G-Guest · what things cost
What a booking system actually costs
A free calendar, a $499 restaurant platform and a €49 booking layer are not the same product. Below: what each one charges for, what gets more expensive as you grow, and which of them is built for the thing you actually need.
Prices checked: 7 September 2026
| If what you need is | Look at |
|---|---|
| The cheapest possible calendar | Square Appointments · Setmore · Fresha |
| Demand from a marketplace | OpenTable · Booksy · Fresha · Treatwell |
| Enterprise restaurant operations | OpenTable Core and Pro · Tock · Resy · SevenRooms |
| Till, payments and booking in one | Square · Fresha · Booksy |
| Table management on a small budget | ResOS |
| Direct booking, a public page, guest history and availability an AI assistant can act on | G-Guest |
Four different products wear the same label
“Booking system” is sold by companies doing four unrelated jobs. The bill follows the job, which is why comparing the monthly figures alone tells you almost nothing.
New to the four types? Start with how to choose a restaurant reservation system.
Marketplace
You buy demand.
The platform puts you in front of people who do not know you and takes a fee when it works. Repeat visits are normally free.
OpenTable · Booksy · Fresha · Treatwell
Operations suite
You buy operational depth.
Floor plans, POS integrations, deposits, ticketed events, group reporting. Built for restaurants that need all of it.
OpenTable Core and Pro · Tock · Resy · SevenRooms
Scheduler
You buy a calendar.
Availability, appointments, reminders, sometimes payments. Cheap, self-serve, and it stops where the calendar stops.
Square · Setmore · Vagaro
Action layer
You buy being bookable.
Your public page, live availability, direct booking, guest history, and an interface both people and AI assistants can complete.
G-Guest · €49 per venue, flat
What €49 buys that a price table does not show
Confirmed on the spot, by nobody
A booking is real the moment it is made, day or night, with no one reading a request and writing back. The table or the hour is held, and the guest has it in writing.
One venue, one price
Two staff or twenty. Twenty bookings or two thousand. €49. Your best month is not your most expensive one.
A business page we build for you
No website needed. Real facts, photos, hours, live availability and a permanent public address, set up by us rather than left in an empty admin panel.
The guest relationship stays yours
Visits, contacts, notes and history belong to the venue and export in one click, including on the day you leave. No marketplace sits between you and the person who just booked, and nobody else's business appears on your page.
Built for human and AI booking
The same live availability a customer clicks can be read and completed by an assistant, with no key and no form to fill.
The sticker is not the number that decides your year
What matters is what the bill does when the business does well. Every rule in the middle column is the vendor’s own, published on their pricing page.
| When this happens | Elsewhere | G-Guest |
|---|---|---|
| You hire a fifth stylist | Booksy adds $20 a month. Fresha charges €6.95 a month for the person. Vagaro adds $10. | €49 |
| You go from 100 bookings a month to 500 | ResOS steps up a plan. A marketplace charges for each new client it introduced. | €49 |
| A marketplace sends you 10 new clients | Booksy takes 30% of ten first visits. Treatwell takes 35%. | €49 |
| Your own website sends 200 covers | On OpenTable Basic that is $50, or the $49 flat option for that channel, on top of $149. | €49 |
| You open a second location | Square charges per location. Most of this market does. | €49 for the second venue |
A worked example, restaurant side. A place on OpenTable Basic pays $149 a month. If a hundred reservations a month come from its own website at two people each, that is 200 covers: $50 at $0.25 a cover, or the flat $49 option for that channel. Around $199 a month, for traffic the restaurant already owned. The same bookings through G-Guest are part of the €49.
And the honest half of it: this compares one channel only. If OpenTable is bringing you diners who had never heard of you, that network has a separate value and the fee is buying something real. The comparison above is about the guests you already had.
A worked example, salon side. A salon with five people on Booksy pays $29.99 plus four times $20, so $109.99 a month before a single commission. Ten new clients from Boost on a $40 service add $120 in one-off fees. On G-Guest the five people are €49 and the ten clients are €0, and none of that includes card processing, which every one of these products charges separately.
