Bookings without the 6% fee.
A lot of booking platforms cost you nothing to join and add a fee to your customer's checkout instead. Every booking pays it, for as long as you use the platform, and all of it goes to them.
I build the booking system into your own website. I add no fee to your customers' prices, I take no cut of any booking, and your customers stay on your site from the first click to the confirmation. Taking payment on the site is quoted on top, and the list below says what else is.
What the fee adds up to over 5 years
Set your average booking, how many you take in a month and your platform's fee. If your platform charges you a monthly plan and a commission instead, switch it at the top and the whole comparison follows.
Your numbers
How your platform charges
$180,000 a year booked online. Every figure below is built from the three numbers above. Change them and the whole comparison recalculates.
Booking platform, fee at checkout
Free to you. Your customers pay the fee.
Free to you, but the fee is on every booking for as long as you use it, and all of it goes to the platform.
Custom booking module
A purpose-built implementation, added to your own site.
Your bookings and customer list stay yours, with permanent rights to keep running the system. No fee is added at your checkout, in a record season or a quiet one.
Yours over 5 years at the same checkout total
$46,900
At the starting price, the build pays for itself in month 5. Everything after that is fee money that stays with you.
That is if your own checkout charges what customers pay now: your price plus the fee. Drop the fee instead and your customers pay less, which only pays back if it brings you more bookings. The custom side is the starting price, before taking payment on your own site, which is quoted on top.
What it looks like compounding
Running totals by the end of each year. The platform line is your site plan plus the fees your customers paid, and it keeps climbing because the fee is a percentage of every booking.
Card processing (roughly 2.9% + 30¢ a transaction) is charged by the payment provider on both sides, so it is left out of both columns rather than counted against one.
The custom column is not a zero-monthly column, and this demo will not pretend it is. Managed Hosting is a flat $30/mo. Managed Database Infrastructure starts at $45/mo, because a booking system persistently stores bookings. In this demo that base rate covers up to 25 bookings a month; from 26 it steps up to $50/mo, and a further $5 for each 25 after that. More bookings means more people checking availability and booking, and every one of those is work the database behind it has to do — what it costs to run follows that activity far more than the number of bookings it stores. At 100 bookings a month the two come to $90/mo. The platform column's $30/mo is before its fee, and the fee is where the difference comes from.
Both columns assume you run your own website either way, on a typical $30/mo site plan. If your platform also supplies your whole website, the custom side needs a website built too, which the module price does not cover. The fee slider opens at 6%, a common platform rate — set it to match yours. The module price is my starting price for adding a booking system to a five-page site, and taking payment at booking is quoted on top; the database steps above the base rate are an illustration for this demo, not a quoted price. Real numbers come out of a scoping call, and if sustained use ever needs a larger database plan, I'll discuss the upgrade and its recurring cost with you first.
Book a trip the way your customers would
An invented tour company and an invented rental shop. Pick a trip, a day and how many are coming, and watch the seats count down. The customer stays on the operator's own site from the first click to the confirmation.
Loading the booking demo…
What a booking system from me does
No double bookings
A time is held the moment someone books it, so two customers can never get the same spot.
A confirmation with its own link
Your customer gets an email with a private link to cancel or pick a different time, without phoning you.
You hear about every change
An email to you on every booking, move and cancellation, with the customer's notes.
Your own booking panel
See what is booked, add a booking taken over the phone, move one or cancel one.
Hours you set yourself
Change your hours or block a day from your own login, and the booking page follows.
Shaped around how your trips run
- Seats per departure that count down as people book
- A price per guest, with the number of guests capped at what is left
- Multi-day hire, only offered when a boat or kayak is free for every day of it
- Your trips, your prices and your wording, not a platform's template
Quoted when you need them
- Taking payment at booking, on your own site, through your own payment account, with refunds from your booking panel
- Deposits instead of paying in full
- Reminder emails before the trip
- Waivers signed at booking
- Gift cards
- Several boats or guides running at the same time
What it costs
I quote a booking system from a written list of what it has to do, because a one-boat charter and a rental shop with forty kayaks are different builds. For scale, Growth, a website with one tool your customers use, starts at $7,000. Taking payment at booking, seats per departure and multi-day hire are quoted on top of that.
- Managed Hosting$30 a month, flat
- Managed Database Infrastructurefrom $45 a month, because a booking system stores bookings
- A fee or commission on each bookingnone, from me or added at your checkout
Card processing, roughly 2.9% + 30¢ a payment, is charged by your payment provider whichever way you take bookings, so it is the same on a platform and on your own site.
All prices in Canadian dollars, before applicable tax.
When a platform is still the better choice
- Most of your bookings come through resellers and travel sites. The connections a platform has already built to them are worth paying for, and your own site would not replace them.
- You take a handful of bookings a month. The fees stay small and a build takes years to pay for itself. The calculator above shows where that line sits for you.
- Your platform charges a flat monthly price and no fee per booking. The numbers are much closer. Run them above before deciding anything.
If one of those is you, I will say so on the call rather than sell you a build.
Want to see what it would look like with your own trips?
Book a call, or get a rough estimate first in about two minutes.