How much should a booking system cost?

Start with the ready-made tools

For a lot of businesses, a booking system is a solved problem. Whether you run a clinic, a class, a salon or a diary full of appointments, there is almost certainly an off-the-shelf tool that does it, takes payment, sends the reminders and syncs to your calendar, for a modest monthly fee.

If one of those fits how you work, use it. It will cost you a small subscription and an afternoon of setup, and I will happily point you at a good one rather than build you something you do not need.

Watch the fee on every booking

Here is the part that hides. Some booking tools are cheap monthly but take a slice of every booking or payment. That percentage feels like nothing on a single appointment and turns into a serious number across a busy year.

Do the sum before you commit. A tool that is free but skims a couple of per cent off everything can cost you far more than one with a flat monthly fee and no cut. Cheap up front is not the same as cheap.

When it is worth building your own

A custom booking system starts to make sense when the ready-made ones cannot handle how you actually work, or when their per-booking fees have grown into real money.

• Your booking rules are unusual: overlapping resources, staff and rooms at once, awkward availability, deposits and conditions the standard tools cannot express.
• You are doing enough volume that a percentage fee now dwarfs what a one-off build would cost.
• You want it built into your own website and brand, feeding your own systems, rather than sending customers off to a third-party page.

A focused custom booking tool typically lands somewhere in the low thousands, depending on how fiddly the rules and payments are. Above that, and it is usually because the booking part is really one piece of a larger system, which is worth scoping properly.

The running cost, as always

Whatever route you take, check what it costs to keep running: the monthly fee, the payment charges, any per-booking cut. A custom build removes the per-booking fee but still needs somewhere to live and the odd bit of maintenance, though that is usually pennies next to a percentage of every sale.

So what should it cost?

For most people: a small monthly subscription for a good off-the-shelf tool, and done. For those with unusual rules or high volume, a one-off build in the low thousands that pays for itself by killing the per-booking fee. The way to know which is you is to add up what your bookings are quietly costing you today.