Let Clients Book Online While You Focus on the Work

Salons, med spas, cleaning companies, massage therapists, personal trainers, tutors, dog groomers, and home service providers — anywhere a client books time with a person, a room, or a piece of equipment. The more useful question is not your industry but how unusual your availability rules are. If you are one person selling thirty-minute slots, Calendly or Square Appointments will do the job for a few dollars a month and you should use them. Custom starts paying when the rules get specific: a treatment that needs both an esthetician and a particular room, travel time between addresses so the calendar stops booking a cleaner in Irvine and Fullerton back to back, durations that change with add-ons, or an intake form that must be signed before the appointment exists at all. Our /compare pages say that plainly rather than selling a build to someone who does not need one.

Yes, and the mechanism matters more than the yes. Every confirmation email and text carries a private link to that specific booking, so the client needs no account and no password to change it. Inside your cancellation window they can cancel or move themselves and the slot returns to public availability immediately, which is the part that actually earns money — a Tuesday morning freed at 8pm is bookable by somebody else overnight instead of sitting empty. Outside the window the same link submits a request to your staff rather than silently releasing the time, and your deposit rules apply as written. Staff are notified either way and every change is recorded with a timestamp. What this replaces is the cancellation text sent to a phone nobody checks until morning, and the double booking that follows when the front desk fills the slot from memory.

Yes. We connect a payment processor, usually Stripe, and take a card at the moment of booking. It can be full prepayment, a flat deposit, or a percentage, and it can vary by service — a card on file for the twenty-minute appointment and a real deposit on the three-hour one that hurts when it vanishes. Refunds follow your policy, and the money moves through your own merchant account: we do not sit between you and your revenue, and processor fees stay between you and Stripe. The honest caveat is that deposits cut both ways. They reduce no-shows, and they also stop some first-time clients booking at all. So the sensible approach is to require them on the appointments where an empty chair is genuinely expensive rather than across the board, then watch what happens to your booking volume before extending the rule.

Yes, and it should work in both directions. Appointments booked online appear on each staff member's Google Calendar within a minute or two, and their personal busy blocks push back the other way, so the public booking page stops offering a slot when somebody has a dentist appointment on their own calendar. Each person connects their own Google account, so nobody shares logins. Outlook and standard iCal feeds work the same way. Two things are worth knowing. Sync is near real-time rather than instant, so we hold a short buffer to stop two clients grabbing the same slot in the same minute. And a booking deleted straight out of Google Calendar does not cancel the client's appointment or tell them anything — cancellations belong in the booking system so the client is actually informed. Without two-way sync, staff keep a private calendar and the shared one quietly goes stale.

Simple booking portals start from $1,900. Systems with payment, multiple staff and service selection sit above that floor; we scope the figure on a call rather than publish a misleading range. That is the Build & Transfer route: one payment, then the source code and hosting credentials are handed to you, with no monthly fee and nothing to be locked into. If you would rather not own the running of it, Build & Maintain starts at $999 setup plus from $149 per month and we host, monitor, back up, and fix it. Final scope is quoted after a short workflow call, because the number is driven by how many services, staff, and rules you have rather than by a package name. Do your own arithmetic before committing: add up what a booking platform charges you monthly and per booking over three years, and compare it with a one-time build you own. Sometimes the subscription still wins, and we will say so.