How to Switch From Fresha (Without Losing Your Clients)

The two things that keep owners stuck on Fresha are the fear of losing the client list they spent years building, and the fear of going dark for a week mid-migration. Both are real. Neither is a good enough reason to stay somewhere you have decided you want to leave.

This is a peer walkthrough for how to switch from Fresha cleanly: what data to get out, the order to do things in, the £190-a-month export wall you may run into, and roughly how long the whole thing actually takes. Plain version, no sales spin.

Before you touch anything

Switching a booking system is genuinely fiddly. Anyone who tells you it is a five-minute job is either selling you something or has never run a busy diary. You are moving a live calendar, a client database, a service menu and your team's habits all at once, and the salon does not stop trading while you do it.

So the goal is not "do it fast". It is "do it without dropping a single booking and without losing a single client record". Slower and intact beats quick and broken.

One thing worth doing first: be clear on why you are leaving. If it is the commission charged on your own returning clients, you are not imagining it. That model is the whole reason the marketplace exists, and it is worth understanding the true cost of Fresha before you decide where you land next. If it is mostly the export wall, read on, because there are ways around being held hostage by it.

How to switch from Fresha, step by step

Here is the running order. Do them in sequence. The mistake owners make is importing into a new tool before they have safely pulled everything out of the old one.

1. Decide, and pick a date

Choose a quieter week if your trade has one. Avoid the run-up to Christmas, Mother's Day or any local event that fills your diary. Give yourself a soft target rather than a hard cutover, because the parallel-running step below means you are not flipping a switch on one morning.

2. Get your data out

This is the part that matters most. The client record is the asset. The four things you want out of Fresha, in priority order:

• Your client list with contact details. Names, mobile numbers, email addresses, and any tags or notes you rely on. The one you cannot afford to lose.
• Future appointments and your calendar. Everything already booked ahead so nobody turns up to a closed door or an empty diary.
• Your service menu. Treatment names, durations, prices. Quick to rebuild by hand, but nice to have ready.
• Client history, if you can get it. Past visit notes, treatment history, course or package balances. Useful, not always essential.

Fresha's settings and what each plan lets you export change from time to time, so confirm the current options inside your own account before you assume anything. Look in the data, clients and reporting areas. If an export button is greyed out or asks you to upgrade, that is the paywall, covered below.

A safe move many owners make: pull your client list into your new system first, before you run any campaign or do anything that could trigger a fee on people who are already yours. Your returning clients are your clients. Get them somewhere you own them.

3. Pick the new tool

Whatever you move to, judge it against the thing that pushed you out. If you left because of commission on your own clients, do not move to another tool that does the same under a different name. The questions worth asking any provider:

• Do you charge a percentage on my own returning clients, or one flat monthly price?
• Do I own and can I export my full client list whenever I want, for free?
• Will you help me move my existing data in, or am I on my own?

Keept was built around exactly those three answers: no commission on your own clients, one flat monthly price, and your data stays yours. Free migration is included, which is the part most owners care about here. It is one option, and an honest comparison against whatever else is on your shortlist is the right way to choose. You can see how the migration side works at Keept.

4. Import into the new system

Once your data is out and clean, import it. Client list first, then future appointments, then the service menu. Check the import line by line on a sample of records before you trust the whole file. Mobile numbers and emails are where imports most often go wrong, and those are the fields you need intact for reminders and rebooking to work.

5. Run both briefly in parallel

Do not delete Fresha the day you import. Keep both live for a short overlap, perhaps a week or two. Take new bookings in the new system, but keep Fresha readable so you can cross-check that nothing already booked got missed. The overlap is your safety net. It is the single biggest thing that prevents downtime.

6. Tell your clients

Most clients do not care what software you use, they care that booking is easy and their appointment is safe. Keep the message short and calm. Something like: we have moved to a new booking system, here is the new link, your existing appointments are all carried over, nothing for you to do. Put it in your usual channels, your booking confirmations, a pinned post, a text to regulars. No drama, no long explanation.

7. Cancel Fresha

Only once the new system has run clean for a couple of weeks, your client list checks out, and every future appointment is accounted for, cancel Fresha. Confirm the cancellation terms inside your account so you are not surprised by a notice period or a final charge. Keep a downloaded copy of your data archive somewhere safe regardless of where you end up.

The £190 export wall, and how not to be held hostage by it

Here is the bit Fresha would rather you did not focus on. In the UK, full data export is paywalled on a paid tier reported at around £190 a month per location. So owners can find themselves in the position of paying a premium just to be allowed to take their own data with them.

There are a few honest ways to deal with this.

First, confirm the current price and what exactly it covers inside your own account, because plan structure and pricing move. Do not take a forum post, including this one, as gospel for what your screen says today.

Second, weigh one month of the higher tier against the time cost of doing it the slow way. For some owners, paying for a single month, exporting everything cleanly, then cancelling is the cheapest route out in real terms. One month of a fee you were going to escape anyway can be worth it to leave with a complete, tidy archive.

Third, if you would rather not pay it at all, you can rebuild from what you already hold. Most owners have more of their own data than they think: past booking confirmation emails, marketing contacts, accounts records, and whatever the free tier does let you see. It is more manual and you may lose some history, but the core asset, who your clients are and how to reach them, is recoverable without the upgrade.

And the documented owner playbook is to get your own client list across before anything triggers a commission charge on those people. Pulling your returning clients out first stops you paying the marketplace to reach people who were already yours.

This is where a done-for-you migration earns its place. Part of what Keept does on the way in is handle the data lift so you are not personally wrestling with exports and CSV files at 11pm. It does not magic away Fresha's own paywall, no third party can override what your old provider charges, but it removes the manual side and the guesswork. Again, one option among several, and worth checking against your shortlist.

How long does it really take

Honest answer: plan for a week or two of overlap, not an afternoon, even though the active work is much smaller than that.

The hands-on tasks, exporting, importing, rebuilding the menu and writing the client message, are a day or two of real effort spread out. The calendar says "a week or two" because of the parallel-running window, where you are mostly just watching to make sure nothing slipped. That waiting period is doing real work even when you are not.

Where it stretches: a big or messy client database, a long notice period on your Fresha plan, or a team that needs a couple of practice runs before they are comfortable taking bookings on the new system. None of that is a reason not to switch. It is the reason to start in a quiet week rather than a frantic one.

If the deeper question is whether leaving actually pays for itself once you add up commission, fees and your own time, the VAT threshold calculator and the true cost of Fresha are the place to run those numbers properly.

FAQ