What does a booking system cost? Prices and hidden costs
What does a booking system cost? The prices, the four costs that aren't in the price list, and the five-year sums for both sole traders and salons with staff.
This article was translated from Danish. Read the original.
What does a booking system cost? A ready-made platform typically costs DKK 150–600 a month. A system built into your own website typically lands around DKK 15,000 as a one-off. Which of the two is cheaper depends almost entirely on two numbers: how many staff you are, and how long you expect to have the system.
We run our own booking system and have set clients up on most of the ready-made platforms. This article is only about the money. If you need to choose the type itself, that is in choosing a booking system for your website.
The four costs that aren’t in the price list
The monthly price on the front page is rarely the one you end up paying.
The price is per user. That is the biggest trap. DKK 199 a month sounds manageable, until you discover it is per employee with their own calendar. Three staff is DKK 597 a month, not DKK 199. Always check whether the price is per user, per calendar or per location.
SMS is an add-on — at a markup. An SMS costs 15–30 øre wholesale. Ready-made platforms typically resell it at 50 øre or more, and some require you to buy bundles you don’t use up. At 60 bookings a week, the difference between 25 and 50 øre is DKK 780 a year for exactly the same message.
Online payment costs percentages. If the customer has to pay or leave a deposit, a transaction fee comes on top — typically 1.5–2.5% plus a fixed amount per transaction. It isn’t the platform’s fault, but it is still your cost, and it grows with revenue instead of staying fixed.
The setup is your work. Services, durations, opening hours, staff, buffer time, copy. Budget a day the first time you do it, and half a day every time something changes. It isn’t on any price list, but it is hours you aren’t spending on customers.
SMS: the cost that pays for itself fastest
SMS reminders are the only item on the list where it is worth doing the sums the other way — not what it costs, but what it saves.
Take a hairdresser with 30 appointments a week and 10% no-shows. That is three lost slots a week, and at DKK 400 each:
| Calculation | Per year | |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue lost to no-shows | 3 slots × DKK 400 × 52 weeks | DKK 62,400 |
| SMS for every appointment | 30 × 52 × DKK 0.25 | DKK 390 |
What’s interesting isn’t how much SMS reduces no-shows. That number varies wildly from industry to industry, and most people quoting a precise figure are selling something. What’s interesting is how little it has to reduce them before it has paid for itself.
The DKK 390 is 0.63% of the DKK 62,400. If your no-shows fall from 10% to 9.94%, you break even. Everything beyond that is profit.
Two details decide whether that effect appears at all: the reminder has to be sent 24 hours before — earlier and it is forgotten again, the same morning and there is no time to move the appointment — and it has to contain a link to cancel. A reminder with no way out makes no difference to the customer who can’t come. They still don’t turn up, they have just been told about it.
The “free” plan
Almost every platform has a free tier. It is rarely usable in a business, and the limitations are in the same places every time:
- The booking happens on their domain with their logo, not yours
- No SMS — only email, which is the channel that doesn’t get read in time
- One calendar, meaning one employee
- No online payment, meaning no deposit and no protection against no-shows
The free tier is built to get you started, not for you to stay. That is entirely legitimate — just don’t count on it when you set a budget.
The sums over five years
Two real situations, using DKK 200 per user per month, SMS at 50 øre on the platform and 25 øre with your own solution, and DKK 15,000 setup for a built-in system.
Salon with three staff, 60 bookings a week:
| After | Ready-made platform | Built into the site |
|---|---|---|
| 1 year | 8,760 | 15,780 |
| 3 years | 26,280 | 17,340 |
| 5 years | 43,800 | 18,900 |
It flips after just under two years, and after five the difference is DKK 24,900. The reason is that the licence is paid per employee every single month, while the setup is paid once.
Sole trader, 30 bookings a week:
| After | Ready-made platform | Built into the site |
|---|---|---|
| 1 year | 3,180 | 15,390 |
| 3 years | 9,540 | 16,170 |
| 5 years | 15,900 | 16,950 |
Here it only flips after 5.4 years, and that is longer than most people can plan for. If you are on your own, take a ready-made platform. We are happy to say so, even though we sell the opposite.
Note that hosting and operation aren’t in the table. If you already have a website, you are already paying for it — with us from DKK 375 a month for the whole site, not for the booking alone. Put that cost on the booking only, and you are comparing two different things.
When cheapest is actually cheapest
Three questions decide it, and none of them are about price:
How many calendars are needed? One, and a platform is cheapest for many years. Three or more, and the licence model works against you from the first month.
What does an hour of your time cost? A system that requires manual follow-up — ringing customers to move appointments, fixing double bookings, typing into two calendars — costs more in time than the difference between the subscriptions. Count it in.
Can you get your customer data out again? That is the question people forget. If names, phone numbers and history are stuck in a platform you can’t export from, you haven’t bought a system. You have rented one, and the price of moving is your entire customer list.
What we charge
We price a booking system built into the website as one fixed quote. It is a one-off amount, agreed in writing after a no-obligation conversation and before we begin. There is no monthly licence and no price per employee — you can have three or ten calendars without the price changing. SMS is included from the start and billed at what the messages cost.
We can hold that price for two reasons you can verify yourself: we are three developers with no project managers, salespeople or open-plan office downtown, and we have built the system once already for our own product. You are paying for the adaptation to your business, not for us to develop it from scratch. See it running at New Style Barbershop, and see the other prices on prices.
You get the price after a conversation and before we begin. A fixed price, not an hourly estimate that slips along the way.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest booking system? A free plan on a ready-made platform, if you are on your own and can live with the booking happening on their domain without SMS. As soon as you are two or more, or need SMS and payments, “cheapest” doesn’t hold up beyond a couple of years.
Can I start on a platform and switch later? Yes, and it is often the right order. Just make sure from day one that you can export customers and bookings. If you can’t, the switch is more expensive than the system you are switching to.
Does it cost extra to add booking to a website I already have? It depends what the site is built in. We will look at it for free and tell you what is possible — see webshop and booking.
Do I have to pay for updates? Not with us. The system is part of your website, and there are no plugin licences to renew. If you want new features built on, we agree a fixed price for that piece of work.
What about payment fees? They are the same whichever system you choose, because they come from the payment provider and not from the booking system. Budget 1.5–2.5% plus a fixed amount per transaction, and don’t let them decide your choice of system.
Why us
Cheaper than most, and not worse for it
We are three developers. No project managers, no salespeople, no open-plan office downtown. That overhead is what you would otherwise be paying on top of the work itself, and it is why we can keep the price down on websites, webshops, web apps and mobile apps alike. Every price is published and fixed in writing before we start — from DKK 375 a month or DKK 3,995 one-time. See prices.
Cheaper does not mean less. We build and run our own products: NBS Booking, NBS Food and the KalorieTracker app, which is live in the App Store and Google Play. So we have already paid for the mistakes we advise you about. You talk to the person writing the code, and you own the code afterwards. If you want to move on without us, you can.