Is Fresha Worth It? Fresha Fees Explained for UK Salons
Every Fresha fee for UK salons, confirmed across sources: £14.95 solo, 20% new-client fee (minimum £4), processing, texts — plus the profile-view catch.
For most small UK salons, Fresha is worth it — with your eyes open. It now costs £14.95 a month solo, or £9.95 per team member, plus a one-off 20% fee (minimum £4, excluding VAT) on the first appointment of every marketplace client, card processing of 1.19%–1.40% plus 20–25p, and around 6p per text after 20 free ones. It’s worth it while the marketplace sends you clients you couldn’t have reached yourself. It quietly gets expensive when “new” clients start being people who found you anyway.
Fresha built its name on being free — and you’ll still find older pages calling it “100% subscription free.” That era is over. Fresha charges a subscription now, and the honest question is no longer whether it costs money but whether each fee buys you something. This article lists every fee, confirmed across independent UK sources in October 2026, totals a realistic salon month, and surfaces the two catches that appear almost nowhere else. Figures are as published by the sources named; check fresha.com before relying on any single one.
For where Fresha sits among the wider choices, see our roundup of the best booking software for a small aesthetic clinic owner-operator; this page is the Fresha-only deep dive.
Every Fresha fee, explained — the full stack
| Fee | UK rate | When it bites | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription — Solo | £14.95/mo | Monthly, 1 bookable professional | Beeviral; Cobbtree (agrees) |
| Subscription — Team | £9.95/mo per bookable team member | Monthly, per person | Beeviral; Cobbtree; Setora (agrees) |
| New-client fee (marketplace / Boost) | 20% one-off, minimum £4, ex-VAT | First completed appointment of a marketplace client | Beeviral; ResoClinx; Cobbtree (agrees) |
| Online card processing | 1.40% + 25p | Per online transaction | Beeviral |
| In-person processing (Fresha terminal) | 1.19% + 20p | Per in-person transaction | Beeviral; what-mobile-payment.com (agrees) |
| Manual card entry | 2.20% + 20p | Per keyed-in transaction | Beeviral |
| Text messages | 20 free, then ~6p per text | After the free allowance | Beeviral — see the caveat below |
| Analytics add-on | £7.95 per staff member/mo | Optional monthly add-on | Setora |
Three notes on reading that table honestly:
The 20% is the whole commission story. You may see a competitor’s page claim Fresha takes “up to 35%” in marketplace commission. That figure is wrong for Fresha — 35% is Treatwell’s new-client rate, as the Treatwell fee guides (including Beeviral’s own) document. Three independent UK sources confirm Fresha’s new-client fee at 20%, one-off, on the first completed appointment, minimum £4, always quoted ex-VAT. Don’t let a rival’s sales page inflate it — and don’t let anyone tell you it doesn’t exist, either. The full Treatwell comparison is in our explainer on how much Treatwell charges salons.
The text allowance is fuzzier than the rest. Beeviral’s fee table says 20 free texts, then about 6p each. Setora describes the allowance as 20 free texts per staff member per month — a real difference if you have five staff. Another page puts texts at 10p each. This article uses Beeviral’s figures (the most detailed fee table in the market) but flags the discrepancy: verify the current SMS allowance and rate on fresha.com before you build a reminder strategy around it.
What isn’t in the table. Fresha’s Blast marketing messages are priced as a separate product, and that per-message price could not be verified across sources for this article — so no figure is stated for it here, rather than a guessed one. If you send marketing blasts, price them on fresha.com before your first campaign, not after.
What a real salon month costs — the worked example
Fee tables don’t make decisions; monthly totals do. Here is the worked example no other page runs. Assumptions, stated: a three-chair salon, three bookable team members, 15 marketplace new clients in the month with an average first appointment of £45, £6,000 of in-person card takings across roughly 300 transactions, and 400 reminder and confirmation texts sent.
| Line | Maths | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription | 3 × £9.95 | £29.85 |
| New-client fees | 15 × (20% of £45 = £9) | £135.00 |
| In-person processing | 1.19% of £6,000 + 300 × 20p | £131.40 |
| Texts | 380 paid × ~6p (20 free) | £22.80 |
| Total | ≈ £319/mo — ≈ £3,830/yr |
All fee figures here are quoted ex-VAT, as the sources publish them — if your salon isn’t VAT-registered, the VAT on Fresha’s fees is a real cost to you rather than a pass-through, so add it when you run your own version of this table.
