Fresha Pricing 2026: What It Actually Costs (Plans, Fees and Commission)

What Fresha Is, and Why Its Price Is Suddenly a Question

Fresha is booking and business software for beauty and wellness: salons, barbers, nail bars, spas, aesthetics clinics and mobile therapists. It runs the calendar, the till, the client record and the payments, and it is attached to a consumer marketplace where people search for and book treatments directly. It is one of the biggest platforms in the sector by partner count — Fresha publishes partner and appointment numbers of its own, and while those are company marketing figures rather than independently audited ones, the scale is not seriously in doubt.

For a decade the pitch was that all of this cost nothing, which is what most older reviews still say and why this page exists. Fresha reportedly began moving away from its free-forever model in late 2024, and third-party trackers put the end of the free tier through 2025; as of July 2026 there is a 7-day trial and then a paid plan. If you are searching for what Fresha costs, you are almost certainly searching because the answer changed. Everything below uses Fresha's published UK prices as of July 2026 unless stated otherwise. Rates differ by country, sometimes substantially, so verify on fresha.com/pricing before you commit.

How Fresha Pricing Actually Works

Fresha does not price like most software. There are six separate lines and only the first appears in the headline. Knowing which line scales with what is the difference between a predictable bill and an unpleasant month four.

1. The plan scales with headcount, not features

The unusual thing about Fresha's tiers is that they barely gate features. Scheduling, point of sale, client records, consultation forms, inventory, invoicing, memberships, packages, gift cards, deals, marketing and the mobile app are on both self-serve plans. What the tiers gate is people: Independent covers exactly one bookable team member, Team charges roughly £9.95 for each one. Your first hire is therefore a pricing event, and so is your fifth.

2. New marketplace clients carry a 20% commission

When a client who has never visited you books through the Fresha marketplace, Fresha takes 20% of that first appointment, minimum around £4. It is charged once — every booking that client makes afterwards is commission-free. Read properly, that is an advertising cost with the risk moved onto Fresha: you pay only when a real person actually books. Read carelessly, it is a nasty surprise on a busy month.

3. Processing, messaging and add-ons sit outside the plan

Card processing is per transaction and varies sharply by country. Texts and WhatsApp messages are metered after 20 free a month, marketing emails after 50. And several capabilities most salons assume are included — advanced reporting, loyalty, review prompting, AI call handling, accounting sync — are paid add-ons, some per location and some per team member.

Fresha Plans, Fees and Add-Ons (July 2026)

Third-party breakdowns disagree on some of these numbers, mostly because they quote different countries — US card rates are roughly double the UK ones, and plan prices are set locally rather than converted. The pattern worth noticing is that almost every line scales with something: the plan and Insights with headcount, commission with new clients, processing with revenue, messaging with appointment volume. No line stays still as you grow.

What Each Plan Includes

This is a fair deal for a solo operator. At around £14.95/month, Independent gives a one-person business a full till, stock control, consultation forms, memberships, gift cards, a mobile app and marketplace exposure — more product than most competitors put in an entry tier, and why Fresha is hard to beat for a single mobile therapist or a one-chair barber.

The economics change with headcount. Because the tiers gate seats rather than features, growing does not unlock anything — it just costs more. Ten bookable staff on Team is roughly £99.50/month for exactly the product three staff had at £29.85, and Insights across ten people takes you near £180 before a client has paid you. Several add-ons are priced per location, so multi-site businesses should price each site separately.

The Fees Beyond the Plan

Fresha's published UK card rates as of July 2026 are around 1.19% + 20p in person, 1.40% + 25p online and 2.20% + 20p for manual entry, with terminals at around £99 per device. It is worth being straight about this: the UK in-person rate is lower than Stripe's standard UK card rate of around 1.5% + 20p, so a salon taking most of its money face to face pays less to process through Fresha than through a Stripe-based platform — roughly £28 a month in Fresha's favour on £9,000 of takings. US rates are a different story at roughly 2.29% + $0.20 in person.

Messaging is metered, and 20 free texts a month is not many for a salon running confirmations and reminders — a three-chair salon can clear that in the first week. Budget roughly £0.06 per text and £0.08 per marketing text beyond the allowance. The add-on list is where the bill quietly doubles: AI Concierge at around £79.95 per location, Client Loyalty at around £49.95 per location, Google Rating Boost at around £12.95 per location, Insights at around £7.95 per bookable member, Xero accounting at around £7.95 per location and Premium Support at around £14.95. None of it is compulsory. All of it is the kind of thing salons assume is in the price.

