Roost is here: a free front desk that keeps working when the Wi-Fi doesn't

The register runs out of pages

Most small properties run on three things: a paper register at the desk, a spreadsheet somebody started two years ago, and the owner's memory. It works until it doesn't. Two people get promised room 4 for the same weekend. A guest asks what they owe after nineteen nights and the answer takes ten minutes of flipping pages and adding in the margin. Someone wants a receipt and you write one by hand on a pad.

None of these is a disaster on its own. Together they eat into the day, and they happen at the worst time, usually when the desk is busy. Roost is my attempt to give that time back without asking anyone to learn a hotel system designed for a chain with two hundred rooms.

What Roost is

Roost is a guest house and small hotel manager for Android, built for owners with roughly 1 to 30 rooms. You sign in with Google, set up your rooms and rates in a few minutes, and from then on the phone is the front desk: who is arriving, who is leaving, which rooms need cleaning, what is still owed and what came in today.

It is free. There is no cap on rooms, bookings or guests, and no trial that runs out. The app shows ads, and if you would rather not see them there is an optional subscription, covered further down.

A day at the front desk

Open Roost in the morning and the Today screen is your daily front desk, with a Messages card that lists arrivals, departures, overdue payments, low stock and open cleaning tasks. A switch in the header takes you to a second view called Manage, which is the owner's side: the month at a glance, the calendar and the money.

When a guest walks in, adding the booking takes one screen. Pick or add the guest, choose one room or several, set the dates, add extras such as breakfast or an extra bed, and say whether they paid in full, part of it, or nothing yet. Roost works out nights times rate, applies a discount or tax if you use them, and shows the balance. It also refuses to book a room that is already taken for overlapping dates, which removes the most common mistake in a paper register.

Payments are kept as a ledger instead of one number you can quietly overwrite. If you take a deposit now and the rest at check-out, both entries are there with their dates. If you enter something wrong, you add a correction and give a reason. Right after a payment Roost offers a numbered receipt, and you can share it through WhatsApp, email or whatever your phone offers, or print it or save it as a PDF. Nothing is sent unless you choose to send it.

When the guest leaves, check-out marks the room as needing cleaning. Once it is done you mark it ready and it goes back on the available list. Supplies work the same way: set a low-stock level for towels or soap and Roost tells you when you are running short.

Your own price list lives under Services and prices: breakfast, Wi-Fi, laundry, airport pickup, whatever you charge for. The prices are defaults, so you can change one for a single booking, and editing the list later never touches an old bill. For charges that are not a stay at all, such as a group event, you can write a one-off invoice and share it as a PDF.

Receipts that can prove themselves

Every receipt Roost creates carries a QR code and a short code under it, something like A1B2-C3D4-E5F6. Scan the QR with any phone camera and it opens meeri.dev/verify, a public page that tells the person holding the paper whether the receipt was issued through Roost, and by which business.

The page shows the business name and city, the receipt number, the type (payment, advance or correction), the date and the amount. It never shows the guest's name, phone number, ID or room, or how they paid. If the QR won't scan, type the code instead, or upload a photo, screenshot or PDF of the receipt and the page will look for the QR inside it. That search happens on the phone, so the file itself is never uploaded.

It helps to be clear about what this does and does not prove. A valid result means that business issued that receipt through Roost. It does not prove the paper in someone's hand has not been altered, which is why the page asks the reader to compare the business, date and amount with what is printed. Think of it as a way to make quiet tampering harder, not as a guarantee against fraud.

It keeps working when the internet does not

Power cuts and patchy mobile data are normal in a lot of places, so Roost was built to cope. It saves what it recently showed you, which means screens still open without a connection, and it lets you do the jobs that cannot wait. Offline, you can add guests, record expenses and payments, create bookings, add extras and check people out. Roost keeps those changes on the phone and sends them in order when the connection comes back, and a banner tells you how many are waiting.

