Fresha Alternatives With No Commission on Bookings

Almost nobody leaves Fresha because of the software. They leave because of the twenty per cent on every new client the marketplace sends.

At ten new clients a month on a €40 service, that is €960 a year on top of the subscription. It is a real number and it is worth escaping.

The list of platforms that charge nothing per booking is the easy half of this article. It is short and it is below.

The hard half is that the commission was buying something. If you do not replace it, you save €960 and lose more than that in bookings.

What you are actually leaving

Fresha charges 20% of a new client's first booking, with a floor of about €6, and only when its marketplace made the introduction.

Clients you brought yourself are never charged. So the first question is not which platform to move to, but how many of your clients the marketplace actually sent.

We work the full arithmetic out in what Fresha's commission costs in a year. The short version is that the fee grows without limit while a subscription does not.

The commission-free options

Notice the last column. Every genuinely commission-free option on that list either has no marketplace or makes it optional.

That is not a coincidence. A marketplace is expensive to run, and the commission is how it gets paid for.

The trade nobody prices

Say you save €960 a year. If the marketplace was sending ten new clients a month and half of them came back, you are also giving up sixty returning clients.

Sixty clients at €40, visiting four times a year, is €9,600 of work. Against that, the €960 saving looks like a poor trade.

It is only a good trade if you can find those clients another way. That is the whole decision, and the platform you move to is almost incidental to it.

How to replace a marketplace

This is the part that decides whether moving was clever or expensive. Four channels do most of the work, and none of them charges per client.

Your own booking link, everywhere

In the bio, in the story highlight, in the automatic reply, on the door. Every platform on the list gives you one, and most salons use it in one place.

A client who taps it books in seconds. A client who has to send a message waits for your reply, and some of them do not wait.

The local map listing

A complete map profile with a booking link is the closest free thing to a marketplace. People searching for a service nearby find it the same way.

It costs nothing per client, forever. It also takes a few hours to set up properly and a photo every month to keep alive.

Asking for the next booking in the chair

The cheapest client acquisition in this trade is the rebooking you ask for while the person is still sitting down.

It is also the one most salons skip, because it feels like selling. It is not: it is saving them a message later.

Referrals, made easy to give

A happy client will recommend you. What stops them is not willingness, it is having nothing to send.

Give them a link rather than a phone number, and the recommendation becomes a booking instead of a conversation.

What the fee gets replaced by

Commission-free does not mean free. Almost every platform on that list earns from card processing instead, and that charge behaves very differently.

A commission hits a handful of first visits. A processing fee hits every paid booking, all year, including the clients you brought yourself.

For a salon with a full book and few new faces, the processing fee is the larger number. For a new salon taking many first visits, the commission is.

Neither is hidden, but only one of them appears on a pricing page. Ask what the card rate is before you compare monthly figures.

Which one suits which salon

One person with a following

A permanent free plan is the honest answer. A solo specialist whose clients come from their own audience should not be paying either kind of fee.

Short services, high volume

A nail salon or a barbershop suffers most from Fresha's minimum fee, because a €6 floor on a €25 service is a quarter of it.

Moving to any flat-priced platform helps immediately here, and the saving is larger than the headline percentage suggests.

Long services, fewer of them

A colour salon or a massage studio takes fewer bookings at higher prices, so the processing fee matters more than the commission.

Compare on the card rate rather than the monthly price, and check whether deposits can be applied to long services alone.

A small team

Watch for per-user and per-calendar pricing. A platform at €12 per user is cheaper than Fresha for one person and dearer for four.

Price your actual team, not the headline. This is the single most common mistake in a move, and it is discovered on the second invoice.

Who should move, and who should not

• Move if most of your clients already come from your own channels. You are paying a commission on a small number and a subscription on top.
• Move if your average service is under €30. The minimum fee makes your effective rate higher than the headline, as we show in the commission breakdown.
• Move if your book is full. You do not need introductions, and the commission is pure cost.
• Stay if you opened this year and the marketplace is filling chairs you could not fill alone.
• Stay if you hate marketing and would not do any of the four channels above. The commission is the price of not having to.

The middle case, a salon that could bring its own clients but has not started, is the one where most bad decisions happen. Build the channels first, then leave.

How to leave without losing people

1. Set up the new platform and your booking link while you are still on the old one. Nothing is urgent yet, so nothing gets rushed.
2. Put the new link in your bio a month before you move. New bookings start arriving through it for free.
3. Tell people in the chair, one at a time, for that whole month. This is the step that decides how many follow you.
4. Export your client list and confirm the file opens and is complete, before you cancel anything.
5. Run both for two weeks. Some clients will use the old app once more; let them, and tell them again.
6. Then cancel. Not before, and not on the day you set up the new one.

What the free options are missing

A free plan with no commission sounds like it must give something up, and it does. Being clear about what keeps this honest.

There is no discovery. Nobody is browsing a directory and finding you, so the flow of strangers stops the day you leave.

Free tiers also carry limits: a number of bookings, a single user, or a subset of features. Read the limit before you rely on the word free.

Ours is fifty bookings a month for one person, permanently. That is what our free plan includes, stated plainly because a vague free plan is a trial in disguise.

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The first three months after

Nobody plans for this part, and it is where the decision is actually judged. Expect three things, and none of them is a sign you were wrong.

New client numbers drop in month one. The marketplace stopped introducing people and your own channels have not warmed up yet.

A handful of regulars will book through the old app once more, because it is still on their phone. Tell them once and they switch.

And your invoice will look wrong in a good way. The number is smaller and it stays the same when you get busier, which takes a month to trust.

By month three the picture is honest. If your own channels are producing, you have the same book at a better margin.

If they are not, you know what to fix.

Verdict

Commission-free platforms are easy to find and the saving is real. Whether the saving is worth having depends entirely on where your next client comes from.

If the answer is your own audience, leave, and you will wonder why you waited. The fee was buying you nothing.

If the answer is the marketplace, do not leave yet. Build one channel of your own first, prove it works for a month, and then go.