Software you pay for arrives as an invoice. You see the number, you decide whether it's worth it, you move on. Commission doesn't work like that. It comes out of each booking before the money reaches you, in amounts small enough that no single one feels worth arguing about — and by the end of the year it can be the largest line item in your business after rent and salaries.
This post is the arithmetic. No conclusions you didn't reach yourself.
How marketplace commission works
Marketplace platforms like Fresha and Booksy are free or near-free to use as software. They earn on the transaction instead. The usual structure has two parts:
- New-client commission. When a client discovers you through the marketplace app rather than your own page, the platform takes a percentage of that booking. Fresha's published rate has been around 20% of the service value on new-client bookings; Booksy's "Boost" programme has been listed as high as 30%. Both change terms periodically — check what applies to your account today.
- Payment processing. A separate percentage on card and wallet transactions, charged whether the client was new or is your regular of six years.
The important detail is what counts as a "new client." On most platforms it's anyone who books you through the marketplace for the first time, including someone who heard about you from a friend, searched your salon by name, and happened to tap the app instead of calling you.
The maths on a ₹6 lakh month
Take a five-chair salon in a tier-2 Indian city doing ₹6,00,000 a month in service revenue. Assume a fairly conservative split: 25% of bookings come through the marketplace as new clients, the rest are regulars or direct.
- Amount
- Monthly service revenue — ₹6,00,000
- Marketplace new-client bookings (25%) — ₹1,50,000
- Commission at 20% — ₹30,000
- Payment processing on the full amount (~2%) — ₹12,000
- Total platform cost, one month — ₹42,000
That's ₹5,04,000 a year. For comparison, a flat-fee salon platform in India runs between ₹5,000 and ₹35,000 for the entire year depending on how many outlets you have.
Run the same salon at 15% marketplace mix and the commission drops to ₹18,000 a month — still ₹2,16,000 a year. Run it at 40%, which is common for salons that lean on the marketplace for discovery, and it's ₹48,000 a month.
Why it compounds
Three things make the annual number worse than the monthly number suggests.
It scales with your success. A software subscription costs the same whether you have a quiet March or your best Diwali ever. Commission takes more precisely when you're busiest. The better your salon does, the more the platform earns from it, and you have no lever to pull.
Repeat visits often still count. Depending on the platform and how the client rebooks, a client acquired through the marketplace can keep generating commission on subsequent visits. A client you would have kept for five years anyway becomes a five-year annuity for someone else.
The client relationship may not be yours. Marketplaces show competing salons alongside yours, and the contact details and marketing consent often sit with the platform rather than with you. You are renting access to your own clients.
When a marketplace is genuinely worth it
It would be dishonest to pretend commission is never worth paying. It is worth paying when:
- You are brand new, have no client list, and need discovery more than you need margin.
- You have genuinely empty chairs at specific times and the marginal booking is pure upside — an unfilled 2pm Tuesday earns nothing at all.
- The commission is on clients you truly would never have reached, and they convert into direct rebookings afterwards.
The mistake isn't using a marketplace. It's using one as your booking system, so that every client — including the ones who already knew your name — routes through it.
The structure that avoids the problem
The alternative is to separate the two jobs. Use a marketplace, if you want, purely as an advertising channel. Run your actual bookings, payments and client records on software you pay a flat fee for, with your own payment gateway, so:
- Discovery costs what you choose to spend on it, and nothing more.
- Regulars book on your own page and cost you nothing per booking.
- Card and UPI money moves through your own Razorpay account at published gateway rates, with no platform markup on top.
That's how Salonior is built: one flat yearly plan, 0% commission on every booking, and payments through your own gateway. A single-location salon with unlimited staff is ₹15,000 a year — roughly what the salon in the example above pays in commission in eleven days.
Work out your own number
Don't take the example. Take fifteen minutes with your own figures:
- Pull last month's total service revenue.
- Split it into marketplace-sourced bookings and direct bookings.
- Multiply the marketplace portion by your current commission rate.
- Add processing fees on the total.
- Multiply by twelve.
If you'd rather not do it by hand, the savings calculator does the same arithmetic and compares it against flat pricing. And if you're specifically weighing up a move, the Salonior vs Fresha comparison lays out what changes and what doesn't.
Whatever you conclude, do the sum. The number is usually larger than owners expect, and it's the one cost in a salon that nobody ever puts on a spreadsheet.
Figures in this post are illustrative and based on publicly available information at the time of writing; commission rates and payment terms vary by platform, plan and region, and change over time. Check current terms with any provider before deciding.