There are limits, and you should know them. Editing or cancelling a booking, uploading photos and issuing a receipt all need a connection. If something clashes, say the same room was booked from another phone while you were offline, Roost does not quietly pick a winner. It marks the booking as needing attention, tells you why, and lets you try again or discard it. And if you uninstall the app or clear its data before the changes have been sent, they are lost.

Free, and what that means

Roost is free because it shows ads from Google AdMob: a small banner above the tabs, an occasional card in long lists, and, at most three times a day, a full screen ad after you finish a job. Google chooses the ads from the device. Nothing you type into Roost is used for that, and guest names, IDs, bookings and payments are never shared with advertisers.

If the ads bother you there are two ways out. Watching a single ad turns them off for 24 hours. Or you can subscribe for $4.99 a month or $44.99 a year, billed by Google Play, and they disappear completely. The prices are in US dollars as listed on Google Play and may look different in your country. The app does exactly the same things either way, and if you stop paying you simply go back to the free version with all your data intact.

Your guests' details, and your own

A front desk holds sensitive things: phone numbers, ID or passport numbers, sometimes photos of documents. Roost lets you record them, but you decide what to collect, and following the law where you operate is your responsibility. Meeri stores the information on your behalf, does not sell it and does not use it to choose ads. Each business can only ever reach its own data.

Mistakes happen, so deleting is never instant. If you erase your records or delete your account, everything is held for 30 days and you can bring it back from the app. After 30 days it is gone for good. The privacy policy and the data deletion guide spell all of this out.

How Roost compares

Whether Roost is right for you depends on what you need, so I looked at what a small owner can use today. The prices below come from the companies' public pages and were checked on 4 October 2026. They change, so read this as a snapshot and check the current figures before you decide.

Sirvoy and Beds24 figures are from their public pricing pages on 4 October 2026. Little Hotelier, Cloudbeds, eZee and Hotelogix are described from their published feature lists. I have not quoted prices for them because they were not available to compare on a single page.

If most of your guests arrive through Booking.com or Airbnb and you need availability to update by itself so you never sell a room twice, you need a channel manager. Roost does not have one, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. Sirvoy's higher plan, Beds24 and the larger systems exist for exactly that, and they are the right tool in that case.

Roost fits a different kind of property: the guest house that fills through phone calls, walk-ins, repeat guests and WhatsApp messages, where the real pain is the register, the unpaid balances and the receipts, and where the connection is unreliable. Two things set it apart. It queues your work when you are offline instead of stopping, and its receipts can be checked by anyone, without an account.

It starts on Android because that is where most phones are. In September 2026 Android had 89.77 percent of the mobile operating system market in Pakistan, according to StatCounter. And since Roost costs nothing, the easiest way to find out whether a phone-based register is enough for you is to try it for a week alongside the paper one.

What Roost does not do

• It has no channel manager, so it does not sync with Booking.com, Airbnb or other sites.
• It has no booking website and takes no online payments. It records payments you take yourself and never handles card details or moves money.
• It has no separate logins for staff. One account is one owner and one property.
• It runs on Android only. There is no iPhone version, and a desktop version is planned.
• Tax is applied to the room charge, not to extras.

Set up in about ten minutes

1. Install Roost from Google Play and open it. Three short intro screens appear once.
2. Continue with your Google account.
3. Answer four short setup steps: about you, where you are (your country suggests a currency, a time zone and a tax, and you can change each), your place (name, number of rooms, rate and how rooms are numbered), and, if you like, the extras you charge for.
4. Tap Create my place. Roost adds all your rooms at once and takes you through a short tour.
5. Follow the Get started card on the home screen: make a first booking, take a first payment and share the receipt.

If you already keep guests in a spreadsheet, export it as a CSV file with names in the first column and phone numbers in the second, and import up to 500 guests at a time from the Guests screen. The file is read on your phone and is not uploaded.

What comes next

A desktop version with its own subscription is planned, and I will write about it here when there is something to show. If there is a feature your property needs, tell me through the contact page. Every message is read by me.