The questions a price page does not answer
Every line below is quoted from the company’s own pricing page, help centre or terms, read on 7 September 2026. These are the terms that decide what a platform costs you over years, and none of them appear next to the monthly figure.
Can you switch the marketplace off and keep taking bookings?
Fresha's help centre: “Unlisting your profile will disable online bookings and any booking links you have.” Their FAQ adds that existing Book Now buttons and booking links stop working too. So on Fresha the marketplace and the booking engine are one thing: while you take online bookings, the new-client fee applies.
Fresha, help centre
Does the fee follow who found the client, or how they clicked?
Booksy's own documentation: “We do our best to ensure you're only being charged for clients we find you through Boost, but you're busy and sometimes we can't keep up with you.” Fresha has confirmed in a public reply that its new-client fee applies even when the booking came through a link shared on your own website or social media.
Booksy help centre · Fresha public reply, December 2025
Can you take your client list with you?
Fresha lets you export it yourself, to CSV or Excel, with names, contacts and notes; only card details are withheld. That is worth saying plainly, because it cuts against us. Booksy is the opposite: appointments, inventory and stock all export with a button, but for the client list their help centre says to email support, and only the Polish version documents a scope and a five-day turnaround.
Fresha and Booksy help centres
Whose data is it while you are there?
Treatwell's supplier terms: “Treatwell has access to all of this data. Treatwell has the right to transfer it to third parties… you do not have the right to restrict the transfer of this data.” The same terms require a salon to “add all bookings into the calendar provided by Treatwell regardless of the means the Customer used to make the booking.” Neither Fresha nor Booksy has an equivalent clause.
Treatwell supplier terms
Do your reviews and your address travel with you?
Fresha, replying publicly to a salon that moved country: accounts “cannot currently be transferred between countries”, and reviews are “linked to the original business location rather than the business itself”. A marketplace profile is also a public page you do not own: Fresha venue pages carry a “Venues nearby” section listing competitors.
Fresha public reply, August 2026, and live venue pages
On G-Guest the answers are short.There is no marketplace to be listed in, so nothing to switch off and no share of any guest. The booking is confirmed the moment it is made, without anyone reading a request. The guest list is the venue’s, exports in one click including on the day you leave, and the page carries no other business on it.
Owner reports, kept separate from the quotes above because they are a weaker kind of evidence: between 2023 and 2026, more than a dozen salon owners on Software Advice, Trustpilot and Reddit describe being charged Fresha’s new-client fee for clients they had brought themselves, and owners on Reddit and YouTube describe the same pattern with Booksy’s Boost, including bookings made on the shop’s own link. Several also report that switching Boost off pushed their profile down the marketplace listings. Both companies dispute individual cases and run a claims process, and Boost is switched on by the owner, not by default.
By kind of product, not by brand
Brands change their plans every quarter. What they are built to do changes slowly, and that is the comparison worth keeping.
| Marketplace | Operations suite | Scheduler | G-Guest | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brings its own demand | yes | sometimes | no | no |
| Direct live booking | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Public business page | yes | sometimes | sometimes | yes |
| Works without a website | yes | usually | often | yes |
| Flat price per venue | rarely | rarely | varies | yes |
| No per-person fee | varies | varies | varies | yes |
| No per-booking fee | varies | varies | often | yes |
| Guest history | yes | yes | varies | yes |
| Waitlist that resells a cancellation | varies | yes | varies | yes |
| Review requests routed for you | varies | varies | varies | yes |
| Set up for you, not self-serve | sometimes | usually | rarely | yes |
| Booking interface an assistant can call | platform's choice | partner-dependent | not the proposition | yes |
| Prepayment at booking | often | yes | often | optional, into your own Stripe |
| POS and inventory | often | yes | often | no |
The line that is not on the invoice
What happens when the customer is not the one clicking the form
Local search is moving from finding a place to doing something at it. Assistants already read a restaurant page, understand it, and try to act. Booking software is quietly acquiring a second customer: software itself.
A person needs a form. An assistant needs an interface it can read and complete. Those are not the same thing, and almost nothing in this market publishes the second one.
