The honest Fresha alternative

What Fresha does well

Fresha earned its scale honestly. The base subscription is free, the marketplace genuinely sends new faces to salons that want walk-in volume, and the calendar and inventory tools are mature and reliable. For a salon that wants discovery above all else and is comfortable trading a slice of revenue for it, Fresha is a legitimate, widely used choice — and that ubiquity means most clients already know how to use it.

Where Fresha falls short for independents

The trouble starts when the marketplace economics meet your own client base. Fresha’s 20% new-client commission is designed for genuinely new discovery, but the line between “new” and “yours” is blurry — a regular who rebooks through a QR code or the marketplace can be classed as new, and you pay a fifth of that ticket on someone you already built a relationship with.

Support is the next pressure point. There’s no dependable phone line, so a held payout, a disputed charge, or a sync problem becomes an email ticket — fine for a billion-dollar platform, painful for a solo stylist whose week’s income is on hold. And because you can’t truly embed or white-label the booking flow, the website you built and the ads you ran keep funneling brand equity back to Fresha rather than to you.

Finally, the deposit protection has a known gap: a client can attach a card that won’t clear, satisfy the booking requirement on paper, and still no-show with nothing actually captured. For a chair you can’t refill at the last minute, that loophole costs real money.

How Keptbookings is different

Keptbookings replaces commission with one flat price. Solo plans start around $19/month and Team is roughly $49/month flat for up to six people, with a free tier to start — and there is never a percentage taken off a sale, whether the client is new or a ten-year regular. The math doesn’t change as you grow.

Deposits and cards are validated at the moment of booking, and if a client later removes or swaps the card on file, you get an alert — closing the invalid-card gap that lets no-shows slip through. Reminders by SMS and email are included rather than upsold, payouts run through Stripe with fast next-day timing and no surprise holds, and your booking page is fully branded and embeddable on your own site so the traffic you earn builds your name.

And when something does go wrong, you reach a real person — phone and human support are part of the plan, not a premium tier.

Switching from Fresha to Keptbookings

Moving over is built to be painless. Keptbookings imports your client list and appointment history for free, so you don’t lose the relationships and notes you’ve accumulated, and setup typically takes about 15 minutes. There’s no lock-in either: if you ever leave, one-click export hands you your data back. The goal is that the switch costs you an afternoon, not a client.

Who should choose which

Stick with Fresha if marketplace discovery is your main growth engine and you’re happy paying for new-client volume. Choose Keptbookings if most of your bookings are your own regulars, you want every dollar of those tickets, and you’d rather pay a flat fee than a commission that scales with your success. Independents who already have a steady book almost always come out ahead on the flat model.