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Fresha Isn't Free Any More — One Number Tells You Whether You Need an Alternative

Sep 20, 2026 9 min read

Is Fresha still free? No. Open its pricing page today and there are three paid plans and a seven-day trial, and nothing that says free forever anywhere on it.

That’s the news. The decision is separate, and it hangs on one number that has nothing to do with the price.

Of your last twenty new clients, how many did the Fresha marketplace introduce? Not the ones who found your Instagram and then booked through your Fresha link. The ones who opened the app, searched, and had never heard of you. Count them. The rest of this article is arithmetic.

What Fresha charges now, from its own pricing page

Read on 20 September 2026. Fresha prices in local currency and the page it serves you depends on where you are — ours came in euros, so check your own before you copy any of these figures.

Independent: €17.95 a month, one bookable team member, seven-day trial
Team: €9.95 per team member a month; Enterprise is a custom quote above 20 people
Marketplace, new clients: a 20% one-time commission, with a minimum fee of €3 per client. Returning clients are free, and so are bookings from your own link, your Facebook page and your Instagram profile
Card payments: 1.29% + €0.20 per transaction, online or in person, plus €0.10 per Tap to pay authorisation. Terminals from €339
Messages: 20 free a month, then €0.15 per text or €0.13–€0.20 per WhatsApp. Marketing emails: 50 free, then €0.02 each. Marketing texts €0.10 each
Add-ons, each billed monthly: Smart Website €13.95 · Insights €7.95 per bookable team member · Google Rating Boost €10.95 per location · Client Loyalty €49.95 per location · Xero €8.95 · Team Connect €2.79 per member
Rates are quoted exclusive of sales tax

Two things deserve credit. The card rate is genuinely low — Booksy’s US page lists 2.49% to 2.69% for the same job, so if you run payments through the platform, Fresha’s cut is the smaller one. And a new client who returns costs you nothing after the first visit.

Switch on a website and Insights and you’ve added €21.90 a month to a €17.95 plan. The subscription is rarely the whole bill; the add-ons are where it doubles.

The same month, two businesses

Two solo pros, same trade, same numbers: 50 visits a month at an average €50, so €2,500 through the door. Both on Independent. Both send a reminder before every visit.

The first one lives on the marketplace. Five of those bookings each month come from people who found her in the app and had never heard of her name.

Subscription €17.95, plus 30 paid reminder texts at €0.15 once the 20 free ones are gone: €4.50
Five new marketplace clients at €50, at 20%: €50
Monthly total €72.45 — about €870 a year

For that she gets sixty introductions a year. If half of them come back on a six-week rhythm, that’s thirty regulars and roughly €12,000 of work over the following year, and she paid €10 each to meet them. No advertising you can buy is that cheap, and no one should talk her out of it.

The second one has never had a marketplace booking. Her clients come from Instagram, from the woman who sat in the chair before them, and from the sign in the window.

Subscription €17.95, plus €4.50 in texts
Marketplace commission: €0
Monthly total €22.45 — €269 a year, or 45 cents a visit

Forty-five cents a visit is cheap. That’s the honest part, and it’s why “Fresha is expensive” is the wrong complaint. What the second business is buying is a diary, a client list and fifty automatic texts. She is paying a small rent for a big machine and using one room of it.

The first business is buying customers. The second is buying a calendar. The price is the same; only one of them is getting the thing the price is for.

The bit that stings isn’t €17.95

It’s that the number moved. The platform that a lot of solo pros chose because it cost nothing now costs something, and the change arrived on the platform’s schedule, not theirs.

That’s not an accusation — a company needs revenue, and a €17.95 plan is a reasonable way to get it. But it does answer a question worth answering before your next slow season: which parts of your business live somewhere you don’t control?