163
working restaurant websites, out of 200 measured in Amsterdam
16
could be completed by an agent driving a browser
0
published a booking interface an assistant could call
G-Guest publishes one for every active venue. The study is here, with its method and its raw counts.
We are not claiming an integration with anybody’s assistant. This is the direction the market is moving, and a booking page that only a human can finish is exposed to it.
What about ResOS?
ResOS is genuinely good value. A free tier up to 25 bookings a month, then €45, €85 or €125 depending on volume, with no commission and no cover fee, a booking page, a website widget, guest profiles, a waitlist and a table planner. If you want a traditional restaurant reservation system with table management, it deserves a look and we would rather say so than pretend it does not exist.
G-Guest is built for a different edge
- · One product across restaurants, appointments and classes.
- · A full public business page, not only a booking link.
- · A flat price that does not step with booking volume.
- · A guest return and review layer, not only a reservation book.
- · A booking interface built to be called by an assistant.
- · We do not hand you an empty dashboard. We put the business live and set it up for you.
Keep what brings you demand. Own what you already earned.
If a marketplace genuinely brings you new customers, keep it. G-Guest does not need to replace it, and this is not a choice between the two. Use the marketplace for discovery, and G-Guest for your own website, your direct traffic, your returning guests and the assistants that will book on their behalf.
The question worth asking is narrower than “which one”: how many of the people you paid a commission for already knew your name? Someone who typed your business into a marketplace app was your customer before the app was involved. That is the part of the bill you can move.
Salons, barbers and clinics: what each one charges
Read the second line of every card. The subscription is the part everybody quotes; the per-person and per-client lines are the part that grows.
Booksy
Marketplace + software
Subscription: $29.99 a month plus $20 for every extra team member on the US page. The UK page reads £40 a month plus £5 a person.
Per guest or per client: Boost, switched on by the owner: a one-off 30% of the full price of a new client's first visit, with a $10 minimum in the US and £5 in the UK. It is charged to the card on file even when the client pays you in cash.
The headline has read $29.99 since 2021, while the charge per extra person doubled from $10 to $20. A five-person shop went from $69.99 to $109.99 without the advertised price moving. No free plan, 14-day trial. Processing 2.49% to 2.69%.
Verified on vendor site · US and UK pricing pages
Fresha
Marketplace + software
Subscription: $19.95 a month solo or $14.95 per bookable team member on the US page. The euro page shows €11.95 and €6.95.
Per guest or per client: 20% of a new client's first booking, minimum $6, on the pages served in dollars. On the euro pages the same row prints “Free”. The fee follows the country the business is in, not the address you type.
Free until 2025: solo accounts in the US went from $0 to $19.95 between 23 August and 18 September 2025. Add-ons are priced separately, from $2.95 a member for Team Connect to $99.95 a location for the AI concierge.
Verified on vendor site · US and euro pricing pages
Treatwell
Marketplace + software
Subscription: Not published. Two plans, both “start for free”, and an FAQ that says “your monthly fee” without naming one
Per guest or per client: 35% of a new client's first booking from their marketplace, marked “subject to location”. 0% on repeat bookings and on bookings from your own site.
2.5% plus VAT on online prepayments.
Verified on vendor site · UK partner page
Square Appointments
Scheduler + payments
Subscription: $0, $49 or $149 a month, per location
Per guest or per client: None
Processing 2.4% to 2.6% plus 15¢, improving as the plan goes up. The free tier is genuinely free.
Verified on vendor site · US pricing page
Setmore
Scheduler
Subscription: Free for up to 4 users. Pro is $12 per user a month on monthly billing
Per guest or per client: None, it is a calendar rather than a marketplace
The $5 on their headline is the annual rate. We quote the standing monthly price.
Verified on vendor site · US pricing page
Vagaro
Scheduler + marketplace
Subscription: $23.99 a month for the first bookable calendar, $10 for each one after, capped at $83.99
Per guest or per client: None published
A bookable calendar is a person who performs services. Read 28 August 2026: their page blocks us today.
Verified on vendor site · US pricing page
Restaurants: what each one charges
Bigger monthly numbers, and a fee structure that is fairer than it is usually described. Most of these platforms do not charge for bookings from your own website.
