Is Fresha really free for barbershops?

No. Fresha ended its 'free forever' model in 2025 and now charges mandatory subscription fees starting at £14.95/month for solo barbers or £9.95/month per staff member. On top of that, there's a 20% marketplace commission on new customers, card processing fees on every transaction, and SMS overage charges. A three-chair barbershop typically pays around £7,700 per year.

What does barbershop booking software actually cost in the UK?

It depends on the platform and pricing model. A three-chair UK barbershop can expect to pay around £468/year on a flat-fee platform like Setora, roughly £1,200-2,700/year on Booksy depending on marketplace usage, up to £7,742/year on Fresha with commissions and processing fees, or £1,200-1,400/year on Square Appointments including processing.

What are marketplace commissions on booking platforms?

Marketplace commissions are fees charged when a customer books through the platform's consumer directory. Fresha charges 20% of the first booking value, Booksy charges 30% through its Boost feature, and Treatwell charges 35%. All three have generated complaints from shop owners who say they were charged for customers who found the shop independently.

How can I avoid hidden fees on barbershop software?

Look for platforms with flat monthly pricing that includes all staff, no marketplace commissions, and no mandatory payment processing. Check whether SMS reminders are included or charged extra. Pull three months of actual bills from your current platform and calculate what percentage of your turnover goes to software fees. Under 2% is reasonable. Over 4% is worth questioning.

What is the cheapest barbershop booking software in the UK?

Square Appointments has a genuinely free tier, but it charges 1.75% on every card payment and locks useful features like cancellation policies and Google Calendar sync behind its £29/month Plus plan. For a three-chair shop processing 280 card transactions a month, that 'free' plan costs roughly £98/month in processing fees alone. Setora charges a flat £39/month with no processing fees or commissions.

The Hidden Cost of 'Free' Barbershop Software

'Free' barbershop software costs UK shops thousands a year in commissions, processing fees and surprise charges. Here's what they actually cost.

Every "free" booking platform has a business model. That business model is you.

The short version

"Free" barbershop software is not free. Across every major platform in the UK, the real cost is buried in marketplace commissions, card processing fees, per-staff charges and SMS overages. A three-chair barbershop on Fresha can pay over £7,700 a year. On Booksy, around £2,700 with marketplace fees. Even Square's genuinely free tier costs roughly £1,200 a year in processing alone, with key features locked behind a paid plan.

The pattern is the same everywhere: get shop owners on the platform for free, then monetise through layers of variable fees that are difficult to predict and harder to track. When 60% of UK barbershops are operating at break-even or a loss, those fees are not a rounding error. They are the margin.

The "free" playbook

The strategy is not complicated. Launch a booking platform at no cost. Build a user base. Once shops have moved their customer data, booking history and daily operations onto the platform, introduce fees. The switching cost is now high enough that most owners will pay rather than migrate.

Fresha is the clearest example. The platform launched as Shedul in 2015 with a "free forever" promise. That promise held for a decade. Then, in 2025, Fresha introduced mandatory subscription fees. Multi-user accounts were charged first. Solo operators in the UK followed around October 2025. Existing users were not grandfathered in. There was no public blog post explaining the change. Some owners reported as little as one month's notice.

The industry reaction was sharp. Beauty professionals were described as "fuming" about the new charges. At least seven competing platforms published Fresha migration guides within months. Owners vented on Reddit, Trustpilot and Google Play.

But Fresha is not unique. It is just the most visible example of a model the whole industry relies on. Marketplace commissions, per-staff pricing, locked payment processing, feature gating. The packaging differs, but the playbook is the same: "free" up front, variable fees underneath.

What "free" actually costs: platform by platform

Full disclosure: we built Setora, a flat-rate booking platform for barbershops. We are a competitor to every platform below, and we are not pretending otherwise. Every figure is sourced and linked. Where a platform does something well, we will say so.

All costs below are for a typical three-chair UK barbershop doing around 400 bookings per month at an average of £20 per cut, with 70% card payments.

Fresha

Fresha now charges a mandatory subscription of £9.95 per staff member per month on the Team plan. For three chairs, that is £29.85/month before anything else.

On top of that: a 20% marketplace commission on any customer classified as "new" through the Fresha marketplace (minimum around £5 per customer), card processing at 1.19% plus 20p per transaction plus 7p per tap, and SMS overages at 5p per text after a small free allowance.

We have done the full breakdown in our Fresha fees analysis. The total for a three-chair shop: roughly £7,742 per year.

The platform's Trustpilot company description still states it offers "subscription-free software" as of March 2026. That has not been accurate since 2025.

