Your clients. Their app.

Booksy's sales pitch to barbers is a marketplace of more than 44 million clients searching for professionals nearby. Read that from your side of the chair: every client who opens the app to book you is standing in a mall of your competitors. CNL Systems takes the opposite bet. Your book lives on your own site, at your own domain, where the only barber a client can find is you.

Understand that the marketplace is the product, and it is Booksy's. The question is what it does to yours, and the answer depends entirely on whose clients they are.

Is Booksy good for barbers?

Booksy is good for Booksy. Its own marketing leads with the marketplace, more than 44 million clients searching for professionals nearby. Whatever that pitch is supposed to do for you, it happens exactly once per client, on the day they find you. Every day after that, the same marketplace is a directory of alternatives that your regulars walk through to reach your booking page.

You built the loyalty. The app owns the shelf.

And the shelf is not neutral. A marketplace's job is to keep clients choosing inside the marketplace, using ratings, "nearby" carousels, and promoted placements. Your years of skill become one data point in a sort order you don't control. The barber who's been cutting for a decade and the one who opened last month rent the same shelf space, and the algorithm decides whose card faces out. That's a strange place to keep the most valuable thing you own: your reputation.

What is the Booksy Boost fee?

Boost is free to switch on. Then Booksy takes a one-time 30% fee on a first-time Boost client's visit. Booksy's own pricing page, quoted exactly:

No hidden or extra fees

And the same page:

One-time 30% fee based on the total cost of a Boost client's first visit with you

Thirty percent. On a $60 cut and beard, that first visit hands over $18 for the introduction.

And 30% is the middle of the range, not the top of it. Booksy's help centre sets a floor and a ceiling:

There is a minimum commission fee of $10 for free services* or for services where 30% of the service's price is less than $10.

The maximum commission fee for a client's first visit is $100. We will never take more than that.

The ceiling protects the big-ticket colour job, and no-shows are excluded, so the fee only lands when the client actually sits in the chair. The floor is the one a barber meets. Under about $33 a visit, thirty percent stops being thirty percent, because the $10 takes over. Booksy's own worked example is a $10 haircut plus a $5 consultation: a $15 first visit, charged the $10 minimum. Two thirds of the ticket, for the introduction.

Notice the shape of it: the platform that hosts your book also charges you a commission when its audience books you, and that audience is the very thing the subscription was sold on. The better Boost works, the more of your first visits carry the fee.

What does Booksy cost per month?

Booksy is $29.99 a month plus tax for a single user, with each additional team member at $20 a month. The pricing page's own words:

Get everything for $29.99 per month + tax

All features included

So much for "everything" and "all features." Card processing runs 2.69% + $0.30 for mobile and keyed payments, 2.49% + $0.10 with their card reader, and 2.49% + $0.20 for tap to pay. Want your payout in 30 minutes? That's another 1.5%. Next-business-day payouts are free.

Add the Boost fee on new faces and the subscription is only the cover charge.

How is CNL different from Booksy?

CNL doesn't have a marketplace, on purpose. Your clients type your name, land on your domain, and book you. Nobody is shown a cheaper chair two blocks over on the way. What you get for $29 a month, flat:

• Your own site and a real domain. We register one for you at cost (about $12/yr for a .com) or connect one you already own, free.
• No per-client fees, ever. We never take a cut of your sales. No commission on a first visit, no percentage of anything. Card processing runs at Stripe's standard rates with no CNL markup.
• Live within 24 hours, set up by a real person.
• A client list that's yours. Full export with history and notes any time you ask.

What does switching to CNL look like?

You sign up, and within 24 hours your book is running at your own address. A real person builds the site with you, sets up your services and hours, and points your domain at it. We register the domain at cost (about $12 a year for a .com) or connect one you already own, free. Then the link in your bio is yours: clients tap it, land on your site, and book, with no app between you and no shelf of alternatives beside you.

Everything after that stays in the $29: booking with deposits where you want them, no double-booking, payments online and at the chair, automatic reminders, your client list with its history and notes, and email campaigns to fill the slow weeks. And if you ever go, the list goes with you. Full export, history and notes included. On a marketplace, leaving means starting over. Here, leaving means taking your business with you, because it was always yours.

When does a marketplace actually make sense?

A marketplace makes sense for the marketplace. The pitch is aimed at the barber at zero, the one with an empty chair and no name in anyone's phone, because that's the one barber with nothing yet to lose to the shelf. Everyone else has something to lose. If you have regulars, if your name gets typed into phones, the marketplace stops being distribution and becomes a toll booth between you and people who were already coming to you, charging rent on attention you built yourself.

The move is the same one every strong shop eventually makes: own the address.

The short version

Booksy rents you access to its audience for $29.99 plus tax a month, plus a one-time Boost fee of 30% when Boost brings a first-timer, floored at $10 and capped at $100, with your booking page shelved alongside every rival in reach. CNL is $29 flat for your own site on your own domain, no marketplace, no commissions, no cut of your sales, ever. Their app grows their brand. Your domain grows yours.

Every Booksy price and quotation on this page was checked against Booksy's own pricing page, marketing site, and help centre on August 22, 2026, and re-checked on August 24, 2026. Prices move; the model doesn't.