What a Booking System Costs, With Real Numbers
There are two ways to pay for a booking system and they are not comparable month to month. One is a subscription that never ends. The other is a one-off with a smaller running cost behind it. Over five years they land in a similar place, and what you hold at the end is completely different.
01
Renting: what the monthly comes to
A booking platform for a small business typically runs somewhere around £75 to £120 a month, and most add a fee per booking on top. Over five years that is roughly £4,500 to £7,000, and at the end of it you own nothing and can change nothing.
That is not an argument against it. It is an argument for doing the sum before you assume renting is the cheap option, because at low volume it is and at higher volume it stops being.
The per-booking fee 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.
02
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.
A foundation build, which is a proper site and payments without a booking system, is £1,500 to £2,500. A booking build, where customers book themselves in and pay, is £3,500 to £5,000. An operations build, which adds the customer list and the tools your team uses after the customer has gone home, is £6,000 to £9,000.
03
The honest comparison
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 to answer the phone when something breaks, there is a retainer, which for us starts at £150 a month.
So the real comparison is not "£100 a month forever" against "£4,000 once". It is "£100 a month forever, rising, owning nothing" against "£4,000 once, then a smaller monthly, owning all of it".
04
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 four thousand pounds finding out
05
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
→Start
Tell us what breaks when you get busy.
The first step is a call, and it costs nothing: twenty minutes on what your business does and what breaks when you get busy. If there is something worth building, the next step is a £450 Diagnostic, half a day walking your process end to end with a written recommendation and a fixed quote attached. That is credited in full against a build if you go ahead within thirty days.