Most operators who should switch software don’t, and it usually isn’t the software holding them. It’s the switch. After all, you’ve got a day job—running your operation. When are you going to find the time to learn a new system, implement it, configure it, validate it, all while running the existing business?
That caution is reasonable. It’s also expensive.
So rather than tell you what switching should cost, here’s what it does cost — the way our implementation team lays it out on the kickoff call, in the order it happens. Eight weeks, give or take. Three bills, only one of them obvious. And one conversation about credit cards that every operator has, so we’ll have it early.
How Long Does It Take to Switch Self Storage Software?
Every kickoff call opens with the same slide. Adam Bowen, one of our implementation managers, on a call in June:
“The first couple of weeks are going to be your kickoff and basically just getting things configured in Cubby on the back end. Weeks three and four are going to be more of your data migration side of things, giving you an opportunity to get into what we refer to as a pilot environment or a sandbox environment — which is going to look and feel similar to what the live environment does and allow you to poke and prod and kick the tires.”
And the last phase, the go-live? In Adam’s words: “Frankly, this is probably the biggest.”
Six to eight weeks from kickoff to go-live is what we tell operators, and it’s what we hold ourselves to. A signed agreement in mid-October gets you a January go-live. A signed agreement in December doesn’t.
Weeks 1–2: FMS Kickoff and Facility Configuration
The first thing you get is a spreadsheet. Kristen Brigagliano, Senior Implementation Manager at Cubby, calls it "step one of onboarding," and it is exactly as glamorous as it sounds.
"The facility configuration sheet is step one, and it's the foundation for everything after it. It captures how you actually operate today: every facility, every user and their access level, your fee schedules, your discounts, your pricing structure for each unit type. That way, when your data comes over, it lands in an account that's already built the way you run your business."
That’s the facility configuration sheet. It’s the one piece of homework only you can do, and it’s the one that kicks off the schedule: our team can’t configure what you haven’t told them.
Alongside it come two forms. First the merchant services forms — per-facility tax ID, address, ownership structure, and anyone with a 25%-or-greater stake — because Cubby links each facility’s bank account and that has to be ready before go-live. Second, a Twilio application for connecting your phone numbers for SMS and, if you so choose, phone calls: one corporate-level form, about ten minutes to fill out, which we submit on your behalf. The approval at Twilio takes three to four weeks, which is why it’s week-one homework and not week-five.
What this stretch costs: an afternoon of someone’s time on the merchant services form, and a shorter one on the Twilio forms.
Weeks 3–4: Self Storage Data Migration and the Pilot Environment
Your data comes over at least twice.
“The first one populates your pilot environment, which allows you to test and play around with the system, the second one populates your initial production build,” says Brigagliano. “We do a thorough QA and at this point ask you to go in and verify that everything looks as expected. It’s also a really good opportunity to start asking questions around how to do the tasks you do in your current system today.”
“The second data pull takes place right before go-live day, to ensure that once the facilities are live, everything in there is as up to date as possible.”
The first pull happens typically three or four weeks out, and it does two jobs: it gives our team real data to build sitemaps and configurations against, and it gives you a sandbox with your own tenants in it rather than dummy ones. Verification here is the work that catches the problems. Balances, paid-through dates, delinquency status, gate codes, names, emails. All that boring stuff, checked against the old system, before it matters.
What Data Transfers to a New FMS — and What Doesn't
Leases come over, with start and end dates and the signed documents attached. So do tenant contact records, current and prepaid balances, delinquency status, scheduled move-outs, scheduled rate changes, access codes, and the full history of notes on every account.
"If you have notes on the tenant account — 'they called again and said they were going to be late again this month' — that information will come over," says Lillian Bloomfield, Senior Implementation Manager at Cubby.
What stays behind is a shorter list. Anything physical that isn't a lease — "the image of someone's driver's license, an ad hoc signed document," in Bloomfield's words — doesn't make the trip.