Where reviewers say Fresha falls short

The criticism in recent public reviews is consistent rather than scattered. Billing is first: unexpected charges, difficulty getting them resolved, and commission charged on marketplace bookings that clients later cancelled. Second is the loss of the free plan itself, particularly from users who signed up on free-forever terms. Third is customisation and lock-in — limited control over how your booking page looks, clients reportedly required to create a Fresha account to book, and a short list of third-party integrations, which means your client records, reminders and booking history live inside Fresha's system rather than yours. That last point deserves the most thought, because it is the one that makes leaving expensive later.

Worked Example: A Three-Chair UK Salon

Take an owner plus two stylists in one location: around £9,000 a month in takings across roughly 180 mostly in-person payments, about eight new marketplace clients a month at an average first appointment of £55, and around 400 confirmation and reminder texts. An ordinary shape for a small salon.

Read that from the bottom up. Card processing of about £143 is not really a software cost — it goes to the card networks whichever platform you use, and Fresha's UK in-person rate is competitive. Marketplace commission of about £88 is acquisition spend, and if those eight clients rebook it is cheap acquisition. What is left — about £89 a month in plan, metered texts and two modest add-ons — is the real software line, against a £9.95 headline. Drop both optional add-ons and it falls to around £53. Hire two more stylists and the plan alone goes to £49.75 before anything else moves.

When Fresha Is Worth Paying For

Fresha is well built and, for the right business, priced fairly.

• You want the marketplace. No ordinary booking platform replicates it. Fresha's own marketing credits it with a meaningful share of partners' new clients and a healthy rebooking rate — vendor figures rather than audited ones, but the discovery channel itself is real. On a competitive high street, 20% of a first appointment is a rational trade.
• You take money over a counter. Point of sale, a card terminal, walk-in checkout and tips are core Fresha territory. Bizzly does none of it.
• You sell retail product across a counter. Stock levels, suppliers and purchase orders are included rather than bolted on. Bizzly's Pro plan sells product online with variants and stock, but it has no supplier or purchase-order side.
• Your team works from phones. Native iOS and Android apps for owners and staff, plus a consumer app clients already have installed.
• You run gift cards or a loyalty scheme. Gift cards, points-based loyalty and promotional deals are native to Fresha. Bizzly does discount codes through Stripe promotion codes, but it has no gift cards and no loyalty programme.
• You are a solo operator. Around £14.95/month for the full feature set is genuinely good value and hard to undercut.

If three or more of those describe you, Fresha is probably the right purchase and the alternative below will not replace it.

Where Bizzly Fits

Bizzly is not a salon till and does not pretend to be. It is an all-in-one platform for service businesses that sell bookings, memberships and course blocks — priced flat, globally, in your own currency, with no charge per team member and no commission on any booking.

Four structural differences drive the comparison for a beauty business.

1. A real website, not a booking page

Fresha gives you a hosted profile and an embeddable widget, with limited control over how it looks and clients reportedly asked to create a Fresha account before they can book. Bizzly ships a fully flexible drag-and-drop website editor on every plan: every page of your public site is editable block by block, you add whatever pages you like — treatment menus, before-and-afters, course pages, aftercare guides — and the booking calendar, timetable, plan pricing, store and the whole customer portal are components you drop onto a page rather than a widget bolted onto someone else's site. Styling goes down to individual elements, with a global theme, your own colours, a media library and per-page SEO with a search-result preview, and you can snapshot a page version before you change it. The editor itself is a desktop tool, and there is no custom code injection. On Pro it runs on your own domain with branded emails.

2. Two billing models, side by side

Fresha does memberships and prepaid packages, and does them properly — that should be said. What it does not do is term and season billing. Bizzly runs monthly memberships and session packs and term or season blocks together: a twelve-week skin programme, a six-session laser course, an eight-week lash training cohort, a school-term academy timetable. Late joiners are pro-rated mid-term automatically, packs can be sold whole or per day, capacity is held while a client is at the checkout so a block cannot oversell, and season subscriptions roll members into the next season automatically with the cancellation policy you choose — billing-period end, a notice period, or the end of the season. For training academies and clinics selling structured courses, that is the difference between the software doing the maths and you doing it in a spreadsheet.

