A booking system your customers use and you control, from £350

What it is

A booking calendar built into your own site, on your own domain. Customers see live availability, pick a slot, and the system holds it the moment they confirm, so two people cannot book the last place at once. You get an admin page, behind a password, where you add dates, set how many places each has, and see who is booked in. No app to install, no third-party account for your customers to make, and no logo that is not yours on the confirmation.

Under the hood it is a small database and a few hundred lines of code that I own the whole of, which is why it costs a one-off £350 rather than a monthly fee. It sits on top of the £399 site, so a five-page site that takes bookings is £749 all in.

£350 from. What moves it up

• Card payment at the point of booking, from £120. Hosted checkout, so card details never touch your site, and the slot only commits once the payment has.
• More than one diary. Two stylists, three rooms, a mobile van and a shop: each is its own set of availability and it takes longer to build and test.
• Passes and memberships with a balance. A six-class pass that counts itself down is a different thing from a label at booking, and I quote it as one.
• Reminders by text. Email confirmations are included. Text messages cost money per message, so they are quoted on top with the real per-message price.

Everything on that list is quoted in writing before it starts. If you only need the plain version, you only pay for the plain version.

The one in use: Yoga with Jennifer Ellis

Jennifer teaches Ashtanga, Yin and Flow and Restore in Prestwick and online. Before the site, every booking was a message: someone asks if there is space on Tuesday, she checks, she replies, they confirm, she writes it down. Multiply by a class list and it is a second job done on the phone at night.

Now the class dates are on her site with the number of places left. Someone books, the place is held, she gets an email and so do they, and the count goes down for the next person. She adds new dates herself from the admin page, with each class's capacity already filled in, and sees who is booked in without asking anyone. She edits her own prices and wording too. Nothing about it depends on me being available.

The maths against renting one

The usual alternative is a booking app with a monthly fee. Good products, all of them, and for a bigger salon with five chairs one may be the right call. For one person taking their own bookings, three years of renting costs more than owning, and at the end you still don't own it. Prices below are the published entry-level plans, checked on 14 September 2026, with the source and its date beside each.

Three-year figures are the monthly price multiplied by 36 and do not include per-booking or card fees, which favours the rented options, not me. Calendly and Acuity publish in US dollars; I have left them in dollars rather than guess an exchange rate. If any of these is wrong on the day you read it, tell me and I will fix the table.

Who it suits

Anyone who sells time in slots and is currently taking those slots by message or phone: yoga and fitness teachers with class dates and capacities, salons and barbers with one to three chairs, clinics such as physio, sports massage and podiatry, tattoo studios taking consultations, driving instructors and dog groomers. If you have more staff than that, or you sell products as well as time, read when you should not buy from me first; some of you should rent the app.

It works in every town I do, and there are pages for the ones I work in most, starting with Falkirk.

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