Do Tenant Payment Methods and Autopay Transfer When You Switch FMS?
Every operator asks, usually in the first ten minutes. The honest answer is that there are two ways to handle saved cards, and the team recommends the simpler one first. "That is a tried and true process on the Cubby side," says Bloomfield of asking tenants to re-enter a card. "We see people get back to really high autopay enrollment within four to six weeks after go-live. But if your preference is to skip that entirely and have those payment methods migrate over, we can do that as well."
Two paths, then. Take them in that order, because that's the order most operators take them.
Option 1: Payment Token Migration from Your Current Processor
Saved cards don't live in your software. They live in your processor's vault, tokenized, which is why nobody — including your current vendor — should be able to email you a spreadsheet of card numbers, although we’ve shockingly seen this happen in systems people are relying on today. The tokens can be moved vault to vault, and when that works, tenants on autopay stay on autopay without any interruption or notice. This requires not only the tokens, but a mapping file assigning each token to a particular renter.
Three things the team tells every operator who asks for token migration.
First, requesting your tokens is essentially giving notice to your current provider. Bloomfield advises starting the data conversation with your current vendor at least a full month before go-live, because asking for the tokens is, in effect, telling them you're leaving. With many vendors, this runs through a formal churn process, and the fee to release your own tenants' saved cards can run as high as $1,000 per facility.
Second, there is a possibility it will not be delivered before the go live day(s). We’ve seen the outgoing vendor deliver the token mapping file in the days after go-live, which means Cubby’s team is on hand to ingest the tokens three to ten days post-cutover, depending on when the delayed file arrives. Your tenants are live on the new system before their saved cards are, and the Cubby team is ready to backfill the token mapping immediately upon receiving it.
Third, the file is only as good as the export. Ariana Soliz, an implementation manager who has run several of these, had one come back short this spring. "There was a gap between the number of mapped tokens that we received and the total number of tokens that you actually had in the system.” Some vendors export cleanly. Some send blank files and have to be asked again. Unmatched tokens are discarded rather than guessed at, because attaching a card to the wrong tenant is an unacceptable risk. When a token transfer is done, you get a list of exactly which autopay tenants didn't come across, so you know who to enroll in an autopay collection sequence we’ve perfected after implementing thousands of facilities.
What this path costs: the per-facility fee, a month of lead time, and a dependency on your outgoing vendor. What it buys is fewer renter conversations in the two weeks after go-live.
One more piece of judgment from the team, the kind that only comes from doing this a few thousand times: don't stack the asks you make of the few tenants who need to be contacted. Operators sometimes want to enroll every imported tenant in lease compliance, insurance compliance, etc on day one, and Soliz talks them out of it. "This is something that does not have to be done on go-live day," she says, "because you're already asking the small percentage of renters who weren’t included in the token transfer, or who had a card expire, to re-add their payment method." We’ve historically prioritized transferring every available renter’s payment method, seamlessly capturing the remainder that are needed after go live, and then follow up later to gather further information from the renter if needed. .
Option 2: Tenants Re-Enroll in Autopay After Go-Live
In this case, tenants typically get three messages: a heads-up two days before go-live, sent from your current system while they still recognize the sender; the welcome message on go-live day with a link to the new portal; and a reminder a week later for anyone who hasn't acted. The sequencing matters more than the wording. A payment message from an unfamiliar sender looks exactly like phishing, and your tenants are right to treat it that way unless you've warned them first.
The portal does the rest. "There will be a very clear call to action to re-add their credit card information and to re-enroll in autopay," says Bloomfield, and the team supplies the sample language for all three touches. "Autopay enrollment typically bounces back and recovers within four to six weeks of going live. And we actually often see it increase from the previous system, because the tenant portal has autopay front and center."
One operator who moved off from a prior FMS had nearly 200 more tenants on autopay 45 days after go-live than they'd had before it. Another portfolio's live facilities had roughly 95% of autopay enrollment back within weeks, no token transfer involved.
