Websites and development
How much does a booking website cost? Tools, plugins and custom builds compared
A ready-made booking tool costs about $10–$60 a month for a small team, a WordPress booking plugin about €223 a year plus your site, and an agency-built custom platform €38,000–€95,000 before VAT, according to vendor pages and one 2026 agency price list. VITON13 builds custom booking platforms from $213, with the final price set by your brief.
How much does a booking website cost?
The price depends on the route, not on the number of pages. A tool rents you a booking page by the month, a plugin adds booking to a WordPress site you own, a custom build writes your rules into software you own, and a marketplace sells you customers for a share of each booking.
| Route | Published price | What it covers | What to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ready-made booking tool | About $10–$60 a month for a small team (Calendly, Acuity, SimplyBook) | Booking page or widget, calendar, reminders | Seat or booking limits; SMS and payments cost extra |
| WordPress plugin | WooCommerce Bookings: €223 for a one-year plan, as shown to us in euros | Booking on your own WooCommerce site, Google Calendar sync | Site and hosting cost extra; deposits need another extension |
| Agency-built custom platform | €38,000–€95,000 before VAT over 12–18 weeks (Kolonell, September 2026); $10,000–$50,000 for an MVP (PerfectionGeeks) | Real-time calendar, payments, accounts, admin | Upkeep of 15–18% of the build each year (Kolonell) |
| Marketplace listing | Commission instead of a fee: 15% on average for Booking.com, according to Guesty | Their audience and checkout | Part of every booking is theirs |
| VITON13 custom platform | From $213 AI-assisted or $313 human-led | Availability logic, booking and reminders, an operations dashboard | The final estimate comes from your brief |
The ranges disagree because they price different things: a tool price buys a shared product, a custom range buys one team’s time. Kolonell counts payments in every tier; PerfectionGeeks gives no feature breakdown.
What do Calendly, Acuity, SimplyBook, Square and Mindbody charge?
These five meter different things: Calendly seats, Acuity calendars, SimplyBook bookings and providers, Square and Mindbody locations.
| Tool | Plans and price | Payments and reminders | Extra costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calendly | Free; Standard $10 per seat a month; Teams $16, billed yearly | Free allows one event type and one calendar; payments and reminders start on Standard | Every host needs a seat; round-robin starts on Teams |
| Acuity Scheduling | Starter $16 (1 calendar), Standard $27 (up to 6), Premium $49 (up to 36), billed yearly; $20, $34 and $61 monthly | Payments on every plan; SMS reminders from Standard | Prices exclude taxes |
| SimplyBook.me | Free (50 bookings, 1 provider); Basic €11.9, Standard €24.9, Premium €49.9 a month billed yearly | Email reminders included; payments and deposits listed from Basic | SMS credits $8 per 100; custom domain with three years of SSL $119 |
| Square Appointments | Free $0, Plus $49, Premium $149 a month per location | Booking and reminders on every plan; no-show fees on Plus; resource management on Premium | Texts: 500 included on Plus, then 3¢ each |
| Mindbody | From €99 a month per location, as shown to us | Payments on every plan; email and text reminders from Accelerate | 20% fee, capped at $30, on a new client’s first purchase via its app |
Which features push the price of a booking website up?
Six features decide most of the bill.
- Calendar sync. WooCommerce Bookings syncs with Google Calendar, while Calendly’s free plan allows one calendar connection. In a custom build, sync is an integration of its own.
- Deposits and payments. Calendly collects payments from Standard and SimplyBook lists deposits from Basic. A custom build needs checkout and refunds; Kolonell counts a Stripe, deposit and refund module in every tier.
- Reminders. Email is standard everywhere we read; SMS is where the meter runs: $8 per 100 credits at SimplyBook, 3¢ a text on Square Plus after 500.
- Staff schedules and resources. Acuity sells 1, 6 or 36 calendars and SimplyBook 1 to 30 providers. Kolonell calls the real-time calendar, which locks a slot against double booking, the most sensitive technical item.
- Several locations. Square and Mindbody charge per location; Kolonell prices a multi-site build at €55,000–€72,000 against €38,000–€52,000 for one site.
- Integrations. PerfectionGeeks lists CRM and communication tools among the connections that raise a custom quote.
