askng.it review: free is a price, not a strategy

“Free” in hotel software makes me lean forward and squint. Not because free is inherently bad. Because free always has a business model behind it, and I want to know what it is before I recommend it to anyone. Is it free because they’re burning investor money to grab market share? Free because the paid tier is where the actual product lives? Free because you’re the product? Every version of “free” has a cost. It’s just not on the invoice.

askng.it is a Dutch startup offering WhatsApp-based guest communication with a free tier. That’s the pitch. The company was previously called Lacoly, and that history matters. Lacoly was one of the very first companies to offer WhatsApp-based communication specifically for hotels, back in 2019 or 2020, before most of the tools in this category even existed. That’s a genuine head start. Every competitor we’ve reviewed added WhatsApp later. Lacoly started there. The rebrand to askng.it reset whatever recognition they’d built, which is a shame, because “we were doing WhatsApp for hotels before anyone else” is a story worth telling. Let’s see what’s actually in the box.

What the free tier includes

Less than I originally thought. After further testing, I need to correct my earlier impression. The free plan is a WhatsApp website widget. That’s it. No guest messaging flows. No PMS integration. No automation. No templates. You get a chat button on your website that opens a WhatsApp conversation, and then you’re on your own. It’s not a messaging platform with a free tier; it’s a chat button with a brand name attached.

For a bed and breakfast with eight rooms where the owner handles everything personally, this might feel like progress. It replaces the step where a guest hunts for your WhatsApp number with a button click. But there’s no automation behind it, no structure, no intelligence. You’re still typing every reply yourself.

The numbers: cost versus return

The paid tier starts at €4.50/room/month. For a 20-room hotel, that’s €90/month, or €1,080/year. That’s more than double what I initially reported, and it changes the arithmetic. At €2/room/month this was suspiciously cheap. At €4.50/room/month it’s entering territory where you’d expect actual features for your money.

You get higher message limits, some additional automation options, and basic reporting. The reporting shows message volumes and response times. It does not show revenue attribution, conversion rates, or anything that would help you answer the question I always ask: is this tool making me more money than it costs?

I should also flag something odd. I found two different pricing structures in their website code: a per-room model and a flat-rate model. When a company can’t settle on how to charge you, it usually means they’re still figuring out their market. That’s fine for a startup, less fine for a hotel committing to a platform.

Compare this with chatlyn at €3/room/month (€60/month for 20 rooms) or Bookboost at a similar price point. At €4.50/room/month, askng.it is now the most expensive option per room in its weight class, and it delivers the least. For less money you can get a proper unified inbox, meaningful AI, campaign segmentation, CRM functionality, and analytics that connect to revenue. The saving no longer exists.

I ran a rough calculation. A well-configured messaging tool with upselling capabilities (pre-arrival offers, late checkout, room upgrades) can generate €3–8 per occupied room-night in ancillary revenue. On a 20-room hotel at 65% occupancy, that’s somewhere between €14,000 and €38,000 per year. askng.it has no upselling features. Zero. The money you spend on the subscription buys you no revenue upside.

The credibility question

This is where I need to be blunt, because I struggled to verify much of anything.

The askng.it website’s metadata claims a founding date of 2019, while the Independent Hotel Show profile references a spring 2022 launch. The 2019 date likely reflects when Lacoly started, with 2022 being when the askng.it rebrand launched. That makes more sense than a discrepancy, but the company doesn’t explain this anywhere, which doesn’t help their credibility.

I asked around. Nobody I know has used it. Nobody I spoke to at HITEC or the Independent Hotel Show had heard of it in any detail. I searched online and couldn’t find a single independent review from a hotelier. For a company that’s been operating in some form for several years, the complete absence of anyone willing to vouch for it publicly is unusual. It could mean they haven’t built much of a customer base. It could mean the customers they do have aren’t talking.

Real clients do exist. The Dylan Amsterdam, a well-regarded five-star property, has a published case study on the Lacoly website. The company (under its Lacoly name) won Partnership of the Year at the Independent Hotel Show 2023. Those are legitimate credentials. But a handful of verified clients and zero independent reviews doesn’t give me enough to recommend spending money here.

Where it falls short

The feature set is minimal and the roadmap is unclear. I looked for a public product roadmap or changelog. Nothing. The website is sparse. The documentation consists of a few FAQ pages and a setup guide. When I had a question about API access, there was no documentation to consult and the response to my support email took three days.

AI capabilities are close to non-existent. The automated responses are keyword-triggered templates. A guest writes “what time is checkout?” and gets the right answer. A guest writes “we’re leaving tomorrow, should we do anything special before we go?” and gets silence. That’s not AI. That’s a lookup table.

I will give them credit for one thing, though. Dirk Taselaar, the founder, posted on LinkedIn about using Mistral, the French AI company, instead of OpenAI. In a category where nearly every competitor quietly routes guest data through OpenAI’s servers in San Francisco, choosing a European AI provider is a principled decision. Whether it actually matters for a tool whose AI barely functions is another question. But if askng.it ever builds real AI features, at least the data stays in Europe. That’s more than most of the bigger players can say.

There’s no unified inbox because there’s only one channel. WhatsApp and nothing else. If a guest emails you, that lives somewhere else. If they message through your booking platform, that’s somewhere else too. You end up with your communication split across more tools, not fewer, which defeats the purpose.

Who this might work for

I can see exactly one scenario where askng.it makes sense. You run a very small property (under 15 rooms), you currently have no structured guest messaging at all, you want to try WhatsApp communication with guests before committing any money, and you understand that the free tier is a website chat widget, not a messaging platform.

In that narrow context, the free tier is a reasonable way to test whether WhatsApp messaging works for your guests before investing in a proper tool. Think of it as a proof of concept, not a platform.

For anyone else, the arithmetic is clear. Spending €4.50/room/month on a tool that can’t measure its own impact, from a company whose claims I can’t independently verify, is not saving money. It’s spending money slowly on something that doesn’t work.