You have more or less decided. Somebody is going to build you the new one. Your contract runs month to month. On some Tuesday in October you will switch the booking button over to your own site. Then you stop paying Fresha, or Booksy, or whoever you are on.
Nobody has told you what stays behind.
Everyone selling you a website will tell you what you gain by leaving. We sell websites, so we would say that too. Almost nobody tells you what you lose. There are four things. One of them is probably the thing you care about most. Here they are, before you decide rather than after.
This post argues against our own sale in places. That is on purpose. Having this conversation after you have paid is a much worse conversation, for you and for us.
What does come with you
Briefly, because this is the half everybody writes about.
Your customer list comes with you, if the app lets you download it. Test that tonight rather than take anyone’s word for it. Your calendar comes too. Your web address is already yours, or it should be. Your prices, your services and your photographs are yours and always were.
That is a real amount of your business, and it is the part most owners assume is at risk. It usually is not.
The reviews do not move
Years of five-star reviews sit on a profile you do not own. They cannot be moved, because they were never yours. People left them on the platform, about you, and that is where they stay.
This is the one that stops people, and it should be weighed rather than waved away. Say you have a hundred and forty reviews on Fresha and eleven on Google. All of that trust is sitting somewhere you rent.
There is no clever fix. The only answer is to start building the one you own before you need it.
If you think you might leave in the next two years, start asking for reviews on your own Google listing now. Do it while you are busy and everybody is happy with you. Do not blast people. Do not offer them anything for it. And never send the happy ones to one place and the unhappy ones to another. Every platform that matters bans that, and it can cost you the listing you are trying to build. Just ask, at the counter, in your own words, when somebody has just told you they are delighted.
Do that for a year before you move and the reviews stop being the reason you cannot.
The new customers they send you do not move either
This is the one worth reading slowly, because the platforms describe it more honestly than most of their critics do.
Fresha prints its own numbers. CA$29.95 a month for a single calendar. CA$19.95 for every person on your team, every month, on the team plan. Then, separately, they charge a fee on every new customer the marketplace sends you. Their words: “20% one-time commission”, with a “minimum fee of CA$6 per client”. On clients who come back, again in their words, “no fee ever applies”.
Booksy does the same thing on its Boost page, with a different number. A one-time 30% of a new client’s first visit. They put the reason plainly: “After the first visit, that client is yours. The next time that client books with you, you get 100%. Service, tip, everything.” That page is written for the United States, so read the percentage as the shape of the deal rather than as a Canadian figure.
Read those terms the way they are meant and the picture is clear. They are not charging you for taking a booking. They are charging you for an introduction to somebody who did not know you existed.
So you have been buying something real. New customers who had never heard of you. The day you leave, you stop buying them.
There is one line in the Fresha terms that most owners have never read. It matters whether you stay or whether you go. Read what their new client fee covers. Their help centre says it covers “those who view your Fresha marketplace profile first and then choose to book through another online channel including your website or social media pages”. So somebody who found you there and then booked on your own site can still count as their introduction.
If you are staying, that is worth knowing. It changes what your own site is doing for you while you keep the profile. If you are leaving, it says the same thing the other way round. Some of the people booking on your own page today were sent to you by the company you are about to stop paying.
Your regulars already have the app on their phone
They book you in three taps, at night, from bed. They have done it that way for four years.
You are about to ask them to change that. Most of them will, because they come for you. Some will not get round to it. A few will open the app, not find you, and book somebody who is still in it. That is not disloyalty. It is a Tuesday and they were tired.
The fix is dull and it works. Tell people in person, more times than feels necessary. At the counter when they pay. In the confirmation for their next appointment. On a card in their hand. For about three months. Do that and most people come across without noticing. Send one email, assume it landed, and you will lose a slice of your book. It will feel like the website’s fault, and it will not be.
It takes a while before people find your own page
The last one is the quietest. People have to learn where your page is.
A profile on Fresha or Booksy borrows the standing of a big website. Your own page starts where it starts. For a while after the switch, somebody searching your name will find the old profile above your new site. That is what everything has been pointing at for years.
You can shorten it. Point your old links at the new page instead of deleting them. Make sure your Google listing is right, and that it sends people to your own booking page. And run both booking systems side by side for a couple of weeks, so nothing drops while it settles. You do not get to skip it entirely.
Who should not switch
Here is the part that costs us money to print.
Go and count your last ninety days of new customers. Mark where each one came from. Not your impression of it, the actual count. Most booking apps will show you that in a report you have never opened.
If most of them arrive through the marketplace, and you have no other way of being found, then your real problem is being found. Doing the software half first will hurt. Fix the finding first. The Google listing, the reviews on it, a page that answers what people actually ask. Then leave, once those introductions are not the only thing keeping you busy.
If most of your new customers come from word of mouth, from your own page, or from walking past, the picture changes. You are mostly paying a fee on people who would have found you anyway.
And if you are one person, or two, on a free plan, you are already paying about as little as anybody can. Keep what you have. There is nothing here worth spending money on yet. We would rather tell you that now than sell you a build you will resent in March.
What we get out of saying all this
A studio that only tells you the upside is not being kind to you. It is protecting a sale.
We would rather you moved with your eyes open. If somebody finds out in month two that their reviews stayed behind, they are right to be angry. No guarantee written on a services page fixes that.
Everything we build becomes yours on the last payment. The website files, the design, your web address, your customer list. That is printed with the prices on the services page, including what we charge to move you across. We run both booking systems side by side for a couple of weeks, so nothing drops while it settles. The booking page is on the work page, screen by screen.
Nobody can promise you more bookings for changing where your calendar lives. Anybody who does is guessing. What a move actually buys you is this. The next four years of reviews, introductions and regulars get built somewhere you keep.
The ninety-day count is yours to do. Nobody else can do it, because the report sits inside your own booking app. What somebody outside can tell you is the other half. How easy you are to find without the marketplace in front of you. That is what the free website sample is. You send your business name. We build two sections of your real website, using your own words and pictures, and send you the link. It is yours to look at whether or not you ever hire us.