VITON13’s booking page names availability logic, booking with reminders and an operations dashboard. Integrations, such as a calendar or a hotel channel manager, feed the estimate; this guide promises none.
What do marketplaces and payment fees add on top?
| Channel or fee | Rate | Applies to | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Booking.com | 15% on average, 10–25% by market and property type (Guesty) | Hotel and guesthouse stays booked on the marketplace | Booking.com’s own pages were blocked to us |
| Mindbody app | 20%, capped at $30 | First purchase of a client the app brings you | Returning clients and your own links carry no fee |
| Square online card payments | 3.3% + 30¢ on Free; 2.9% + 30¢ on Plus and Premium | Card payments made online | In person: 2.6%, 2.5% or 2.4% + 15¢ |
| SimplyBook.me | No transaction fee of its own, according to SimplyBook | Bookings and customer payments | The payment processor still charges its own rate |
Run the numbers on your own volume. Each $1,000 of stays booked through a 15% channel costs $150 in commission. The same $1,000 paid on your own booking page at Square’s online rate costs about $29 plus 30¢ per payment. A marketplace also brings guests you would not have reached, so compare cost per new customer.
Subscription or custom: what does each cost over three years?
Take a salon with five staff and about 400 bookings a month. This is our arithmetic on the published prices above, not a quote.
| Route | Arithmetic | Three-year total |
|---|---|---|
| Acuity Standard, billed yearly | $27 × 36 months, up to 6 calendars | $972 |
| SimplyBook.me Standard, billed yearly | €24.9 × 36 months; 500 bookings cover the salon | €896 |
| Calendly Standard for five hosts | $10 × 5 seats × 36 months | $1,800 |
| WooCommerce Bookings plugin | €223 × 3 years, plus your site and hosting | €669 |
| Custom build, single site (Kolonell) | €38,000 + 3 × 15% upkeep, up to €52,000 + 3 × 18% | €55,100–€80,080 |
| VITON13 custom platform | From $213 AI-assisted or $313 human-led, plus third-party fees | Set by your written estimate |
Kolonell argues that on €400,000 of bookings a year a commission-based SaaS takes €6,000–€12,000, so a custom build pays back in 4 to 8 years on commission alone. The same page puts upkeep at 15–18% of the build: €5,700 a year on €38,000 leaves €300 of a €6,000 saving, or €6,300 of €12,000 and about six years. That is our reading of the agency’s figures.
When is a custom booking system worth building, and when not?
Build when a tool cannot hold a rule that makes you money, or when the fees you would stop paying exceed the upkeep you would start paying.
- Your rules do not fit a tool: shared rooms and staff, packages, group capacity or prices that change by the hour.
- Your yearly per-booking and commission costs clearly exceed 15–18% of the build price, Kolonell’s upkeep range.
- Booking has to live inside your own product, with customer accounts.
- You need to control where client data is stored.
Do not build yet if:
- A tool at $10–$60 a month covers your services and you have not hit a plan limit.
- You have no booking data yet.
- Nobody will own upkeep after launch.
- You only want a nicer booking page: SimplyBook offers an iframe and Square an embeddable widget.
What about client data, health data and deposits?
A booking record holds a name, a phone number and a time, and at a clinic or physiotherapist it can reveal health. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office lists data concerning health as special category data under Article 9 of the UK GDPR, which needs extra care. Where the data sits belongs in the choice between a tool and a build.
Deposits are payments, so they carry the card fees above. Write your cancellation and refund terms before you pick a tool and have them checked locally. This is not legal advice; ask a lawyer before storing health information.
What would a booking platform cost with VITON13?
The online booking platform page names three outputs: availability logic, booking with reminders and an operations dashboard. It starts at $213 AI-assisted or $313 human-led and usually takes 15–30 working days; the final estimate comes from the brief, which fixes user roles, integrations and platforms. Our business website service leaves booking engines and online payments out, so they are separate lines.
Cost calculator
Plan your booking system
Tick what you need; the totals update as you choose.
Your estimate
- AI-assisted
- from $213
- Human-led
- from $313
- Timeline
- 15–30 working days
stages can overlap; the written estimate fixes the dates
Get a written estimate in 1 working dayStarting prices of VITON13 services; the written estimate sets the final price after the brief.
