If you run a busy salon or massage room, you already know the monthly subscription is the smallest part of the bill. The question that keeps you up is not "how much does Fresha cost" on the pricing page. It is how much it costs once the card fees and the 20% new-client charge have quietly come out of your takings.
This is written for established UK owners who are near full and resentful of the fees, not chasing leads. If that is you, leads were never your problem. The cost is. So let us add it all up properly, with the maths shown, and no spin.
The headline price is not the real price
Here is what Fresha lists on its UK pricing, as it stands. We are using their published numbers and nothing else.
- Subscription: £14.95 per month for an independent, plus £9.95 per month for each extra team member.
- New-client marketplace fee: 20% of the booking value on clients Fresha counts as "new" from its marketplace, with a £4 minimum per booking.
- Card processing: 1.40% + £0.25 for online payments, 1.19% + £0.20 in person, and 2.20% + £0.20 for manually keyed cards.
- Data export: paywalled at £190 per month, per location, in the UK.
None of those numbers is outrageous on its own. The free tier was killed off in 2025, so the £14.95 is now the floor rather than a choice. The card rates sit roughly where most processors sit. The 20% is where it gets interesting, and the £190 export fee is where it gets uncomfortable.
The 20% is the line item that actually hurts
The card fees are predictable. You can model them, price them in, and forget them. The 20% new-client fee is the one that scales with your success and is hardest to forecast, because it depends on who Fresha decides is "new".
That word is doing a lot of work. For a salon nobody has heard of, a marketplace booking is genuine new demand, and 20% to fill an empty chair can be fair. For an established local business with a five-year reputation, a Google profile, a shopfront people walk past, and a word-of-mouth engine that runs itself, most of the people who tap "book" on the marketplace would have found you anyway. They searched your name. They saw your sign. A friend sent them.
When the platform sits between you and a client who was already coming, the 20% stops being a finder's fee and starts being a tax on demand you created. You built the reputation. You paid the rent on the visible high-street unit. You did the years of good work that the word of mouth rests on. The fee is charged on the outcome of all that, attributed to a booking journey that touched the marketplace last.
A worked monthly example (illustration only)
Let us put real-ish numbers on it. This is an illustration to show the shape of the bill, not a quote. Your figures will differ. The assumptions are labelled so you can swap in your own.
Assumptions
- A solo therapist plus one part-time team member.
- 120 card-paid appointments in the month, average ticket £50.
- Of those, most are in-person card taps, a handful are online deposits.
- 6 bookings in the month land as Fresha "new" marketplace clients, each above the £4 minimum, so the 20% applies on the full ticket.
The maths
| Cost line | Working | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription | £14.95 + £9.95 (one extra member) | £24.90 |
| In-person card fees | 110 taps, (1.19% of £50) + £0.20 each | £87.45 |
| Online card fees | 10 deposits, (1.40% of £50) + £0.25 each | £9.50 |
| New-client 20% fee | 6 bookings at 20% of £50 | £60.00 |
| Total | £181.85 |
On £6,000 of card takings, the all-in Fresha cost in this illustration is about £182, or roughly 3% of revenue. The subscription is £25 of that. The card fees are about £97. The 20% new-client fee is £60 from just six bookings.
Now scale the resentment. Push it to 15 marketplace "new" clients in a strong month and that single line jumps to £150, and the all-in cost crosses £270. The fee that grows fastest is the one tied to bookings that, for an established salon, were the most likely to have come without a marketplace at all. And if you ever want to leave with your client list in a usable file, the £190-per-month export charge is sitting there as a final speed bump.
For context on whether any of this even moves you over a tax line, see our VAT threshold calculator.
When Fresha is actually fine for you
This is not a hit piece, and pretending Fresha is worthless would be dishonest. There are owners it genuinely suits, and it is worth being clear about who.
- You are new or have spare capacity. If your chairs are empty and you need bodies through the door, the marketplace is doing real work, and 20% on a stranger who would never have found you is a fair trade. Filling a gap beats an empty slot.
- You do not want to run any tech yourself. Fresha is competent software with a deep feature set. If you would rather not think about booking systems at all, it is a reasonable default.
- Your card volume is low. If most of your clients pay cash or bank transfer, the processing fees barely touch you, and the bill is close to just the subscription.
- You actively use the marketplace as a growth channel. Some owners lean into it on purpose, treat the 20% as a customer-acquisition budget, and are happy with the trade. That is a legitimate strategy.
The owners it does not suit are the established, near-full ones, paying 20% on clients they already earned, watching a finder's fee turn into a recurring tax, and locked out of their own data unless they pay £190 a month to get it out.
What changed, and what to do about it
For years the trade-off was simpler because Fresha had a free tier. That ended in 2025. The deal now is a paid subscription on top of card fees on top of a marketplace cut, and the export paywall on top of that. For a salon whose pain is cost rather than empty chairs, the model is pulling in the wrong direction.
The good news is that the market has moved. Flat-fee, no-commission booking tools now exist, where you pay one predictable monthly price, take no marketplace cut on your own clients, own your client list outright, and can leave with your data without a paywall. Keept is built on exactly that idea: no commission on the clients you already earned, one flat price, and free done-for-you migration off Fresha so the switch is not your job to project-manage. You can see how it stacks up at keept.co.uk.
If you are weighing it up, the honest move is to pull your own last three months of Fresha statements and run the maths above on real figures, not the headline price. Then decide. For a step-by-step on moving across without losing your calendar or your clients, see our switch-from-fresha article.
FAQ
Is the 20% Fresha fee a one-off or recurring?
It is charged per qualifying booking, not once per client. A booking the platform counts as a "new" marketplace client triggers the 20% (minimum £4) on that booking. How it treats that same person's repeat visits depends on Fresha's own attribution rules, so read your statements rather than assuming a single charge. The practical point is that it is a per-booking cut, not a flat one-time fee.
Can I avoid the new-client marketplace fee?
The fee applies to bookings Fresha attributes to its marketplace. Clients who book through your own link, your website, or in person are not the same as marketplace "new" clients. So the more of your booking traffic you drive through channels you own, the smaller that line gets. The catch is that attribution is the platform's call, which is exactly why an established salon ends up paying on demand it created. If most of your clients already come from your own reputation, a no-commission model removes the question entirely.
How do I export my data off Fresha?
In the UK, full data export is paywalled at £190 per month, per location. That is the number to know before you are mid-switch and surprised by it. If you are planning to leave, factor it in, and look for a destination tool that offers free, done-for-you migration so you are not paying the exit fee and rebuilding your calendar by hand at the same time.
Is Fresha worth it for an established salon?
It depends entirely on where your bookings come from. If you rely on the marketplace for genuine new demand, the fees buy you something. If you are near full and most of your clients already know you, you are likely paying a recurring cut on demand you generated yourself, and a flat-fee tool will usually cost less and leave you owning your client list.
The honest close
Fresha is not a scam and it is not the enemy of every salon. For an empty chair, a marketplace cut is a fair trade. The problem is narrower than that. It is the model applied to the wrong business: an established, near-full UK owner paying 20% on clients they already earned, plus card fees, plus a subscription that used to be free, plus £190 a month to leave with their own data.
If that is you, do the maths on your last three statements before your next renewal. The headline price was never the real cost, and once you see the full figure, the decision usually makes itself.