Phorest Pricing 2026: What It Actually Costs (Plans, Fees and the Quote Gap)

What Phorest Is, and Why Its Price Is Hard to Find

Phorest is salon, spa and clinic management software built in Dublin and trading for more than two decades. It runs the appointment book, the till, the client record, the marketing and the payments for hair salons, barbers, nail bars, spas, aesthetics clinics and med spas. Phorest reports serving close to 12,000 businesses and over 160,000 beauty professionals across eleven regions — company figures rather than audited ones, but the scale in the UK and Irish market in particular is not in question. It is a premium product with a strong reputation among the salons that use it.

What it does not have is a price. Search for what Phorest costs and you will find plan names, feature lists, a “Request a quote” button under every tier, and a long tail of third-party estimates that disagree with each other by a factor of five. That gap is why this page exists. Below is what Phorest actually publishes as of July 2026, what is documented in its help centre and its own terms and conditions, what drives the quote you will be given, the questions worth asking before you sit the demo, and — honestly — where a flat published price like Bizzly's is the better purchase and where it plainly is not.

How Phorest Pricing Works

Phorest sells through a demo and a tailored quote. There is no self-serve checkout, no published price list and no starting-from figure on the vendor site — the UK, US and Irish pricing pages name the tiers and then ask for your contact details. That is a deliberate model, not an oversight, and it has three consequences worth understanding before you book anything.

1. The plan bundles services, not just software

Part of the reason there is no list price is that a Phorest plan is not purely software. Every tier includes installation and tailored setup, unlimited ongoing training, and data migration handled by Phorest specialists; higher tiers add a dedicated business advisor. Those are people-hours, and their value differs enormously between a two-chair barber and a six-site clinic group. Against a self-serve platform where you import your own client list on a Sunday evening, that is a real inclusion and the most defensible argument for quoting rather than publishing.

2. The tiers gate features, not seats

Unusually for this market, Phorest does not charge per bookable staff member. Its pricing page states unlimited staff members and unlimited devices on every plan. What the tiers gate is capability: consultation forms and the online store arrive at Grow, the branded client app and Reserve with Google at Ultimate, premium marketing at Elite. So your bill is driven by which feature you cannot live without, not by how many people you employ — the opposite shape to Fresha, Vagaro and most of the per-seat field. For a growing multi-chair salon that is a genuine advantage.

3. Several real costs sit outside the plan entirely

Three lines are separate from the subscription, and only one of them is easy to find. SMS is metered beyond 500 free messages a month. Card processing runs through PhorestPay, which is built on Stripe, at rates that are not published. And in the UK and Ireland every online booking carries a fee of £0.60 to £1.50 depending on the value of the booking — documented in the help centre rather than on the pricing page, and the line most salons discover after they sign.

What Is Publicly Known (July 2026)

Here is everything with a documented source, separated from everything that is an estimate. The published lines are worth more than the estimated ones — they are the parts of the bill you can plan around today.

Read that table in two halves. The published half is genuinely informative: 500 free texts a month is a more generous allowance than most competitors offer, unlimited staff and devices is a better pricing shape than per-seat charging, and included setup and migration is a real service. The unpublished half — the plan price itself, and the card processing rate — is the half that decides your budget, and neither can be established without a sales conversation.

What Drives the Quote You Will Be Given

Since the number is negotiated rather than listed, it helps to know which of your own facts move it. Five things do.

• Which tier your must-have feature sits in. The biggest single lever. A branded client app is an Ultimate feature; consultation forms and the online store arrive at Grow. Work out the lowest tier containing the one capability you cannot do without, and quote against that rather than being sold upward.
• Business type. Med spas and aesthetics clinics are quoted on a parallel plan family — Core, Elevate and Elite Aesthetics — rather than the salon tiers. Ask which family you are on and what differs between them.
• Number of locations. Multi-site groups are quoted differently from single salons. Ask whether the figure is per location, and what a second site adds.
• Region. Tier names, SMS rates and booking fees all vary by country, and the US site names its popular tier Complete Advantage where the UK site names Grow and Ultimate. Quote the tier by its features, not its label.
• Contract length and timing. With a twelve-month term as the baseline, discounts for annual prepayment or for signing at a particular point in the quarter are normal in quote-led sales. Ask.