OpenTable
Marketplace + operations
Subscription: Basic $149, Core $299, Pro $499 a month
Per guest or per client: Per seated guest from their network: $1.50 a guest on Basic, $1 on Core and Pro, after an initial period. On Basic the fee also reaches guests from your own website, billed at $0.25 a cover or a flat $49 a month for that channel. On Core and Pro your own website's covers are included.
The one to read twice is Basic: the cheapest plan is the one that charges you for traffic you already own.
Verified on vendor site · US plans page
Tock
Operations suite
Subscription: $289 a month on Platform and Essential, $459 on Platform 360 and Premium
Per guest or per client: No per-cover fee. Prepayments cost 3% on Essential and 2% on Premium.
Two of the four plans read “Powered by Resy”. Tock and Resy are the same family now, and their pages mirror each other.
Verified on vendor site · US pricing page
Resy
Operations suite
Subscription: $289 a month on Platform and Essential, $459 on Platform 360 and Premium
Per guest or per client: “Resy pricing is transparent with no per-cover fees. We do not charge any fees on a per reservation basis.”
New since our August check: Resy publishes prices now. Two of its plans read “Powered by Tock”.
Verified on vendor site · US pricing page
ResOS
Flat booking system
Subscription: Free up to 25 bookings a month. Then €45 for 350 bookings, €85 for 750, €125 unlimited
Per guest or per client: None. No commission, no cover fee, no per-booking charge.
The honest cheap option for a restaurant that wants table management. Their price steps with booking volume, and some features are paid add-ons.
Verified on vendor site · euro pricing page, currency switcher
TheFork
Marketplace
Subscription: “Ask for pricing”, no figure published
Per guest or per client: A percentage of your average bill per guest, on bookings from their marketplace only
Bookings from your own website and social media are listed as included. Read 27 August 2026: their page blocks us today.
Verified on vendor site · manager pricing page
SevenRooms · ResDiary
Operations suite
Subscription: Neither publishes a subscription price
Per guest or per client: ResDiary states zero commission on every channel including your own website. SevenRooms shows tiers with “Get a quote”.
ResDiary prices its add-ons openly, €10 to €60 a month each, while the core plan carries no figure.
Verified on vendor site · vendor pricing pages
G-Guest is deliberately not everything
Need floor optimisation, POS, inventory and group reporting?
Buy an operations suite and pay what it costs. That is what they are for.
Need a card held against no-shows, or ticketed experiences?
G-Guest takes an optional prepayment at booking, straight into your own Stripe, but it does not keep a card to charge later or sell tickets. If that is the core of your business, a platform built around it fits better.
Need a marketplace to fill quiet nights?
Use one. We bring no demand of our own and will not claim otherwise.
Need hotel nights?
G-Guest books within a day: tables, appointments, class places. Not overnight stays.
Need direct bookings, guest memory and availability an assistant can act on, without an enterprise stack?
That is our lane, and it is the one this page is about.
Already paying for booking software?
We will show you what G-Guest would replace, what it would not, and what your current booking path looks like to an AI assistant. It takes about a minute and costs nothing.
No card. No call. We set it up for you.
Straight answers
How much does a booking system cost?
Between nothing and several hundred a month, depending on which of four things you are buying. A calendar starts at zero and runs to about $12 a user. A flat booking system for a restaurant runs roughly €45 to €125 a month at ResOS, stepping with volume. A marketplace charges a subscription plus a share of the clients it introduces: Booksy $29.99 a month plus $20 per extra team member plus 30% of a Boost client's first visit, Treatwell 35% of a first booking. Restaurant platforms run $149 to $499 a month at OpenTable and $289 to $459 at Tock and Resy. G-Guest is €49 a month per venue, flat, whatever the volume and however many people work there.
What is the cheapest booking system?
For one person taking appointments, the cheapest real options are free: Square Appointments has a free tier and Setmore is free up to four users. Fresha starts at €11.95 a month. If price alone decides it, those are the answer and we will not pretend otherwise. The reason to pay more is what the cheap tools do not include: a public page for the business, a guest history that is yours, setup done for you, and a booking interface software can act on.
