Nail software, priced for a floor you don't have

Most nail salon software is priced for a salon with a front desk. If you're a solo nail tech, you're paying that price alone, and on most platforms you are also handing over a cut of every new client and hosting your book on somebody else's address. CNL Systems is $29 a month, flat, on a domain with your name on it, and takes nothing from your sales.

That's the argument. Here is what the rest of the market actually charges.

What does the best nail salon software actually need to do?

Search for nail salon management software or nail salon scheduling software and you get feature grids running to sixty rows. For a solo tech, the real list is much shorter. You need clients to find you, book a set or a fill without texting you at midnight, put a deposit down so the slot is real, and get a reminder so they turn up. You need the payment to land in your account. You need the client list to be yours.

Everything else on a comparison chart is a salon feature: staff rotas, shift planning, inventory counts, product reorder alerts. Useful if you run a floor of six. Dead weight if you're the one holding the brush, and you are paying for it either way.

That's worth naming before any pricing, because the feature grids are designed to make a solo tech feel underserved by the cheap tier. Ask instead which of those rows you'd ever open.

What do booking sites for nail techs actually cost?

Here is what nail salon booking software costs across the platforms a nail tech is most likely to shortlist, at their own published prices:

The entry prices are close enough to be noise. The last two columns are where the money actually goes.

Is Booksy free?

No. Booksy runs a 14-day free trial, and after that the business plan is $29.99 a month plus $20 a month for each additional team member. There's no free tier for a professional account.

Booksy fees come in two parts, and the part that catches nail techs out is not the subscription. It's Boost, Booksy's marketplace promotion, which takes 30% of a client's first visit, with a $10 minimum and a $100 maximum per client. No-shows are excluded.

What Boost costs on a nail ticket

Do that arithmetic on nail pricing rather than on an average. A $35 gel fill through Boost hands over $10.50. A $30 basic set hits the $10 floor, so the effective rate is a third. The percentage is easiest to accept when you picture a large ticket, and nail work is mostly not large tickets.

That's the trade Booksy is offering, and it's a real one: they bring you a client you didn't have, and they charge you for it once. Whether it is worth it depends entirely on whether that client was going to find you anyway.

Do these platforms give you your own website?

Mostly not, and this is the difference that compounds.

GlossGenius states it plainly in its own help centre: you can customise the part of the address before .glossgenius.com, and custom domains are not supported. They publish a separate article on pointing a domain at your booking site, but it works by forwarding at your registrar, with no DNS records of their own. The client's address bar still finishes on glossgenius.com. A forward is a bounce, not an address.

On Vagaro the website exists but is a separately priced add-on called MySite at $20 a month, on top of the subscription. Booksy puts you on a profile inside its marketplace, which is the product working as designed.

Why your own site matters more for nails

Here is why it matters more for nails than almost any other trade. Your work is visual and it travels by phone. A client shows a friend the set you did, the friend asks who did it, and they type your name in. Where they land is the whole question. If it's a platform page, they arrive in a directory that also lists nine other techs within two miles, with a "similar professionals" rail underneath. If it's your own site, the only nail tech on it is you.

What does nail salon software cost at CNL?

$29 a month, one plan, everything in it. Your own site on your own domain, online booking with deposits, payments online and at the chair, automatic reminders, your client list, and email campaigns. No tiers, no per-calendar arithmetic, no add-on menu.

The rest, plainly:

• No cut, ever. We never take a percentage of your sales. Card processing runs at Stripe's standard rates with no CNL markup.
• The domain is included. We register one for you at cost, about $12 a year for a .com, or connect one you already own for free.
• In person if you want it. An optional Stripe WisePOS E for tap, dip and swipe at the chair, $249 once, bought direct from Stripe at Stripe's price. We do not sell it, mark it up, or touch the payment.
• Your list stays yours. Leave whenever you like and take the full export with you, history and notes included.

What is not included

What isn't in it: inventory counts, product reorder alerts, and staff rotas. CNL is built for one pro running their own book. If you need to manage stock across a floor of six, we're the wrong product and you should buy the one that does that.

What does taking a nail appointment online actually change?

Two things, and neither is the one the feature lists lead with.

The first is deposits. A slot that costs nothing to book costs nothing to abandon. Taking a deposit at the moment of booking is the single change that moves no-shows, and it works because it's small, not because it is punitive.

The second is that nail salon booking stops being a conversation. Most solo techs lose more time to the back and forth about whether Thursday at two still works than to any admin task on a feature grid. A booking page ends that thread before it starts.

The short version

Nail salon software is mostly priced and built for salons with staff, and a solo tech pays that price without the floor to spread it across. Booksy is $29.99 a month with no free tier, and Boost takes 30% of a first visit with a $10 floor, which lands hard on nail-sized tickets. GlossGenius won't put you on your own domain and says so in its own documentation. Vagaro sells the website separately at $20 a month.

CNL is $29 a month, flat, with the website included and on your own domain, and we never take a cut of what you earn.

Competitor prices and terms on this page were verified at each company's own pricing or support pages on August 24, 2026. Prices move; check them before you sign anything, including ours.