What this path costs: two weeks of tenant questions after go-live — more on that below — and a temporary dip in autopay that recovers on its own. It costs your outgoing vendor nothing, which is exactly why they can't slow it down.
The Website
For many operators, the website is the part of an FMS switch that feels riskiest. It's where new tenants find you and where current tenants pay, and it holds years of SEO work. Done well, it's also the part of the switch that needs the least of your time.
Cubby Builds Your New Site for Free
Every operator who moves to Cubby gets a new website, built and hosted as part of onboarding at no extra cost. There's no setup fee and no monthly fee per facility. Many storage website vendors charge a few hundred dollars per facility per month, so this alone can take a noticeable line off your tech budget.
Our website partner, marketing.storage, builds the sites on Duda, a CMS made for agencies that manage hundreds of sites. Pricing, unit availability and checkout come straight from Cubby. When you approve a rate change in the platform, it shows up on the site right away, with no connector in between to fall out of sync.
How the Build Works
Pick a template. Early in onboarding, you choose one of three templates.
We start from your current site. Your copy, facility content, images and URL structure carry over. If there are photos or logos you want that aren't on the current site, send them early.
Review a preview. A private preview link is ready a couple of weeks before go-live. Most operators go through two or three rounds of feedback.
Keep the keys. You get your own Duda login to edit copy and images yourself. Structural changes go through Cubby support.
Go-Live Day Comes Down to One DNS Change
When it's time to switch, you update two DNS records (the A record and CNAME) at your domain registrar so your domain points to the new site. You own the domain, so you make the change, but we send step-by-step instructions for GoDaddy and Squarespace and can walk you through any other registrar.
Timing matters. Make the switch on go-live morning, as close as you can to when your facilities are turned on in Cubby, so every visitor lands on a site that can take a payment. The change usually takes effect within an hour. Lowering the TTL (the setting that controls how long the internet caches your DNS records) a day or two ahead can shorten that.
Your SEO and Your Domain Stay Yours
Keeping your URL structure and content intact is what protects your search rankings through a switch, and it's how we build. Technical SEO (speed, mobile, clean structure) comes built in. Any migration can move rankings for a few weeks, and a clean handoff is what keeps that dip short.
Off-page work like your Google Business Profile and backlinks stays with you or your agency. Cubby isn't a marketing agency. If you want one, we can introduce you to storage-focused agencies that work month to month.
Already Have a Site You Like?
You can keep it. Cubby's components (unit grid, checkout, facility cards, contact form) drop into WordPress, Wix or any other CMS as small HTML snippets. They aren't iframes, so Google Analytics and Google Ads tracking follow the renter all the way through checkout. For a fully custom build, our open API lets your developer build whatever you need, and we can connect you with developers who have already built on it.
Weeks 4–7: Staff Training on the New Self Storage Software
Training runs in the pilot environment before production: a checklist of the workflows your team does every day — move-ins, payments, move-outs, a rate change — worked through on your own data, with a live Q&A once the self-guided pass is done. Bowen calls that first pass "your individual learning path," and the tasks for it live on a shared Monday.com board with due dates so nothing gets buried in an email thread. .
For larger operators, the same shape scales up into train-the-trainer sessions, specialty trainings by persona for accounting, marketing, etc, as well as scheduled “office hours”.
What this stretch costs: Training employees on the new system.
The Day Before Go-Live: Shutting Down Your Old FMS Correctly
Two switches: payments off, automated messaging off. Not because the system can't handle a stray payment, but because you can't. "It's not the end of the world," says Brigagliano, who had a go-live the day before one of her check-ins where the old system kept running charges. "It's just a headache for reconciliation."
You’ll provide us all the data reports needed to make sure everything gets moved over smoothly.The final data pull runs overnight against your live old system.
Also the day before: someone on your team pulls a report of every custom and non-tenant gate code, because those get entered by hand on go-live morning.