Do booking platforms charge for bookings from my own website?
Usually no, with one important exception. TheFork lists bookings from your own website and social media as included; ResDiary states zero commission on every channel; Resy states no per-cover fees at all. The exception is OpenTable's cheapest plan, Basic: there, covers from your own website are billed at $0.25 each, or a flat $49 a month for that channel, on top of the $149 subscription. On Core and Pro they are included.
What is a new client fee?
A one-off share of the first visit of a customer the marketplace says it introduced. Booksy charges 30% of that first visit when the client came through Boost. Treatwell charges 35% of the first booking and 0% on repeats. Fresha's pricing page carries the row and prints the value as “Free”, with no rate or minimum published on that page.
What does Fresha really cost?
More than the headline, and it depends where your business is. The US page shows $19.95 a month solo or $14.95 per bookable team member, plus 20% of a new client's first booking with a $6 minimum. The euro page shows €11.95 and €6.95 and prints the new-client fee as “Free”: the fee follows the country the business is in. On top of either, card processing, messaging beyond the free allowance, and add-ons priced from $2.95 a member to $99.95 a location. Fresha was free until 2025: solo accounts in the US went from $0 to $19.95 between 23 August and 18 September 2025.
Can you use Fresha without its marketplace?
Not while taking online bookings. Fresha's help centre states that unlisting your profile “will disable online bookings and any booking links you have”, and that existing Book Now buttons stop working too. Fresha has also confirmed publicly that the new-client fee applies when a first-time client books through a link shared on your own website or social media.
Can I export my clients from Booksy or Fresha?
From Fresha, yes, yourself: their help centre documents an export of the client list to CSV or Excel, with only card details withheld. From Booksy, not on your own: appointments, inventory and stock export with a button, but for the client list their help centre tells you to email support, and only the Polish version documents what comes back and how long it takes. Nobody reports being refused an export by either company.
Is a commission-free booking system always cheaper?
No. It is cheaper when your customers already know you and arrive by your own name, search, social or word of mouth, because then a commission bills you for people you already had. It is more expensive when a marketplace genuinely fills tables you could not fill yourself. That commission is the price of demand, and demand is worth paying for.
How much is G-Guest, and what changes as it gets busier?
€49 a month per venue, flat. Nothing per booking, nothing per staff member, no share of any guest. Two people or twenty, twenty bookings or two thousand: €49. A hundred bookings a month works out at €0.49 each, two hundred at €0.24. The guest base belongs to the venue and exports in one click.
What does G-Guest not do?
It does not keep a card on file to charge for a no-show: a venue can take an optional prepayment at booking, paid into its own Stripe with no cut for G-Guest, and otherwise reminders and a waitlist that resells the cancellation do that job. It is not a marketplace and brings no demand of its own. It has no POS, no inventory and no enterprise floor management. And it books within a day: tables, appointments and class places, not hotel nights.
Which booking systems can an AI assistant complete a booking on?
Very few. In a field study of 200 randomly selected Amsterdam restaurants published by G-Lab Studio in July 2026, 163 had a working website, 16 could be completed by an agent driving a browser, and none published a booking interface an assistant could call directly. G-Guest publishes one for every active venue, and a booking can be completed end to end without a human touching a form.
How this was checked
On 7 September 2026we opened each vendor’s own pricing page and recorded what it said, in the currency and region that page served us. Nothing here is averaged, converted or taken from a review site.
List prices only. Where a vendor is running an introductory offer or headlines an annual rate, we quote the standing monthly price instead. A discount published here would be wrong within weeks, and every other number on the page would inherit the doubt.
Not published by the vendorat the time of checking: Treatwell’s subscription, Fresha’s new-client rate and minimum, TheFork’s subscription and percentage, and SevenRooms’ and ResDiary’s subscriptions. We say so rather than pass on a third-party estimate.
What changed since 27 August: Resy now publishes prices, and our earlier note that it did not is corrected above. Fresha and ResOS served us euro pages, so those figures are the European ones. Two pages, Vagaro and TheFork, refused our request this time and carry their August reading with that date. Prices change: if you are reading this much later, check again.