Guide · Online Booking
Two booking tools publish their card-processing rate. The rest hand you to a processor and stay silent.
GlossGenius charges a flat 2.6% and Booksy 2.49%–2.69%; the other fifteen vendors in our index hand payments to a third party whose rate they don't quote — so the real cost lives off the pricing page.
The subscription is the number every booking tool puts on its pricing page. The processing fee — the cut taken every time a client actually pays you — is the number most of them don’t. And for a salon, clinic, or studio running real transaction volume, that second number is usually the bigger one.
Here is the direct answer: of the seventeen vendors in our index, exactly two publish their own card-processing rate. GlossGenius charges a flat 2.6% on all three plans — Standard, Gold, and Platinum alike. Booksy charges by how the card is taken: 2.69% + $0.30 for mobile or keyed-in payments, 2.49% + $0.10 through its card reader, and 2.49% + $0.20 for Tap to Pay. The other fifteen quote you nothing on processing — the rate is whatever a third party charges, and their booking pricing page is silent on it. Most of those fifteen lean on a named processor (Stripe, Square, or PayPal); two — the quote-only salon platforms Fresha and Vagaro — bundle payments through their own back-office stack (Fresha via Xero/Meta, Vagaro via QuickBooks/Zapier) without publishing a USD rate at all.
What the two rate-publishers actually cost on a sale
Because GlossGenius is a flat percentage and Booksy adds a fixed per-transaction fee, the cheaper one flips depending on ticket size. On a typical service charge:
| On a $100 sale | Processing fee | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|
| GlossGenius (all plans) | $2.60 | 2.60% |
| Booksy — Tap to Pay | $2.69 | 2.69% |
| Booksy — card reader | $2.59 | 2.59% |
| Booksy — mobile / keyed | $2.99 | 2.99% |
On a $100 ticket the spread is small. But the fixed Booksy component matters most on small tickets and least on large ones: a $30 add-on through Booksy’s keyed rate costs $1.11 (3.7%), while the same $30 on GlossGenius costs $0.78 (a flat 2.6%, no fixed fee). GlossGenius’s flat model is the more predictable line item; Booksy’s reader and Tap to Pay rates beat it once the per-transaction $0.10–$0.20 is spread across a larger sale.
Neither rate moves with the subscription tier. GlossGenius confirms 2.6% holds on the $24/mo (annual) Standard plan as much as on $148/mo Platinum, and Booksy’s single all-inclusive plan — $29.99/mo plus $20/mo per additional team member — carries the same processing schedule regardless of seat count.
The other fourteen hand you to a processor — and don’t quote the rate
Strip out the two rate-publishers (GlossGenius, Booksy) and Square Appointments, whose own processor is Square (its own case, below), and fourteen vendors remain. Every one of them leans on an outside payment processor and stops short of publishing what that costs. The integration lists tell the story: Acuity Scheduling connects Stripe, Square, and PayPal; Setmore, GReminders, Bookeo, and Picktime list Square and Stripe; Calendly, Cal.com, Appointlet, TidyCal, Doodle, and YouCanBookMe route through Stripe (several also through PayPal); vcita collects through PayPal and QuickBooks. The two quote-only salon platforms, Fresha and Vagaro, are the exception to the Stripe/Square/PayPal pattern — Fresha runs payments through its own system (Xero/Meta on the integration side) and Vagaro through QuickBooks/Zapier, and neither publishes any subscription or processing figure in USD at all. In every one of these fourteen cases the booking subscription is what you see, and the processing fee is a separate bill from a company whose rate isn’t on the page you’re shopping.
Square Appointments is the instructive middle case. Its Free plan is $0/mo and explicitly includes payment processing — but that’s because Square is the processor, and our index does not record a published Square Appointments processing percentage, so we won’t invent one. “Included” means bundled, not free; the rate is Square’s, just not quoted in the booking context.
This is the structural point a buyer should internalize: a $0 scheduler (Calendly, Setmore, GReminders, Appointlet, YouCanBookMe, Cal.com, Picktime, TidyCal, Doodle, and Square’s own Free tier all publish a $0 plan) or a $10/mo seat that routes payments through a third party is not cheaper than GlossGenius’s $24/mo just because the sticker is lower. The two tools that publish 2.6% and 2.49%–2.69% are telling you the part of the bill the others leave blank.
How to read this
If taking client payments is core to your day, the honest comparison isn’t subscription against subscription — it’s total cost of a transaction. Two vendors let you compute that up front: GlossGenius at a flat 2.6%, Booksy from 2.49% + $0.10 (reader) to 2.69% + $0.30 (keyed). The other fourteen make you go ask their processor — Stripe, Square, or PayPal for most, or Fresha’s and Vagaro’s own back-office stack — before you know your real cost per sale.
That doesn’t make the Stripe-based tools more expensive — Stripe’s standard card rate may well undercut both. It makes them unquoted. And an unquoted fee that fires on every payment you take is exactly the line item worth pinning down before you sign up, not after. We publish the two rates that are public, and flag the fourteen that aren’t, so the question lands where it belongs: not on the pricing page, but on the processor’s.