What a booking commission actually costs a salon in a year.

The tax nobody itemises

Marketplaces charge between 15 and 30 percent of each booking they send. That is defensible for a genuinely new client who found you through them. It is harder to defend on the regular who has been coming for two years and happens to rebook through the app, because you are paying a finder fee for someone you already found.

A year, priced

Take a salon running 120 bookings a month at an average ticket of $60. Assume half of those arrive through a marketplace at 20 percent, which is the middle of the published band.

Year one carries the build. Year two is hosting alone, about $1,440, against another $8,640 of commission. The gap widens every year you stay open, and it widens faster the busier you get.

The part that is not money

The commission is the visible cost. The client relationship is the one that matters later. When the booking lives in someone else’s app, so does the history, the contact details and the reminder that brings them back. You are renting access to your own regulars.

An owned diary keeps that. The colour formula is still there next time, the client record is yours, and nothing takes a percentage for showing it to you. See the salon booking app, or the rest of salon and beauty.

Where owning is the wrong answer

If most of your bookings genuinely are strangers the marketplace found, the commission is buying you customer acquisition and an owned diary will not replace that. Owning wins when the marketplace is mostly billing you for repeat business. Count what share of last month was regulars before you decide, because that number settles it either way.

On-demand builds are quoted per project rather than per app, because a taxi dispatch and a salon diary are different systems wearing similar screens. What does not change is that nobody takes a cut. The terms are in pricing.