Ask an owner what their marketplace costs and you’ll hear the software fee — “about forty a month.” Ask their accountant and you’ll get a very different number. The difference is the commission: charged per new client, buried in the payout report, never shown as one figure.
The fee you see, the fee you don’t
Marketplaces charge in one of two ways. The subscription model — the common one in the Netherlands — pairs a software fee around €40 a month with a commission on the first booking of every new client, which lands at roughly 42% of that ticket once VAT is counted. The free-core model — Fresha is the big one, on its 2025-26 pricing — charges nothing for the core software, then takes 20% with a $6 minimum on every appointment from a new marketplace client, locks payments to its own processing, and bills SMS and marketing as extras. Different doors, same toll: the introduction is what gets taxed, once per person, forever spread out.
That structure has one consequence worth staring at: the better your shop is doing, the more you pay. Growth is the thing being taxed.
A worked example
Take a busy barbershop: 18 new clients a month from the marketplace, €25 average ticket. The commission on those first bookings comes to about €189 a month once VAT is counted. Add the €40 software fee and you’re at roughly €229 — every month, climbing with every good month.
Over a year that’s around €2,700. Not for the chairs, not for the clippers, not for the person cutting — for the introduction.
What “flat” changes
A flat-fee system inverts the deal. €49.99–€149.99 a month, whether the book holds 10 bookings or 200. The tenth new client costs the same as the first: nothing. The system stops being a tax on growth and becomes what it should have been — a fixed cost, like rent, that gets cheaper per booking the busier you get.
The marketplace still has a use: being found by strangers. Keep it for that if it earns its keep. Just stop paying a commission on the walk-in who saw your sign, the regular who’s been coming for years, and the caller who found your number on Google.
Do your own maths
Count last month’s new clients from the portal. Multiply by your average ticket, then by 0.42. Add the software fee. That’s the number to hold against a flat fee — and it’s the number the calculator on our homepage runs live, with sliders, if you’d rather not do it on a napkin.
And that was the last sum you had to do yourself: on our system, the app keeps track from here — what comes in, what goes out and what you keep, with the quarterly VAT alongside, ready for your bookkeeper.