The number on the pricing page is not the cost
Booking tools advertise a monthly price, and it is the smallest part of what you pay. The full cost has four parts, and the return has two. Owners who compare tools on the headline subscription usually pick the wrong one and are then surprised by the invoice.
The four costs
Subscription. From zero to roughly $60 a month for a small team, depending on the tool and how many staff. Some tools charge per staff member, some per location, some a flat fee. A free tier usually means a single user and card fees, or a marketplace model.
Card processing. Deposits and payments taken through the tool attract a percentage plus a fixed amount per transaction, typically in the region of 1.5 to 3 percent plus a few cents. On a salon taking a $20 deposit on 200 bookings a month, that is roughly $100 to $150 a month in fees. This is often the largest line, and it is usually the one owners forget.
Marketplace commission. Tools with a marketplace, Fresha and Booksy among them, may charge a fee on bookings that arrive through their marketplace rather than your own site. New-client fees can be a significant share of the first appointment's value. Steer bookings to your own site's widget and this cost falls; rely on the marketplace and it becomes your biggest.
SMS reminders. A few cents per text, so $10 to $30 a month for a busy diary. Cheap, and the best money on this list, because texts on the day are what stop the forgetting.
Add them up for your volume. A two-chair salon might pay $30 in subscription, $80 in card fees, $20 in texts and $0 in marketplace fees if it routes bookings through its own site: about $130 a month. A four-practitioner clinic on Cliniko might pay $120 in subscription, $150 in card fees and $30 in texts: about $300.
The two returns
Phone time. Count how many bookings reception takes by phone in a week, and how long each takes including the back-and-forth about times. Fifty bookings at four minutes is over three hours a week, or about fourteen hours a month. If reception is paid, that is a direct saving. If the owner is reception, it is time back with clients.
Online booking does not remove every call. It removes the ones that did not need a human, which in most appointment businesses is well over half.
No-shows. This is the larger return. A deposit taken at booking and a reminder on the day reduce no-shows sharply, and each no-show avoided is a slot that earns. A salon with a $60 average ticket that avoids eight no-shows a month has recovered $480, several times the entire cost of the system.
There is a third return that does not fit a spreadsheet: bookings that happen at 10pm, when the phone was off. Those are bookings that would otherwise have gone to a competitor or not happened at all.
Comparing tools on total cost
When comparing, model your actual volume:
| Line | Tool A | Tool B | | --- | --- | --- | | Subscription | | | | Card fees on deposits | | | | Marketplace commission at your mix | | | | SMS | | | | Total per month | | |
A tool that is free to subscribe to and charges marketplace commission can cost more than a $50 subscription tool for a business that already has a client base. A tool with lower card fees can beat a cheaper subscription for a business that takes deposits on every booking. The headline price tells you little.
Costs that are not the tool's
Two more things belong in the picture. Setting the tool up properly, configuring services, staff, deposits, reminders and emails and embedding it on the site, is a one-time job; ours is a fixed price. And the site itself has to be fast enough on a phone that the client reaches the booking page, which is a website cost rather than a booking cost, but the booking system's return depends on it.
The honest summary
A booking system for a small appointment business costs somewhere between $100 and $300 a month all in, dominated by card fees, and returns several times that in phone time and recovered no-shows, provided deposits and reminders are switched on and the bookings run through your own site. Without deposits and reminders, you have paid for a calendar. With them, you have paid for the most reliable revenue protection a small business has.