Your clients are yours.

The marketplace tax on your own regulars

Marketplace booking apps pitch themselves as a way to find new clients, and for true new discovery a finders fee can be fair. The problem is that those same apps keep charging a commission every time your existing regulars rebook, even though you brought those clients in yourself and the app did nothing to win them.

Fresha takes around 20 percent and Booksy around 30 percent on bookings, and those percentages often apply to your own repeat clients, not just marketplace discovery. If a loyal client books a $120 service once a month, a 30 percent cut can quietly drain over $400 a year from a relationship you built and maintain entirely on your own.

Stack that across a full book of regulars and the marketplace tax becomes one of your largest expenses, growing automatically every time you do good work and a client comes back.

Whose contact list is it, anyway

Commission is the visible cost. The hidden cost is ownership of the relationship itself. Some platforms make it deliberately hard to export client contact details, treating your client list as their asset rather than yours. If leaving means losing your clients’ phone numbers and emails, you are not really a customer of the software, you are captive to it.

Keptbookings takes the opposite position. Your client list, including contact details and history, is yours to export in one click whenever you want, no support ticket and no waiting. The booking page is branded to your business, not to a marketplace, so clients associate the experience with you rather than with an app that could send them a competitor next week.

• One-click export of your full client list and history.
• Free import when you move in from another tool.
• A booking page branded to your business, not a marketplace.

A flat price keeps incentives aligned

When your software earns a percentage of every booking, its incentive is to insert itself between you and your clients as often as possible, because each booking is revenue for them. A flat price removes that conflict entirely. Keptbookings charges the same whether you book 30 clients or 300, so the software has no reason to tax your growth or compete for your relationships.

Solo is around $19 a month, Team is a flat $49 for up to six providers, and there is a free tier for up to 20 appointments a month. Whatever you earn above that price is yours. The more your business grows, the better the flat deal looks, which is the opposite of how commission feels.

Leaving should be easy, on purpose

The truest test of whether a tool believes your clients are yours is how hard it makes leaving. Keptbookings offers a one-click export and a free import, because a company confident in its product does not need to lock you in. You stay because Keptbookings is worth staying for, not because your client list is held hostage.

Guest checkout reinforces the same principle on the client side. Clients can book without being forced to create a marketplace account that ties them to a platform, so the relationship stays between you and them. There is also real human support when you need help, not a chatbot maze designed to slow down anyone trying to leave.

How to reclaim a client list you already own

If you are currently on a marketplace tool, your clients are still yours even if the contracts and the export buttons make it feel otherwise. The practical move is to export what you can, stand up your own branded booking page, and start steering rebookings through it. Every client who books direct next time is one the marketplace no longer taxes.

Keptbookings makes that migration deliberately painless. Free import brings your existing client list and history in without a setup fee, and one-click export means you are never trapped again. From there, your reminders and rebooking messages carry your branding and your booking link, so the relationship quietly shifts back to where it belongs: between you and the people who already chose you.

The shift does not have to be abrupt. Many pros run their own booking page alongside a marketplace for a while, then let the commission-charging channel wither as regulars move over. Because Keptbookings costs the same flat price regardless of volume, every client you bring direct improves your economics immediately rather than someday.