How VITON13 does it
We start from one normal booking and one that went wrong, then agree roles, services and who accepts the result. Acceptance means walking one role journey end to end, including a failure state. In the AI-assisted mode AI speeds up scaffolding and tests while an engineer reviews every change; in the human-led mode the engineer writes the code and AI assists. A written proposal fixes milestones, exclusions and rollback first.
Online booking platform
- Price
- $213 AI-assisted or $313 human-led
- Timeline
- 15–30 working days
The final price is fixed in writing after a short scope review.
Payment system integration
- Price
- $73 AI-assisted or $93 human-led
- Timeline
- 5–8 working days
Business website development
- Price
- $113 AI-assisted or $173 human-led
- Timeline
- 3–5 working days
AI-assisted: AI drafts inside defined steps, a person directs and checks every result. Human-led: a specialist does the work and AI assists.
What is included
- Availability logic, so two clients cannot take the same slot, with consistent time zone, reschedule and cancellation rules
- Booking flow and reminders
- An operations dashboard for your staff
- Acceptance on one end-to-end role journey with real states and a recovery case
- Delivery: 15–30 working days after the brief is approved
Not included
- Fees paid to third parties, such as payment processors, SMS and email providers, hosting and domains
- Card checkout, refunds and reconciliation, which are the separate payment system integration service
- Legal advice on client data, health data and cancellation terms, and any promise of bookings or revenue
Revisions: 2 revision rounds on each stage
Get an estimate in 1 working dayWritten estimate within 1 working day
Example
CONCEPTConcept — not a commissioned project
HOURLINE: our own concept booking platform, not a client project
HOURLINE is a booking platform VITON13 built as a concept for a fictional house of three studios in Moscow, Dubai and London. A guest books on a phone and the studio sees it in its calendar at once. On 28 September 2026 we measured it in headless Chrome: a scripted phone booking took a median of 6 seconds over 14 runs, and a check of 658 offered times found no conflict. Reminders and deposits are simulated.
What this does not prove
- That a real salon would book faster: there is no client, no real booking, no traffic and no revenue behind it.
- Anything about people: a script tapped at a fixed pace and no user testing was done.
- What a live system costs: that still needs a server with slot locking, payments, real reminders, accounts and data protection.
Read the case: HOURLINE: a concept booking platform with a client side and a studio back office
Questions and answers
Is a free booking tool enough for a small business?
Often, for one person: Calendly’s free plan allows one event type and one calendar, SimplyBook’s 50 bookings a month and one provider, and Square’s has no monthly fee. Move up when you need a second staff calendar, SMS reminders or deposits, not before.
How long does a custom booking system take to build?
Kolonell quotes 12–14 weeks for a single-site platform and 16–18 for an advanced one; PerfectionGeeks says 4–6 weeks for an MVP and 8–12 for a standard platform. VITON13 usually delivers in 15–30 working days after the brief is approved, within the written scope.
Can I add booking to the website I already have?
Yes. SimplyBook offers an iframe and Square an embeddable widget, so a new site is not required. Our business website service does not include booking engines, which is why booking is priced as its own service.
What does a booking system cost to run after launch?
A tool is its subscription plus SMS and card fees. For a custom build Kolonell budgets 15–18% of the price a year for support, updates and security: about €11,000–€13,000 on €74,000, before hosting and third-party fees.
Will VITON13 connect my calendar, channel manager or payment gateway?
The booking platform page names availability logic, booking with reminders and an operations dashboard. Integrations feed the estimate: tell us which you need and we confirm in writing whether they fit. Card checkout and refunds are the separate payment system integration service, from $73.
What should I send to get an estimate?
One normal booking and one that went wrong, your current tools, who needs access and who will accept the result. Add your services with durations, staff hours, locations and any deposit rule. That is enough to expose the unknowns before a price is set.
Sources
- Calendly, Pricing —
- Acuity Scheduling, Pricing plans and features —
- SimplyBook.me, Pricing 2026 —
- Square, Appointments pricing and plans —
- Mindbody, Business pricing —
- WooCommerce, WooCommerce Bookings —
- Kolonell, Custom Booking Platform Development Cost in 2026 —
- PerfectionGeeks, Booking Platform Development Cost —
- Guesty, How much does Booking.com charge hosts? —
- ICO, What is special category data? —