The Questions to Ask in the Demo

A demo with a quote-only vendor is a pricing interview, not just a product tour. These are the eleven answers to leave with, in writing. None of them are unreasonable and a good salesperson will answer all of them.

1. What is the monthly price of the specific tier you are recommending, in my currency, including tax?
2. Is that per location, and what does a second location cost?
3. What is the minimum term, when does it auto-renew, and how much notice must I give to leave?
4. If I cancel mid-term, exactly what do I owe?
5. What is the online booking fee in my country, at each booking-value band, and can it be passed to the client?
6. Does the online booking fee apply to bookings made in the branded app, and to rebookings by existing clients?
7. What are the PhorestPay rates — in person and online — and is there a terminal cost?
8. What is my SMS rate beyond the 500 included, and does a long appointment reminder count as one text or two?
9. Which features in this demo are add-ons rather than plan inclusions, and what does each cost?
10. Which tier is Front Desk AI on, is it an add-on, and is it metered by message?
11. What is the price-increase policy at renewal, and what notice will I get?

If the answer to any of these is “we can look at that later”, that is information too. And do the arithmetic in the room: take your own online booking volume and average booking value, multiply by the fee band, and add it to the monthly figure before you compare Phorest with anything else.

What Each Plan Includes

The gating is logical and the jumps are meaningful rather than artificial. Starter is a complete booking and marketing system. Grow is where most salons land, and the consultation forms, online store and gift vouchers matter in beauty. Ultimate is bought for one thing above all — your own branded app in the app stores, which very few competitors at any price can match — alongside Reserve with Google for discovery. Elite is for premium and multi-site operations. The tension is that the two capabilities most likely to drive a beauty business up the ladder both sit at Ultimate, and you cannot find out what Ultimate costs without a sales call. That is the transparency gap in one sentence.

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 appointments, about 80 of them booked online at an average value above £40, and around 600 confirmation and reminder texts a month. An ordinary shape for a small UK salon.

The honest reading is that the range is wide because the largest line is unknowable from the outside. What the exercise does show is the shape: the published fees alone — booking fees, metered SMS and a separate website — come to roughly £130 to £155 a month before the subscription is counted at all. At eighty online bookings a month the booking fee on its own is near £1,440 a year, and it is the line that scales with exactly the behaviour you are trying to encourage.

When Phorest Is Worth Paying For

Phorest is a strong product and, for the right business, worth a premium. Its review scores are high and its retention in the UK and Irish salon market speaks for itself.

• You want your own branded client app. A salon-branded app in the App Store and Play Store, with bookings, rebooking and loyalty points inside it, is something almost nothing else in this price bracket offers. Bizzly does not have one.
• You run a loyalty scheme. TreatCard is Phorest's best-known feature for good reason — points on appointments and retail, redeemable for rewards, visible in the app or on barcoded keytags. Bizzly has no loyalty programme.
• You take money over a counter. Point of sale, PhorestPay terminals, walk-in checkout and retail stock are core Phorest territory. Bizzly does none of it.
• You are growing headcount. Unlimited staff and devices on every plan means your fifth stylist costs nothing in software. On per-seat platforms she costs about £120 a year, indefinitely.
• You want your data moved and your team trained. Setup, migration and unlimited training are included on every tier — worth real money for a busy salon switching systems mid-year.
• Marketing is how you grow. The Marketing Suite, ReConnect lapsed-client campaigns and the Online Reputation Manager are mature and well regarded. Bizzly has review requests and automated transactional messaging, but no win-back campaign engine.

If three or more of those describe you, Phorest is likely the right purchase and the alternative below will not replace it. Go and get the quote.

