How much does a booking system cost? Renting against building

Renting: what grows with you

A full-featured platform charges a monthly fee, and some add a commission on each new client their own app sends you. The fee is easy to see. The commission is the part that catches people out: it is invisible at twenty bookings a month and it is a line in your accounts at four hundred.

At the end of it you own nothing. Your customer list sits in their system, the way it works is the way they built it, and you can change only what the platform allows.

Simpler scheduling tools cost far less, some with a free tier, and for a simple diary they can be the right answer. What you give up is the membership, class and payment handling a business like a gym needs.

That is not an argument against renting. It is an argument for working out your own volume before you assume renting is the cheap option, because at low volume it is and at higher volume it stops being.

Building: what the one-off comes to

Our own prices are published rather than quoted on request, so you can work out whether you can afford us without booking a call to find out.

An Enquiry build, which is a proper site and payments without a booking system, is from £1,500. An Attention build, which adds catching the enquiries that arrive while you are busy, is from £2,500. An Order build, where customers book or order and pay for themselves, is from £3,500. A Full Line build, which adds quotes, job sheets, the customer list and the tools your team uses after the customer has gone home, is from £6,000.

What you still pay for, either way

A built system is not free to run, and anybody presenting it that way is being slippery with you.

You will still pay for a domain, hosting and business email, which together are small. You will still pay card fees, because those belong to the payment provider and not to the software. And if you want somebody who knows your system on the end of the phone when something breaks, there is a monthly retainer: £149 with the Attention build, £249 with Order and £399 with Full Line. It has a three-month minimum from the start of the build, because that is when fast fixes matter most, and after that you can stop it whenever you like. You own the same things either way.

So the difference is not the size of the monthly figure. It is what the cost does as you grow. A per-booking fee rises with every booking, and a built system does not charge you more for being busy.

When renting is the right answer

• +Your booking volume is low enough that per-booking fees are noise
• +How you take bookings is ordinary for your trade
• +You need it working next week
• +You are not yet certain the business model holds, and you should not spend thousands of pounds finding out

When building starts to make sense

• +Volume is high enough that the per-booking fee has become a real number
• +Your process does not fit the product, and you are running a spreadsheet alongside it to cope
• +The data matters: a customer list with history, or records you have a legal obligation to produce
• +You are paying for three or four subscriptions that do not talk to each other, and somebody is retyping between them