If you’ve searched for a “Fresha alternative,” it’s usually for one of three reasons: Fresha isn’t free anymore and the subscription caught you off guard, the marketplace fee on new clients feels steep, or you’d simply rather have a booking page that’s yours instead of a listing among competitors. All three are legitimate. Here’s an honest, current look at what Fresha actually costs and where WellDesk fits — without pretending WellDesk is something it isn’t.
What Fresha actually costs now
Fresha built its reputation on being free, but that changed in 2025. As of mid-2026, per Fresha’s own pricing page, the model looks like this:
- A subscription, priced per professional: around €19.95/month on the Independent plan for a solo pro, and about €13/month per team member on the Team plan. Larger operations (20+ staff) move to custom Enterprise pricing. Exact figures vary by region and currency, so check Fresha’s pricing page for your market — don’t take a number from any blog post, including this one, as permanent.
- Payment processing fees on top of the subscription: roughly 1.29% for online payments and 0.99% in person, plus the cost of a card terminal if you want one (from about €119).
- SMS and WhatsApp costs once you’re past the free monthly allowance (150 messages), which most active shops run through quickly.
- A one-time 20% marketplace commission (minimum roughly $6) on a brand-new client’s first completed appointment, specifically when that client discovered and booked you through Fresha’s consumer marketplace. This is the part that trips people up: it doesn’t apply to returning clients, and it doesn’t apply to bookings from your own website, Google Business Profile, or social media — unless the client viewed your Fresha marketplace listing before booking.
None of that makes Fresha a bad product. It’s a mature, full-featured platform with a genuinely large consumer marketplace, and for the right shop that marketplace is real, valuable distribution — new clients you might not have found otherwise. The fee is the price of that distribution, not a hidden trick.
The real question for a small shop
Once you strip away the “free” framing, the decision isn’t about price alone — it’s about where you want your booking page to live.
On a marketplace like Fresha’s, your listing sits inside a directory alongside other shops, including direct competitors, and a share of your new-client revenue funds that placement. That’s a reasonable trade if marketplace discovery is genuinely bringing you clients you wouldn’t get otherwise, and you’ve budgeted for the subscription and the 20% fee on the clients it sends you.
The alternative is a booking page that belongs to your shop and nobody else — one that search engines can index and rank for your name and your area, rather than a listing competing for attention inside someone else’s directory. Neither approach is universally “better.” It depends on how you currently get clients, and how much you want to lean on someone else’s marketplace versus your own name.
A marketplace rents you discovery; your own page builds your name in search. Most shops end up using a bit of both.
Where WellDesk fits
WellDesk is booking and scheduling software built specifically for small, independent wellness shops — massage, nails, brows and lashes, spa. A few honest facts, both the appealing ones and the caveats:
- Free during our public beta. There’s no subscription right now — that’s the current state of the product, not a permanent promise. We’ll be upfront if and when that changes.
- No marketplace commission, because WellDesk doesn’t run a shared consumer marketplace. There’s nothing like Fresha’s 20% new-client fee to plan around.
- Your own booking page, at
<your-shop-name>.welldesk.ai— your branding, your photos, your name, indexed by Google as your page rather than one entry in a directory. In our experience, a page like this can start showing up in local search within a couple of weeks, though results will vary shop to shop and we don’t have measured outcomes to promise a number. - Built for small shops specifically — a simpler, more focused tool than an enterprise-capable platform, which is a plus if you want fewer settings to configure and a minus if you need advanced multi-location or franchise features.
A real WellDesk booking page — the shop’s own page at aurelia-spa.welldesk.ai, indexed by Google under its own name.
Clients pick a service and book right on your page — no marketplace sitting in between, and no 20% cut of a first visit.
To be equally clear about the trade-offs: WellDesk is not fee-free. Card payments run through Stripe, and WellDesk takes a small platform fee on those transactions — the free-during-beta part is the subscription, not payment processing. WellDesk is also newer than Fresha, currently supports Stripe only (no choice of payment processor yet), and has a smaller feature set overall. If you’re deep into Fresha’s ecosystem — its marketplace, its reporting, its integrations — switching is a real decision, not a formality.
Which one fits your shop
Fresha makes sense if marketplace discovery is actually working for you, or you need a mature, feature-rich platform and can absorb the subscription plus the 20% fee on the new clients it brings. WellDesk fits better if you’re a small independent shop that wants a low-cost way to run bookings today and would rather build a page that ranks under your own name than pay a marketplace commission for placement in someone else’s directory.
If that sounds like your shop, WellDesk is free to use during our public beta. Create your account and set up your own booking page in an afternoon — no subscription, no marketplace fee. And if Fresha’s marketplace is genuinely bringing you business, that’s a real reason to stay; we’d rather you make that call with accurate numbers than switch on a false premise.
