One flat price. Texts included.

Commission is a tax on your success

Percentage-based pricing sounds painless when you start because a small cut of a small number feels small. The trap is that the cut grows automatically as you grow. Every new client, every price increase, every busy month sends more money to the platform without it doing anything more for you.

Fresha takes around 20 percent and Booksy around 30 percent on bookings. At 30 percent, every $100 a client pays sends $30 to the platform. A pro doing $6,000 a month in bookings would hand over $1,800 a month, or more than $21,000 a year, for software. That is not a tool cost, it is a partnership you never agreed to.

Flat pricing breaks the link between your revenue and your software bill. You pay the same $19 or $49 whether you have a slow month or your best month ever, so growth makes the deal better, not worse.

• Fresha: around 20 percent commission on bookings.
• Booksy: around 30 percent commission on bookings.
• Keptbookings: $0 commission, flat monthly price.

What flat pricing looks like with Keptbookings

Keptbookings keeps the plans simple on purpose. The Solo plan is around $19 a month for an individual pro. The Team plan is a flat $49 a month and covers up to six providers, so a small studio is not billed per seat as it adds stylists. A free tier covers up to 20 appointments a month, which is enough to run a side business or trial the software with no card required.

There are no booking commissions, no per-message reminder charges, and no surprise per-transaction platform cut. SMS and email reminders are included in the price rather than sold as an add-on.

• Free: up to 20 appointments per month.
• Solo: around $19 per month for one pro.
• Team: flat $49 per month for up to six providers.
• Reminders, booking page, and exports included.

Beware the add-on creep

Not every painful price model is a percentage. Some tools advertise a low base price and then charge separately for the features you actually need: reminders, online payments, a website widget, extra staff, marketing tools. Vagaro is a common example of add-on creep, where the real monthly cost climbs well past the headline number once you switch on what you assumed was included.

Flat pricing only protects you if it is genuinely flat. Keptbookings includes SMS and email reminders, a branded embeddable booking page, guest checkout, deposits and card-on-file, one-click export, and free import in the price. The number you see is close to the number you pay, which is the whole point of choosing flat over a percentage or an add-on menu.

Predictability is a feature

Independent pros run on thin, variable margins, and unpredictable costs are stressful even when they are not huge. A flat bill is something you can plan around. You know your software costs $19 or $49 this month, next month, and during your busiest week, so you can price your services and forecast your take-home with confidence.

Pair that with Stripe fast next-business-day payouts and zero commission and the whole money side of the business becomes legible: predictable software cost in, fast and full payouts out, nothing skimmed or held in between. For a small business, that clarity is worth as much as any individual feature.

How to compare the true cost of two booking tools

Comparing a flat plan against a commission plan is not a like-for-like sticker comparison, so do the arithmetic on your own numbers before you decide. The commission model hides its cost inside your revenue, which is exactly why it feels cheap until you total it up at year end.

Start with your realistic monthly bookings revenue. For a commission tool, multiply that by the commission rate to get its true monthly cost. For Keptbookings, the cost is simply the flat plan price. Then add any add-ons the commission tool charges separately, such as reminders or payment features, that Keptbookings already includes, so you are comparing the same capabilities.

A worked example makes the gap obvious. At $4,000 in monthly bookings, a 20 percent tool costs $800 a month and a 30 percent tool costs $1,200 a month, before add-ons. Keptbookings’s Team plan is a flat $49. The flat plan looks slightly more expensive only at very low volume on the free or Solo tier; at any real working volume it is dramatically cheaper, and the gap widens every month you grow.

• Commission cost = monthly bookings x commission rate.
• Add separately billed features the flat plan already includes.
• Re-run the math at your busiest month, not your slowest.