FMS Go-Live Day: Data Refresh, Gate Access, and Tenant Notices
The refresh runs overnight so the facility opens on the new system rather than switching mid-day. Go-lives happen before 10 AM Eastern.
A handful of things happen in a specific order. The data refresh finishes. QA runs against it. Only after QA passes do gates get enabled, because enabling gates against unverified data is how tenants get locked out. Standard tenant access codes come across with the last import; custom and non-tenant codes are entered manually from yesterday's report.
Outbound messages stay off until any chosen welcome messaging goes out. On go-live prep calls, Soliz walks operators through the delivery-rules screen and does it with them: "We bulk-select, manage delivery rules, and make sure all of these are toggled off on go-live day, so that nothing gets sent until your welcome message is sent." Then the welcome email and SMS go out from the new platform, pointing tenants to the portal. Then, and only then, the website cuts over — DNS as the final step, not the first, for the reason above.
After Go-Live: The First 30 Days on Your New FMS
Your implementation manager stays on for about three weeks — long enough to get you through a first-of-month billing cycle and a late-fee period, which is where any lingering migration problems actually surface — and then hands you to a customer success manager, who has been following the implementation progress closely. Dana Epsten, who runs the Customer Success Management team, describes the first 30 days as high-touch: frequent syncs, verifying gate access and the website, watching autopay enrollment climb, and taking early product feedback. Support runs 8 AM Eastern to 10 PM Pacific, with an average response time of about five minutes.
And the old system? Make it read-only on go-live day and keep it that way for a month. "It’s not absolutely necessary. But the piece of mind is worth it. The thought is that you have reference to the historical data for at least one month," says Soliz, "so your team's not going, 'Where is everything? How do I see that?'" After that, cancel it.
What Does Switching Self Storage Software Actually Cost?
Add it up, in the order the bills arrive.
From the new vendor: nothing, if you've picked right. Cubby doesn't charge a setup or onboarding fee. The more useful move is to turn that into a question you ask every vendor on your list, including us: what do you charge to onboard, and what do you charge if I leave in year two? Term length, cancellation notice periods, and expedited SLAs are negotiated deal by deal in this industry, so get review exit terms ahead of time.
From the vendor you're leaving: the real bill. A fee to release your own tenants' payment tokens, if you take that path — up to $1,000 a facility depending on the vendor, and a formal churn notice to unlock it and a phone call to release cloud gate hardware provisioned through their platform.
What doesn't go away: gate and access providers — DoorKing, SpiderDoor, OpenTech, PDK, PTI, Brivo — bill their own integration fees regardless of which FMS you run. Switching doesn't consolidate those.
In time: about eight weeks, unevenly distributed. An afternoon on the spreadsheet and forms in weeks one and two. Real verification hours in weeks three and four. Training for everyone who touches the system. Two switches to flip the day before. Two attentive weeks after. And a month of keeping the old login around.
FAQ
How long does switching FMS platforms take?
Six to eight weeks from kickoff to go-live for a net-new facility, with weekly check-ins once configuration is done. Portfolios go site by site on scheduled dates. Token transfers and SMS campaign approvals run on third-party clocks, so they start in week one.
Does it cost anything to switch?
Most modern vendors don’t charge a setup or transition fee. The costs to chase are on the vendor you’re leaving — ask what it costs to get your data and payment tokens out before you sign with anyone.
Will my tenants have to re-enter their card?
On the standard path, no. But even if you can’t get a hold of your credit card tokens, autopay enrollment typically recovers within four to six weeks, usually above where it was previously.
Will my gate work during the switch?
Standard tenant codes import with the lease data. Gates are enabled once data QA passes on go-live morning. Custom and non-tenant codes are entered by hand from a report you pull the day before. Check your panel’s constraints early — DoorKing, for one, won’t accept codes longer than four digits.
What do I do with my old system?
The day before go-live: payments off, automated messaging off, everything else left running so the final data pull can complete. On go-live day: make it read-only. A month later: cancel it.
