paper.
Yes. SastyBed is free for owners and wardens — no subscription, no per-bed pricing, no card at signup, and no feature tier held back. Unlimited beds, unlimited properties, unlimited staff accounts.
SastyBed is built and funded by GOFTECH as a long-term commitment to the shared-accommodation market. If you want the full feature-by-feature breakdown, see the best hostel management software overview on our homepage.
Two free apps, on Android and iOS. The owner app runs the property from your phone — accept bookings, enrol walk-ins, mark payments, publish the mess menu, check occupancy. The resident app lets students find and book a bed, see their dues and receipts, read the mess menu and raise complaints, so they stop calling you for it.
There is no migration project. Add the property, define floors and rooms, set rent and any extra charges, and you are live. Existing residents go in as walk-in enrolments while you keep operating — nothing has to stop.
A hostel management system is software that runs the day-to-day operations of a hostel from one place — who is staying in which bed, who has paid, who owes rent, what the mess is serving, which rooms need maintenance and what the property earned this month. It replaces the paper register, the spreadsheet and the WhatsApp group with a single record that you and your staff can both see, on web and on mobile.
Because the three things that quietly cost hostel owners money — empty beds, late rent and untracked expenses — are all invisible without one. It shows live occupancy so you can see vacancies the day they appear, sends rent reminders automatically so you stop chasing residents, and totals income against expenses so you know your real monthly profit instead of guessing.
Yes — SastyBed. It is genuinely free for owners and wardens: no subscription, no per-bed pricing and no card at signup. Walk-in enrolments and any rent you collect in cash or by bank transfer are always 100% yours; SastyBed never touches that money. A 5% platform fee applies only to optional online booking payments, and only if you switch them on.
At minimum: bed-level (not just room-level) allocation, a live occupancy view, both online and walk-in enrolment, rent and fee collection with automatic receipts, expense tracking, and role-based staff accounts. Beyond that, look for automated rent reminders, mess menu publishing, complaint and maintenance tracking, inventory, multi-branch support and a mobile app for both you and your residents.
Paid platforms typically charge per bed per month, or a percentage commission on bookings — which for a 50-bed hostel commonly works out to a meaningful monthly cost before you have earned anything. SastyBed removes that entirely: it is free for owners, so your only cost is the optional 5% on online booking payments if you choose to accept them.
It should, and SastyBed does. Room-level tracking is not enough for shared accommodation — you need to know which specific bed in a 6-bed room is free, which is reserved and which is under maintenance. SastyBed shows every block, room and bed on a colour-coded live grid, so a warden can allocate an incoming resident in seconds without clashes or double-bookings.
Yes. A paying-guest property, a boarding house, a dormitory and a student hostel all share the same underlying operations — beds, residents, rent, mess, staff and maintenance. SastyBed handles all of them from one account, and has dedicated setups for each so the language and the billing match how you actually run the property.
Yes. One SastyBed account runs unlimited hostels, blocks and branches from a single dashboard, with a combined view across all of them or a drill-down into any one. Staff accounts are scoped per hostel and per module, so each manager sees only their own property and only the parts of it you allow.
Yes — and this matters more than most software admits. Many hostels fill most of their beds from walk-ins, not the internet. SastyBed lets you run a property as online-only, walk-in-only, or both. A walk-in enrolment takes about 30 seconds at the desk and produces the same record, receipt and reminder schedule as an online booking.
About 10 minutes for a single property. You add the hostel, define floors and rooms, set the rent and any extra charges, and you are live. Existing residents can be entered as walk-in enrolments as you go, so there is no data-migration project and no need to stop operating while you switch.
Set up your first hostel, PG or boarding house in 10 minutes. Free for owners — forever. No subscription, no card required.