To be fair: Fresha's consumer marketplace does genuinely generate new bookings for shops in high-traffic areas. One UK business owner calculated a 3,500% ROI on marketplace customers over 12 months. The booking interface is polished and the feature set is comprehensive. The platform did not reach 110,000 businesses by being bad software. The question is whether the total cost represents good value for what your shop actually needs.

Booksy

Booksy charges £40/month for a solo barber, plus £5 per additional staff member, plus VAT. A three-chair shop pays £60/month before processing fees.

Then there is Boost, Booksy's marketplace feature. It charges a 30% commission on the first booking value from marketplace customers, with a minimum of £5 per customer, plus VAT. That is higher than Fresha's 20%.

Boost is optional and can be disabled. But multiple reviews on Trustpilot and Sitejabber report being charged Boost fees for existing customers who booked through Booksy's website widget, not through the marketplace. One long-term user estimated Boost cost them over £20,000 across nine years.

An independent analysis by BarberInsights puts the real monthly cost of a three-chair shop with card processing and Boost at around £226/month, or roughly £2,712 per year.

Credit where it is due: Booksy includes 500 free marketing messages per month and unlimited free appointment reminders. That is more generous than Fresha's SMS allowance. For a detailed comparison, see our Setora vs Booksy breakdown.

Square Appointments

Square is the most transparent "free" option. The UK free tier is genuinely free with unlimited staff calendars, text and email reminders, and basic reporting. No subscription. No marketplace commission.

The catch is payment processing. Square charges 1.75% on every in-person card payment on the free plan (1.6% on paid plans). On 280 card transactions at £20, that is roughly £98/month in processing fees, or around £1,176 per year.

You also cannot use your own card terminal. You must use Square's hardware and their processing rates. And the free tier locks several features barbershops actually need: cancellation policies with fees, Google Calendar sync, waitlist management and custom SMS.

The Plus plan at £29/month unlocks these, bringing the total to around £119/month or £1,428 per year.

Square is not trying to trick anyone. The pricing is upfront and the product is solid. But "free" still costs over a thousand pounds a year when you factor in processing.

Treatwell

Treatwell runs the largest consumer marketplace in the UK with 9 million active users. If your priority is visibility and new customer acquisition, that reach is hard to ignore.

The cost of that reach: a 35% commission on the first booking from any marketplace customer. That is the highest marketplace cut in the industry. On a £25 cut, Treatwell takes £8.75 per new customer. A rebooking window of 365 days means the customer is commission-free for a year, but if they do not return within 12 months, they count as "new" again.

There is also a 2.5% plus VAT online prepayment fee and a monthly subscription on the Advanced plan. Treatwell's model can work well for shops in busy high-street locations that need a steady flow of new faces. For shops where most customers already know them by name, 35% is a steep price to pay for bookings that might have happened anyway.

The commission attribution problem

This is the part that makes shop owners angriest. Not the commissions themselves, but who gets charged and why.

Both Fresha and Booksy operate marketplace models where they take a cut when they "find" a new customer for your shop. In principle, that is fair. They spent money on advertising and SEO to get that person in front of you. A one-off fee for genuine customer acquisition is a reasonable deal.

The problem is how these platforms decide who counts as "new."

On Fresha, barbers consistently report being charged the 20% commission for customers who found the shop through Google, not through Fresha's marketplace. The customer searched the shop's name, landed on the Fresha listing (which ranks well in search results), and booked. Fresha counted that as a marketplace acquisition. Other owners have been charged for customers who scanned the shop's own QR code, because the booking routed through Fresha's domain.

On Booksy, a reviewer on Sitejabber described how Booksy embedded a booking widget on their business's own website, then classified existing customers who booked through it as marketplace referrals, triggering a 30% Boost commission.

These are not isolated complaints. Across Trustpilot, Capterra, Software Advice and Reddit, commission attribution is the single most common theme in negative reviews for both platforms.

Fresha advises shops to import their full customer database before enabling the marketplace, which should prevent existing customers from being misclassified. That is good advice. But it does not help when someone who found your shop through a Google search, a word-of-mouth recommendation, or a sign in your window happens to book via a URL the platform claims as its own.

The annual cost comparison

Here is what a typical three-chair UK barbershop pays on each platform over a year. Assumptions: 400 bookings/month, £20 average, 70% card payments, 10% new marketplace customers where applicable.

Platform	Monthly estimate	Annual estimate	Model
Setora	£39	£468	Flat fee, all staff included
Square Free	~£98	~£1,176	Processing only; missing key features
Square Plus	~£119	~£1,428	Processing + £29/month subscription
Booksy (no Boost)	~£60 + processing	~£1,932	Subscription + card fees
Booksy (with Boost)	~£226	~£2,712	Per BarberInsights analysis
Treatwell	~£49 + commissions	~£3,000+	Subscription + 35% marketplace fees
Fresha	~£646	~£7,742	Subscription + 20% commission + processing + SMS

Setora figure is the published price. Fresha figure from worked calculation using official rates. Booksy figure from BarberInsights independent analysis. Square figures calculated from official UK processing rates. Treatwell figure estimated from published commission rates. All variable-fee platforms will differ based on actual volume and marketplace activity. Setora SMS reminders are charged as credits on top of the £39/month price.