This is arithmetic rebuilt from the confirmed fee stack above, not any vendor’s model — two competitors publish their own Fresha cost models (Cobbtree claims a £1,320-a-year software-cost difference against its own product when optional extras are modelled; one clinic-focused rival claims over £1,000 a month for a busy clinic), but both are rivals modelling against Fresha, so treat their totals as their claims, not as your bill. Yours moves mostly with one line: the new-client fees. At 5 marketplace clients a month instead of 15, the same salon pays about £229. At 30, about £454. The subscription is the smallest part of Fresha now — the marketplace is the meter.
Want this table rebuilt with your real client mix? get a free audit and we’ll run your numbers — including how many of your “new” clients actually arrived via the marketplace.
The two catches nobody tells you
Catch one: the fee can apply to clients who never booked through Fresha. ResoClinx, citing Fresha’s own help centre, reports that the new-client fee can still apply if a client viewed your marketplace profile first and then booked through another channel — including your own website. Read that again. A client finds you on Google, glances at your Fresha profile to check reviews, books on your own site — and Fresha may still take 20% of that first appointment as if it had sent them. Whether this attribution applies to your account is a question to put to Fresha in writing; that it exists in their help-centre wording at all is the single most decision-relevant fact in this article.
Catch two: you don’t control the marketing relationship. On Fresha, clients set their own marketing preferences and the salon cannot override them (ResoClinx, framing it against the ICO’s soft opt-in rules). Your client list lives inside a system where re-contacting your own clients happens on the platform’s terms. That’s the structural difference between a marketplace and your own booking website: on your own site, the list, the preferences (handled lawfully, with consent) and the follow-up are yours. It’s the reason the endgame for many salons is switching from Fresha to your own booking website while keeping the marketplace only as a discovery channel — and why our Fresha alternative page exists for clinics weighing the same move.
Which fees are choices, and which aren’t
Beeviral’s verdict framing is the fairest in the market: one fee is fixed, the rest are choices. Expanded into a decision framework:
You can’t avoid: the subscription (£14.95 solo / £9.95 per team member) and text overages once your reminders pass the free allowance — reminders are not optional if you care about no-shows, so this is a real cost of operating on Fresha.
You chose, and can un-choose: the 20% new-client fee (it only exists while you’re visible on the marketplace — turning off marketplace discovery stops new fees but also stops the flow) and Fresha Payments (you could process elsewhere, though deposits and no-show protection are designed to pull you in).
The judgement call: Fresha is a marketing channel wearing a booking system’s clothes. £135 a month in new-client fees is cheap client acquisition if those clients rebook five times each — and expensive if they were your Instagram followers all along. The profile-view catch muddies exactly that calculation, which is why it matters.
The mechanisms underneath the fees — a checklist from the sharpest critic
Setora, a barbershop software company, names the eight mechanisms by which “free” salon software earns its money — using Fresha as its worked example throughout. Setora sells a competing product, so read its list as a checklist to verify against your own Fresha account rather than as settled fact. It is still the most useful scepticism in this market:
- Bait-and-switch pricing — the free or cheap entry that paid tiers quietly replace.
- Commission attribution — the profile-view rule covered above: fees triggered by association, not by an actual marketplace booking.
- Per-staff pricing — a £9.95 headline that multiplies with every chair you add.
- Locked processing — deposits, prepayment and no-show protection designed so the card volume flows through the platform’s rates.
- SMS overages — a free allowance sized below a real reminder strategy, then per-text charges.
- Feature gating — the analytics add-on (£7.95 per staff member a month, per Setora) as the example: reporting on your own business, sold back to you.
- Data lock-in — your client history inside a system you rent.
- Cancellation friction — leaving being harder than joining.
Not every mechanism is a scandal — per-staff pricing and paid add-ons are ordinary software economics, and Fresha’s headline rates compare well against Treatwell’s. The value of the list is that it converts “is Fresha worth it?” from a vibe into eight checkable questions about your own account. If five of the eight bite in your numbers, the worked example above will already have shown you why.
What Fresha does well — why salons stay
A fee audit that only lists fees would mislead you, so here is the other side plainly. Salons stay on Fresha in large numbers because the product underneath the fees is genuinely good at the unglamorous work: a booking flow clients complete without phoning, deposits and prepayment that make no-show protection practical instead of theoretical, reminders that go out whether or not anyone at the front desk remembered, and a marketplace that really does put a salon in front of people searching for one nearby. For a new salon with empty chairs, £135 a month in new-client fees against a diary filling with strangers is not a cost problem — it is the cheapest advertising that salon will ever buy.