Where Bizzly Fits

Bizzly is an all-in-one platform for service businesses that sell bookings, memberships and course blocks. It is not a salon till and does not pretend to be. What it does differently starts with the thing this page is about: the price is published. £19, £29 and £49 a month, with a 14-day free trial and no card required, no charge per staff member and no commission or platform fee on any booking. It is a global product rather than a UK-only one — your own clients are charged in your business's operating currency through your own Stripe account.

Four structural differences drive the comparison for a beauty business.

1. A real website, not a booking widget

Phorest gives you a booking widget to embed, booking through Facebook and Instagram, and from Ultimate a branded app. What it does not give you is a marketing website. Every Bizzly plan — including the £19 Base tier — includes a fully flexible drag-and-drop editor where the whole public site is editable block by block: treatment menus, before-and-after galleries, course pages, aftercare guides, price lists, policies. There are 26 components to drop in, including the booking calendar, the timetable, your plans, a store with a cart, testimonials, contact forms and the entire customer portal, so the marketing site and the checkout become one system on one bill. Styling runs from a global theme and your own colours down to a raw CSS inspector on a single element; each page carries its own SEO settings; edits are captured as version snapshots you can roll back; and there is a media library with stock photography plus AI page creation and refinement. The bounds are honest ones — the editor itself is a desktop tool, and you build from the component palette rather than injecting your own code. On Pro it runs on your own domain with branded email.

2. Memberships and term or season billing, side by side

Credit where it is due: Phorest memberships are good. Service-based plans that include set treatments each cycle, credit-based plans that give a spend value, billing every couple of weeks or monthly or quarterly, fixed-term or open-ended, all manageable by the client in the branded app. That is a proper membership engine and Bizzly is not obviously better at it.

What Bizzly adds is a second billing model running alongside the first. Monthly plans with booking quotas, session packs with expiry dates, one-off term and holiday-camp packs, and season subscriptions — all at once. A twelve-week skin programme, a six-session laser course, an eight-week lash training cohort, a termly academy timetable. Late joiners are pro-rated mid-term automatically so someone starting in week four pays for what is left, blocks can be sold whole or day by day, capacity is held while a client is at the checkout so a course cannot oversell, and season subscriptions roll members into the next season natively through Stripe with the cancellation policy you choose — billing-period end, a notice period, or the end of the season. For a training academy or a clinic selling structured treatment courses, that is the difference between the software doing the arithmetic and you doing it in a spreadsheet.

3. Booking is gated on payment

Bizzly's booking quotas are payment-gated: billing and booking are one system, so a client can only book what their active plan, pack or credits cover, and if payment lapses new bookings are blocked automatically. Each plan carries its own booking rules — how far ahead members may book, how close to the start, and how much notice they must give to cancel. For a membership-led beauty business — brow and lash maintenance plans, monthly facial memberships, unlimited-treatment tiers — that removes the month-end reconciliation where you cross-check the appointment book against a payments report to find who quietly stopped paying and is still turning up.

4. A WhatsApp AI assistant, inside a published allowance

Phorest has moved here too, and it should be acknowledged: Front Desk AI was unveiled at its January 2026 Salon Owners Summit, handling SMS bookings, cancellations, reschedules and general queries, with Phorest reporting more than 85% of messages answered automatically, alongside WhatsApp integration. It looks like a serious piece of work. What is not published is which tier it sits on, whether it is an add-on, or what it costs.

Bizzly's equivalent is in the Standard plan at £29 a month with a stated allowance: a WhatsApp AI assistant that checks live availability including recurring slots, books and cancels appointments, suggests alternative times, joins clients to a waitlist and checks their place, answers questions about their account, subscription and invoices, raises support tickets and answers business questions from a knowledge base you write — 24/7, with the client verified by one-time passcode before it touches their account. It reschedules by cancelling and rebooking rather than moving a booking in place. Standard includes 500 messages a month, Pro 2,000. The capability gap between the two may be small. The pricing gap is that you can read one of the numbers.

