Payment Processing · Buyer guide
Every salon and spa platform is sold on its monthly price. It is the number on the pricing page, the number in the sales call and the number owners compare. It is also, for most salons, the smallest of the three bills the platform sends.
The second is the card rate, which is several times the subscription once you are trading. The third is the marketplace commission, which only some platforms charge, which almost nobody puts in the comparison, and which on a single new client can cost more than a month of software. On a $120 cut and colour booked by a brand-new client through the Fresha marketplace, the commission is $24. The card fee on the same ticket is $2.95.
Here is what each of the platforms this site has reviewed actually publishes, on one basis, read on 22 September 2026.
All figures below are US rates from each company's own pricing page. Where a platform does not publish a rate, that is noted rather than filled in. The grade in brackets is our review grade.
On a $120 service that works out at $2.95 with Fresha, $3.03 to $3.27 with Square depending on plan, and $3.22 with Clover's direct pricing. The spread between the cheapest and dearest published option is about 32 cents a ticket — real money over a year, but not the number that decides this.
Fresha charges $19.95 a month for a one-person business and $14.95 per bookable team member a month for a team. Square Appointments is $0 for Square Free, $49 a month per location for Square Plus and $149 a month per location for Square Premium, with custom pricing above $250,000 a year of processing. Vagaro lists $30 a month for a single bookable calendar, shown discounted to $23.99 for the first six months when we read it. Mindbody starts at $79 a month per location and every plan button says "Let's talk".
Note the structural difference. Fresha and Vagaro scale with staff; Square charges per location regardless of how many chairs you have. A six-chair salon pays Fresha $89.70 a month and Square Plus $49.
But Square's paid plans are not really a software purchase — they are a processing discount, and you can work out exactly when they pay for themselves. Square Plus costs $588 a year and cuts the in-person rate by 0.1 percentage points against the free plan. That saving equals the subscription at $588,000 of annual card volume. Below that, a salon taking cards in person is better off on Square Free.
Square Premium's in-person rate is 0.2 points below Free for $1,788 a year, which breaks even around $894,000. The maths is friendlier if a large share of your income is online or on invoices, where Free pays 3.3% + 30 cents and both paid plans pay 2.9% + 30 cents — a 0.4-point gap that breaks even much sooner. Run it on your own split before upgrading.
Fresha's pricing table carries a line most salon software comparisons omit entirely. A client who discovers your business through the Fresha marketplace and books there is charged to you as a "20% one-time commission", with a "Minimum fee of $6 per client". Returning clients are free, and so are bookings through your own direct link, Facebook or Instagram.
On the $120 service, that is $24 on top of the $2.95 card fee. The first visit costs $26.95 to serve — about nine times what the card alone costs — and it is a bigger number than a month of subscription for a four-person team.
The $6 minimum is the part that catches small-ticket businesses. It bites on anything under $30, so a $25 blow-dry booked by a new marketplace client costs 24% of the ticket, not 20%. A barber shop with a $22 average ticket is paying over a quarter of the first visit for the introduction.
None of that makes the commission a bad deal. It is one-time, it is only charged on clients the marketplace genuinely brought you, and $24 to acquire a client who returns six times a year is cheap against almost any paid advertising. The point is that it is an acquisition cost, it belongs in your marketing budget rather than your software budget, and it should be measured against the rebooking rate of the clients it brings. If marketplace clients do not come back, you are paying 20% for a one-off.
Take a four-chair salon doing 1,000 services a year at an average ticket of $120 — $120,000 of card volume, all in person, no marketplace bookings:
Now add twenty new clients a year arriving through the Fresha marketplace at the same $120 ticket. That is 20 x $24 = $480, which takes the Fresha total to roughly $4,146 and makes it the most expensive of the three — unless those twenty clients rebook, in which case it is the cheapest way any of these platforms will bring you new business.
That is the whole argument in one line. The platforms are close on processing and close on subscription. What separates them is whether you are buying software or buying customers, and only one of those is priced as a percentage of your work.
Most booking platforms tie payments to the software, which is the point of the model. If you are large enough that the processing line dominates, the alternative is a booking system that lets you bring your own processor and an interchange-plus account underneath it. Helcim (A-) publishes rates from interchange + 0.40% + 8 cents in person with signup fees, PCI fees and monthly fees all at $0, and applies volume discounts automatically. Whether that beats a flat rate at $120,000 a year depends entirely on your card mix, because interchange is not a single number — a debit-heavy till lands well below these flat rates and a rewards-card-heavy one may not. Price it on your own statement rather than on the headline. You also lose the marketplace, the built-in booking and the single support line, which for most salons is the reason they bought the platform.
The platforms that publish everything are not automatically the cheapest. Fresha publishes the most detail of any company in this article and also charges the fee with the largest single impact on a salon's economics. Publishing it is what lets you decide whether it is worth paying.
