About Halfpast

Built by two people who ran a salon diary on paper for six years and then on four different apps.

Why this exists

The diary is the business

“A booking system is not a calendar with payments bolted on. It is the thing that decides whether you get paid for the hour somebody did not turn up for.”

Halfpast started because one of us ran a three-chair salon and spent four years trying booking apps. Every one of them was either a calendar that could not take a deposit, or a payments product that treated the diary as an afterthought.

The specific thing that broke us was cancellations. Every app had a cancellation policy field. None of them had a ladder — different consequences at different distances from the appointment — which is what every business we know actually operates, informally, in their head.

So we built the ladder first and the calendar around it. Nine thousand four hundred businesses later, the cancellation ladder and the three-hour reminder are still the two features people mention when they tell us why they stayed.

Three things we will not do

They cost us money, which is how you can tell we mean them.

No commission on your bookings

A percentage of every booking means we earn more in your best month and you pay more for succeeding. It is also the pricing that makes a booking product reluctant to send clients to your own website instead of a marketplace.

No forced client accounts

We could harvest a client list from every business on the platform by making customers register. Forced registration is also the biggest single cause of abandoned bookings we have measured, so it would cost you money to make us a database.

No hostage-taking on the way out

Full export from the settings screen, no ticket required. Your booking page keeps working for thirty days after you cancel so nobody arrives at a dead link.