Every couple of months I get some version of the same email. An agent forwards me a link to a 3D tour I shot for them a while back, and the link is dead. Sometimes it's a property they're re-listing. Sometimes a past client asked for it. Once it was a builder who wanted to show a finished unit to a lender.

The tour isn't gone. It's just switched off.

This is the part of Matterport that nobody explains up front, and after 500-plus property shoots around Milwaukee I've had the conversation enough times to know it catches good, experienced agents completely off guard.

Matterport isn't a file. It's a rental.

When you get photos back from a shoot, you own them. They sit on your drive. Nobody can turn them off.

A Matterport tour doesn't work that way. It lives on Matterport's servers, and it stays visible as long as somebody keeps paying a subscription. Matterport's own support documentation puts it plainly — when a subscription ends, "active links to your Spaces will result in an error." Your data isn't deleted. You can restart a plan and get it back. But in the meantime, every link you've ever emailed, embedded, or dropped into the MLS just breaks.

The billing is built around what Matterport calls active spaces — how many tours you have switched on at one time, not how many you've ever created. As of today their plans run:

  • Free — $0, one active space
  • Starter — $14/month ($12 if billed annually), 5 to 20 active spaces
  • Professional — $69/month ($58 annually), 20 to 150 active spaces
  • Business — $355/month ($296 annually), 100 to 300 spaces

Prices scale with the space count, so those are starting numbers.

For an agent moving properties steadily, that math is fine. You archive the sold ones, you activate the new ones, you stay under your cap. It's a cost of doing business, and Matterport earns it — there is still nothing else that gives a buyer that walk-the-house feeling.

Where it goes sideways is the long tail. A commercial listing that sits for fourteen months. A custom build you want in your portfolio forever. A property manager who wants tours live on twelve units indefinitely. A luxury listing you want to show a seller three years from now when you're pitching their neighbor. Those don't archive gracefully, and every one of them is occupying a paid slot.

Worth noting too: Matterport lists "Share & embed anywhere" as a Starter feature, not a Free one. So the free tier is genuinely useful for kicking the tires and not much else.

What CubiCasa Tour actually is

I want to be careful here, because a lot of the comparison articles floating around are written by companies selling something and they'll tell you CubiCasa replaces Matterport. It doesn't. They're different animals, and pretending otherwise makes you look uninformed in front of a client.

A CubiCasa Tour is an interactive floor plan with the listing photography built into it. You click a room on the plan, you see the photos of that room, and you understand instantly where you're standing and how it connects to everything else. No 360° camera, no dollhouse view, no walking through a doorway in first person.

What it does exceptionally well is solve the problem floor plans and photos have always had separately: photos show you what a room looks like, floor plans show you how the house works, and buyers have to assemble the two in their head. The tour does the assembly for them.

There's also a version that costs nothing extra at all. Every CubiCasa scan now includes a Hosted Floor Plan — a mobile-friendly, zoomable, multi-floor version of your floor plan on its own URL. CubiCasa's documentation is direct about it: the hosted interface is completely free and included with every scan. You can paste that link into any MLS field that accepts a virtual tour URL. Add the listing photos on top of it and it becomes the full Tour.

Rather than describe it, here's one

This is a real tour from a home I shot at 3410 Overlook Drive in Richmond, Illinois — about fifty minutes from Milwaukee and well inside the radius I cover. Three levels, 38 photos, one link.

Click around it for a minute before you read the rest of this. A few things worth noticing:

  • The blue markers are camera positions. Each one sits on the plan exactly where the photo was taken, pointed the direction the camera was facing. Click one and the photo loads next to it. That's the entire trick, and it's the reason this works — a buyer never has to guess which room they're looking at or how they got there from the front door.
  • Room dimensions show up with the photo. Kitchen, approximately 13'2" x 12'5". Buyers ask that question constantly, and the answer is sitting right there instead of buried in a PDF nobody opens.
  • The floor selector is one click. Three levels, and the photo markers change with it. On a multi-level house this is the part photos alone genuinely cannot do — no gallery in the world tells you that the primary bedroom is off the foyer and not up the stairs.
  • There's no branding on it. No logo, no company name in the URL, nothing an MLS compliance officer is going to flag.
  • And on a phone, it stacks into a scrollable view instead of falling apart, which matters given that most of the people looking at your listing are doing it in a parking lot on their lunch break.

The hosting difference

Here's the actual comparison, stripped down.

Matterport: somebody is paying a monthly subscription for that tour to exist. Stop paying, the link errors out.

CubiCasa: there is no monthly platform fee for hosting. None.

There's one honest asterisk, and I'd rather you hear it from me than discover it yourself. A CubiCasa Tour link runs for six months, and then you renew it from the web portal — open the tour's share settings, set it back to Online, save. That's it. CubiCasa's help documentation says you can do that as many times as you'd like. It's free, it just isn't automatic.

Six months of clicking a button versus an open-ended subscription is not a close call for a long-tail listing. But it's a button somebody has to click, and if the property is sitting quietly on a builder's website, "somebody" needs to be a real person with a calendar reminder.

The other thing that's changed recently: CubiCasa built integrations with Redfin and Realtor.com that automatically surface hosted floor plans and Tours on matching on-market listings. No uploading, no extra fees. Your floor plan just shows up on the portal where buyers already are.

How I'd actually decide

Shoot Matterport when:

  • It's a high-end or unusual property where spatial flow is the selling point
  • The buyer pool is out of state or relocating and can't walk it
  • It's a commercial space where a tenant or lender needs real measurements
  • The tour has a defined marketing window and someone's actively managing the subscription

Use CubiCasa Tour when:

  • It's a bread-and-butter residential listing where you want floor plan plus photos working together
  • Nobody wants a recurring bill attached to the listing
  • You need something live on the MLS and the portals fast
  • The tour needs to stay up long after the property sells

Do both when the property justifies the full treatment — and honestly, on the properties that justify Matterport, the floor plan is usually getting ordered anyway. Adding the hosted tour on top costs you nothing in platform fees.

The wrong move is defaulting to one for everything. I've watched agents put Matterport on a $240,000 ranch in West Allis because it's what they always do, and I've watched agents skip 3D entirely on a $900,000 lakefront because they got burned by a subscription once.

If you're in Southeast Wisconsin

I shoot both. Matterport, CubiCasa floor plans and Tours, drone, video, stills — one photographer, one invoice, usually back to you inside 24 hours and often the same day.

More useful than any of that: I'll tell you which one your specific listing needs, including when the answer is "you don't need 3D on this one." I'd rather sell you the right thing twice than the wrong thing once.

If you've got a property coming up and you're not sure which way to go, send me the address and what you're trying to accomplish. Happy to give you a straight answer.

Matterport and CubiCasa pricing and hosting terms current as of August 2026.