The worth-it question only turns when the mix changes: when the diary fills with regulars, the marketplace line keeps charging for discovery you no longer need at the same rate, and the platform’s control over the client relationship starts to matter more than its convenience. That is a stage-of-business judgement, not a verdict on Fresha’s honesty — Fresha publishes its main rates clearly enough that this article could confirm them across three independent sources, which is more than can be said for several rivals in this series. The same stage-of-business test applies to premium US platforms; our audit of Mangomint worth it for small salons runs the fee-stack maths on a tool whose headline price is higher but whose add-on pattern will look familiar.
Barbershops, one specific note: the sharpest critical writing about Fresha’s model (Setora’s mechanisms list above) comes from the barbershop market, where walk-in culture makes marketplace attribution and per-staff pricing bite differently. If you run a barbershop, run the worked example with your walk-in share in mind before deciding.
Fresha vs Treatwell vs your own website — three routes, side by side
| Fresha | Treatwell | Your own booking website | |
|---|---|---|---|
| First-booking commission | 20% one-off, min £4, ex-VAT | 35% + VAT | None |
| Subscription | £14.95 solo / £9.95 per member | Not published | Care plan / hosting only |
| Who owns the client list | Platform terms; client sets marketing preferences | Platform terms | You |
| Discovery included | Yes — marketplace | Yes — larger marketplace | No — your Google/Instagram does it |
Treatwell’s 35% (plus VAT, 0% on repeats and direct bookings) is confirmed by ResoClinx citing Treatwell’s UK pricing page, with Beeviral agreeing. Fresha is the cheaper marketplace. Your own website is the only route where a first booking costs you nothing in commission — the trade is that nobody sends you clients; your Google profile and socials have to do that work, which is a system, not a hope.
The verdict, by salon type
| Your salon | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Solo operator, booked out by regulars | Marginal. £14.95/mo is small, but if the marketplace sends you almost nobody, you’re paying rent on a discovery channel you don’t use — and risking 20% on clients who were yours anyway via the profile-view rule. |
| Small team, still growing | Yes, with tracking on. Fresha is worth it while marketplace clients are genuinely new to you. Count them monthly. The day most “new” clients turn out to be people who found you elsewhere, the maths flips. |
| Marketplace-dependent | Yes — but build the exit ramp. Keep taking the clients, and start moving rebookings to your own website and list, so the 20% becomes a first-visit cost you control rather than a permanent tax on growth. |
Fresha is not a rip-off and it is not free. It is a fair-priced system whose one big fee is tied to a definition of “new client” that deserves your attention. Run your own month through the worked example above; if the total buys you clients you couldn’t otherwise reach, keep paying it gladly. If it doesn’t, the alternative is built, not bought — and get a free audit is where that conversation starts.
FAQs
Is Fresha really free for salons?
Not any more. Older pages still describe Fresha as “100% subscription free,” but Fresha now charges £14.95 a month for solo professionals or £9.95 per bookable team member, plus the fees in this article. The subscription-free description is outdated.
How much is Fresha’s new-client fee in the UK?
20% of the client’s first completed appointment, one-off, with a minimum of £4, quoted excluding VAT — confirmed by Beeviral, ResoClinx and Cobbtree independently. It applies to marketplace (Boost) clients. Be wary of pages claiming “up to 35%”: that is Treatwell’s rate, not Fresha’s.
Can Fresha charge the new-client fee if the client booked on my own website?
According to ResoClinx, citing Fresha’s help centre, yes — the fee can apply if the client viewed your marketplace profile before booking, even through another channel such as your own website. Ask Fresha to confirm how attribution works on your account, in writing.
How much does Fresha charge for text messages?
Beeviral’s fee table lists 20 free texts, then about 6p per text. Setora describes the free allowance as 20 per staff member per month, and another source prices texts at 10p — the sources conflict, so verify the current allowance and rate on fresha.com.
Does Fresha charge commission on repeat bookings?
No. The 20% new-client fee is a one-off on the first completed appointment. Repeat bookings are charged only the subscription and card processing. This is the main structural difference from Treatwell’s model — though Treatwell also charges 0% on repeats, its first-booking rate is 35% plus VAT.
Is Fresha worth it compared with having my own booking website?
They do different jobs. Fresha rents you discovery plus a booking system; your own website gives you the booking system and the client list with no per-client commission, but no built-in discovery. Many salons run both during growth — marketplace for first visits, own website for everything after — and drop the marketplace when their own channels fill the diary.