The gap between Setora and Fresha for the same three-chair shop is over £7,000 a year. That is not a software cost difference. That is a staff member's wages for several weeks.

Why this matters more in 2026

The numbers above would matter in any year. They matter more now because UK barbershops are under real financial pressure.

According to the NHBF's 2025 industry survey, 21% of salons and barbershops are operating at a loss, up from 17% in January 2025. Another 39% are breaking even. That means 60% of businesses are not turning a profit.

The 2024 Autumn Budget hit the sector hard: National Living Wage increases, the NICs rise from 13.8% to 15%, and a reduced NICs Secondary Threshold have added an estimated £139 million in additional costs to the hair and beauty industry. In response, 74% of businesses have raised prices.

When your margins are already this thin, the difference between paying £39/month and £200 to £600/month for booking software is not trivial. For a shop turning over £100,000 on 8 to 12% margins, £7,000 in annual software fees is the difference between a decent year and a bad one.

Eight hidden fee patterns to watch for

Not every platform uses all of these. But most "free" or "low-cost" platforms use at least three.

1. The bait-and-switch. Launch as free, build a user base, then introduce mandatory fees once the switching cost is high. Fresha is the textbook example.

2. Commission attribution. Charge a percentage on customers the platform claims to have "found" for you, even when the customer found you independently. Both Fresha (20%) and Booksy (30%) have well-documented disputes over this.

3. Per-staff pricing. Your software bill grows every time you hire. Booksy charges £5 per additional staff member. Fresha charges £9.95 per bookable team member. A shop that grows from two chairs to five sees its bill climb without using any new features.

4. Locked payment processing. You must use the platform's card terminal and payment rates. You cannot shop around for better processing fees or use your existing terminal. Fresha and Square both require their own hardware.

5. SMS overages. A small free text allowance that runs out quickly, followed by per-message charges. Fresha gives 20 free texts per staff member per month. A three-chair shop sending reminders to half its customers blows through that in the first week.

6. Feature gating. Essential features locked behind higher-priced tiers. Square's free plan has no cancellation policies or Google Calendar sync. Fresha charges £7.95 per staff member per month just for analytics.

7. Data lock-in. Making it difficult to export your customer data and leave. Booksy has no self-service data export. You must contact support, and response times have been a consistent complaint.

8. Cancellation friction. No self-service cancellation option, email-only requests, and reports of continued charges after requesting cancellation. If getting out is harder than getting in, that tells you something about the business model.

How to audit what you are actually paying

If you are already on a booking platform, here is a 10-minute exercise worth doing.

Step 1. Log into your platform's dashboard and pull up your billing history for the last three months.

Step 2. Add up everything: subscription fees, marketplace commissions, card processing charges, SMS costs, add-on fees. Do not forget charges that look small individually, like the 7p per tap authorisation or the 5p per text overage. They add up across hundreds of transactions.

Step 3. Compare the total to your monthly turnover. What percentage of your revenue is going to your booking platform?

If it is under 2%, you are probably getting reasonable value. If it is over 4%, it is worth asking whether the platform is earning that, or whether a simpler tool could do the same job for less.

The answer depends on your shop. A high-street barbershop in central London pulling 30 new marketplace customers a month has a very different cost-benefit to a neighbourhood shop where everyone already knows the owner's name.

What we built instead

We built Setora because the barbershops we spoke to wanted a booking platform that did not take a cut of their revenue. No commissions. No per-staff fees. No mandatory payment processing. One price.

Setora: £39/month per location. Unlimited staff. Online booking. Walk-in management. Automated email reminders. Configurable deposit policies. Cancellation rules. Customer records. No marketplace. No commissions. You keep your own card terminal and your own processing rates.

We are honest about what is extra: SMS reminders are charged as credits on top of the £39/month price. And we do not have a consumer marketplace, so we will not send you new customers the way Fresha or Treatwell might. What we will do is give you a predictable bill every month that does not grow when your business does.

If you are paying more than £39/month for your current booking platform (and based on the numbers above, you almost certainly are), it might be worth seeing what that £39 actually gets you.

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Sources: Fresha UK pricing (March 2026), Fresha Help Centre, Booksy UK pricing (March 2026), BarberInsights, Square UK pricing (March 2026), Square UK fees, Treatwell UK, NHBF Industry Reports, Professional Beauty, Trustpilot, Capterra, Software Advice, Sitejabber