Why we do not take a percentage

Plenty of booking products charge a percentage of each booking, or a flat fee per booking. It sounds fair — you only pay when you earn — and for a very quiet business it genuinely is cheaper.

Here is why we do not.

The arithmetic

A three-chair salon doing 120 bookings a month at an average of £55 turns over about £6,600. At a modest 2% commission that is £132 a month, and it scales up every time you have a good month. Our Studio plan is £39 whatever happens.

The crossover is somewhere around 35 bookings a month. Below that, commission wins and you should take it. Above it, commission is a tax on growth — and the businesses we serve are almost all above it within a quarter.

The second-order problem

This is the part that matters more than the arithmetic.

If a booking product earns per booking, it has an incentive to be the place bookings happen — its marketplace, its app, its branded page. It has a mild disincentive to make the widget on your own website excellent, because a booking that arrives through your site is worth the same to it as one through its marketplace, but the marketplace one builds its business.

We earn the same whatever channel you use. That is why the widget on your own site is the thing we have spent the most time on, and why we will happily point you at Reserve with Google, which sends bookings straight to you without passing through anything of ours.

What this costs us

Predictability, mostly. Per-seat subscription revenue grows slower than commission on a growing customer base, and it means we grow roughly in line with how many businesses use us rather than how well they do.

We would rather have that. A pricing model where our best quarter requires your busiest quarter puts us on the same side as your success in a way that is easy to say and hard to actually feel. A flat fee just means we are boring to you, which for infrastructure is the correct relationship.