Around those four sit the day-to-day tools: waitlists that auto-offer a freed place with a time-limited claim link paid through Stripe, attendance registers marked Present, Late or Absent with a note against each mark, custom registration forms for medical history, consent and patch tests, client profiles holding several people under one payer with custom fields that drive per-slot eligibility, free trial sessions as a bookable service, and staff bookings on a client's behalf. Clients get a portal that pauses, resumes, changes plan, cancels under your policy with a live refund quote, and shows credits, receipts and purchase history. Around it: automated confirmations, 24-hour email and SMS reminders, failed-payment chasing, credit-expiry warnings, review requests by SMS magic link published to your testimonials on every plan, discount codes via Stripe promotion codes, online consultations through Google Meet with links sent automatically, custom staff roles with a read/write permission matrix, HubSpot CRM and a calendar synced with Google Calendar.

What Bizzly does not do

These are real gaps, not caveats, and against Phorest specifically they are substantial. There is no point of sale and no card terminal, so counter payments, walk-ins and tips are not covered. There is no loyalty scheme — nothing equivalent to TreatCard — and no gift cards or gift vouchers; discount codes run through Stripe promotion codes, which is also how a sibling or family discount is applied, but the client enters the code rather than having it detected for them. There is no branded client app in the app stores — Bizzly is a responsive web app — and no Reserve with Google or consumer marketplace, so discovery is your own SEO, social and referrals. The Pro plan sells product online with variants and stock, but there is no supplier or purchase-order management for a retail counter, and no staff commission or payroll tracking. There is no per-client treatment-notes or progress journal — the nearest equivalents are the note saved against each attendance mark and custom profile fields for standing information, which is thinner than Phorest's client history for an aesthetics clinic. And setup is self-serve: nobody migrates your client list, and there is no business advisor.

One item that belongs here as a difference in shape rather than a gap: clients reschedule by cancelling and rebooking from the portal within the cancellation window, with the credit returned automatically and a new slot picked there and then, rather than moving an appointment in a single action. Staff can additionally move an individual booking or drag a whole session to a new time on the calendar.

If you run a high-street salon with a till, a retail shelf, a loyalty card and stylists on commission, that list should send you to Phorest and the quote is likely worth having. 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 a price you can read is the more important number.

Verdict

Phorest is a good product with an awkward purchasing experience. Unlimited staff and devices on every plan is a better pricing shape than the per-seat model most competitors use; 500 free texts a month is generous; included setup, migration and unlimited training are worth real money; and the branded client app, TreatCard loyalty and marketing suite genuinely justify a premium for a busy salon. None of that is in dispute, and the review scores reflect it.

The problem is that you cannot evaluate any of it commercially without a sales call. The plan price is unpublished, the card processing rate is unpublished, the online booking fee of £0.60 to £1.50 lives in the help centre rather than the pricing page, and the twelve-month auto-renewing term with two months' notice is in the terms and conditions rather than in front of you. Each is defensible alone. Together, the effect is that the most consistent criticism of Phorest is not about the software at all — it is about people feeling they did not know what they were signing.

So do the work the vendor has not done for you. Take the eleven questions above into the demo, get the answers in writing, add the published fees to the quoted plan, and multiply by twelve. Then compare that figure with a platform that puts its price on a page: Bizzly at £19 to £49 a month, with no per-booking fee and no per-staff charge, your clients charged in your own operating currency, a fully flexible website builder in every plan, memberships and term or season billing side by side, payment-gated booking quotas and a WhatsApp AI assistant from £29 — accepting that it has no till, no loyalty scheme and no branded app.

For the wider market, read our best software for beauty salons comparison, the transparency-gap breakdown of Fresha's published pricing and the direct Bizzly vs Fresha comparison. See how Bizzly handles beauty businesses on the beauty industry page, or check current plans on the pricing page.