Most salon scheduling tools in the US price on your success: a percentage of each booking, a fee per active client, or a tier that jumps the month you add a second chair. That is fine while you are quiet and expensive once you are not — the bill grows precisely when the shop is working.
What actually needs to be true
A salon booking site has a short list of jobs, and most of the difficulty is in the second one:
- Publish a service menu with real prices and real durations
- Never hand the same slot to two people
- Send the client something so they turn up
- Record what happened, including when nobody showed
Durations are where generic tools break
A cut is forty minutes and a full colour is two and a half hours. A calendar that treats every appointment as one block either burns your afternoon or books a colour into a gap that cannot hold it. Each service carries its own duration, and the day is offered to clients accordingly.
Double-booking is settled in the database, not the screen
Two clients tapping the last Friday evening slot at the same moment is the case that matters. The slot is claimed by writing it, and the second write is refused — so availability on the page is a convenience, never the thing deciding who got the chair.
Payments land in your own account
On a paid plan you connect your own Stripe or PayPal account and card payments settle there directly. Storzu is not in the payment path, so there is no platform balance, no payout schedule of ours to wait on, and no cut taken between your client and your bank.
What it will not do
It will not hold a deposit when a client books. The appointment is recorded as unpaid and the client pays you at the chair. Deposit-taking is common in the US salon market, so if that is your no-show strategy, choose a scheduler built around prepayment — this is the wrong tool for that one job, and it is better to know now.
What is here instead: text and email reminders on paid plans, a no-show recorded as its own outcome rather than a quiet cancellation, and a history that shows you which clients do it repeatedly.
Starting cost
The free plan is genuinely free and takes real bookings — 10 services and 30 bookings a month, no card required. Growth at $9.99 a month removes the booking limit and adds your own domain and card checkout. See US pricing for the full comparison.