3. Billing and booking are one system

Bizzly's booking quotas are payment-gated. A client can only book what their active plan, pack or credits cover, and if their payment lapses new bookings are blocked automatically. Each plan carries its own booking rules too — how far ahead members may book, how close to the start, and how much notice they must give to cancel. No cross-checking a calendar against a payments report at month end, and no awkward conversation with the member whose card failed in March. For membership-led beauty businesses — brow and lash maintenance plans, monthly facial memberships, unlimited-treatment tiers — that is the most useful thing here.

4. A WhatsApp AI assistant, in the plan

From the Standard plan at £29/month, Bizzly includes a WhatsApp AI assistant that checks live availability, books and cancels appointments, suggests alternative times, joins clients to a waitlist, answers questions about their account, subscription and invoices, raises a support ticket and answers business questions from your own knowledge base — around the clock, with the client verified by one-time code first. It cannot reschedule in place: it cancels and rebooks. Messages come out of a plan allowance, 500 a month on Standard and 2,000 on Pro, rather than a per-minute charge or a separate module. Fresha's nearest equivalent, AI Concierge, is an add-on at around £79.95 per location per month, with metered minutes and messages once its own allowance runs out. If your clients message rather than ring — and in beauty, most now do — that is a large practical and financial difference.

Alongside those, Bizzly includes waitlists that offer a freed place to the next client in the queue with a time-limited claim link, attendance registers with Present, Late and Absent marking and a note against each mark, custom intake forms for medical history, consent and patch tests, client profiles that hold several people under one payer, free trial sessions as a first-class bookable service, discount codes through Stripe promotion codes, Stripe receipts and full purchase history in a customer portal where clients pause, change plan or cancel under your own policy, online consultations through Google Meet with links generated and sent automatically, HubSpot CRM sync, a calendar synced with Google Calendar, review requests by SMS magic link that publish straight to your testimonials, and Google Business Profile integration from the Standard plan.

What Bizzly does not do

These are real gaps, not caveats. There is no consumer marketplace — Bizzly will not bring you a single new client, and you drive your own traffic through your site, SEO, social and referrals. There is no point of sale and no card terminal, so counter payments and tips are not covered. The Pro plan carries a merch store with product variants and stock levels, but there is no supplier or purchase-order management of the kind a retail shelf needs. Discount codes are covered — they run through Stripe promotion codes, which is also how a sibling or family discount is handled, though the client has to enter the code rather than have it detected for them — but there are no gift cards and no loyalty scheme. There is no native mobile app — it is a responsive web app, fine for an owner and weaker at a busy front desk than Fresha's apps. And there is no staff commission or payroll tracking, which a commission-paying salon will feel immediately.

If you run a high-street salon with a till, a retail shelf and stylists on commission, that list should send you to Fresha and the price is fair. If you are a mobile therapist, an aesthetics clinic selling treatment courses, a training academy running termly cohorts or a membership-led studio — and your website is your shopfront — most of the list is irrelevant to you, and the flat fee is the more important number.

Verdict

Fresha is no longer the free platform its reputation is built on, and the honest summary is that it is still good value for the right shape of business. A solo therapist gets a full till, stock control, consultation forms, memberships and marketplace exposure for around £14.95/month, which is difficult to beat. The marketplace is a genuine advantage no ordinary booking tool replicates, the UK in-person card rate is competitive, and 20% of a first appointment is cheap client acquisition if that client rebooks.

The problem is what happens as you grow. The plan is per bookable person, several add-ons are per person too, messaging is metered, and the commission scales with the new business you are trying to win. Our three-chair example lands near £321/month all-in against a £9.95 headline, and ten staff on Team with Insights approaches £180/month in software alone. For a salon with a counter and a retail shelf, that is money well spent. For an appointment-only or membership-led beauty business you are paying per head for a till you do not use, while still buying a website somewhere else. That is the case for a flat-priced alternative: £19 to £49/month whatever your headcount, no commission on any booking, billed in your own currency, with a fully flexible website builder, memberships and term or season billing side by side, payment-gated booking quotas and a WhatsApp AI assistant already in the price.

See how Bizzly handles beauty businesses on the beauty industry page, read the direct Bizzly vs Fresha comparison, or check current plans on the pricing page.