Your client list and their history — if it only exists inside a platform, its terms are the terms of your client list too.
Your booking flow — once regulars learn to tap a link, moving them is a project, not a decision.
Your quiet months — a subscription is the same in a €2,500 month and in a €700 one. Fresha’s page says cancel any time and there’s no commitment, which is fair; it also means the diary is a thing you rent rather than a thing you have.
Your reminders — at 20 free messages a month, a 50-visit book is paying per text from the third week. The price is small and it is per message, forever.

A free plan was a promise; a subscription is a price. Neither of them was ever yours to set — which is the whole argument for keeping the book itself somewhere that is.

Who should stay on Fresha

Plenty of people should. If any two of these describe you, stop reading and go and enjoy your Sunday.

The marketplace sends you work. Four or five discoveries a month is a stream of new clients that no offline app can produce. Pay the 20%, keep the stream.
You want clients to book themselves at 11pm. Self-booking, waitlists, deposits and cancellation fees are what a platform is for. An app on your own phone cannot take a booking while you sleep.
You take cards through the app. At 1.29% + €0.20 the processing is cheap, the deposit and no-show protection hangs off it, and the money lands without a second device.
You want the messages automatic. Fresha sends the client the reminder; you don’t press anything. If you know you won’t do it by hand, that’s worth more than the €4.50.
You have a second pair of hands, or a room you rent to someone else. Team pricing, timesheets and commissions exist for exactly that, and they don’t exist in a single-person app.

There is one case where the fees deserve a second look even if you love the platform: the €3 minimum on a small first service. On a €12 fringe trim or a €15 brow tidy from the marketplace, that minimum is a quarter of the ticket. It doesn’t make the model wrong — it makes cheap introductory services an odd thing to advertise there.

What’s left to replace

If you’re the second business, take the machine away and look at what you were actually using. A day view. Names with numbers. Notes that mean you remember. A total at the end of the month.

My Clients does that and nothing more: an appointment book that lives on your phone, with no account, no server and no booking page. It works with the phone in airplane mode in a basement salon, because everything is stored on the phone itself. Unlimited clients, unlimited appointments and the whole history are free.

The reminder story is different from Fresha’s and you should know exactly how before you switch. Your phone notifies you before each appointment (how the reminders work). When you want the client to hear from you, you hold the appointment, tap Notify client, and the message is already written with her name, the date and the time in it — you choose WhatsApp, SMS, Telegram or Instagram and send it (sending a reminder). Nothing goes out on its own. That costs you four seconds and no per-message fee, and the client gets a message from a person rather than a platform.

Money works the same way — plainly. Every appointment carries a price, a prepay and a tip, and the current month’s earnings are free to see; expenses, profit, older months, PDF reports, the month grid, calendar sync and most of the widgets are the paid tier, and the free version shows a banner ad (what Pro includes). On Android the client list is part of Pro; on iPhone it isn’t. That’s the honest shape of it.

Whatever you decide, do one thing this week: export your appointments and clients to a spreadsheet and keep the file somewhere you own. It costs nothing on either platform, and it’s the difference between changing tools and starting over (export and import CSV).

What you’ll actually miss

Four things, and no amount of enthusiasm makes them smaller.

Discovery. Nobody browsing an app at midnight will stumble onto you. New clients will come from your own work — posts, referrals, the window, the conversation at the till — and that is slower than a marketplace Fresha’s own site says 25 million people use to book.

Self-booking. Your clients will message you and you will answer. Some of them prefer that. Some of them will ask why they can’t just book, and you’ll type the times out by hand.

Automatic reminders. The text goes when you send it. That’s a habit, not a feature, and habits fail in busy weeks.

Card payments and deposits. No terminal, no pre-payment, no cancellation fee collected automatically. Cash, transfer, or whatever reader you already own.

If those four are worth €270 a year to you, the subscription was never the problem and you have your answer. If most of them describe something you’ve never actually used, the answer is on the other side.

The My Clients app is free, needs no sign-up and works without internet. Keep your bookings, your client history and what you actually earned on your own phone — and pay nothing for the introductions you made yourself.