The Salon and Clinic Software Stack — Priced, and Which Two You Should Actually Own
A small clinic runs booking, waivers, a staff rota and expenses. We priced the hosted options from their own pages and worked out which layers are worth owning outright — and which are not, including the one that disqualifies most self-hosted booking tools.
A four-person salon or a two-room clinic runs more software than it realises. Booking. Consent forms and waivers. A staff rota. Expenses. Each one is a small monthly number that cleared the "too small to think about" bar, and together they are the third-largest fixed cost after rent and wages.
This is what those four layers actually cost, from the vendors' own pricing pages — and an honest assessment of which are worth owning outright. Two of the four are. Two are not, and one of those is disqualified for a reason that applies to most self-hosted booking tools.
Layer 1 — Booking
The busiest layer and the most contested. From each vendor's own pricing page:
| Vendor | Published price | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Setmore | Free tier; Pro $5/user/month | (2026-07-22) |
| SimplyBook.me | Basic EUR 11.90/month billed annually; free tier exists | (2026-07-05) |
| Acuity Scheduling | Starter $16/month billed annually ($20 monthly) | (2026-07-05) |
| Calendly | Standard $10/seat/month, billed yearly | (2026-07-05) |
| Square Appointments | Free plan; Plus $49/month per location; Premium $149/month | (2026-07-22) |
Three of the five have a free tier. For a single practitioner, booking is close to a solved and free problem.
The question that disqualifies most self-hosted booking tools
When we searched this category on 1 August 2026, the returned analysis named the two constraints that decide it, and they are worth quoting because they are exactly right:
"Team scheduling logic — For teams with shared availability like clinics and agencies, you need round-robin assignment, per-member calendars, and buffer rules; lighter tools often fall short here."
"Payments — If you take payment or deposits at booking, payment gateway support becomes the deciding constraint and narrows the field considerably."
Apply the second one to the self-hosted option honestly. Slotly — $34.00 one time (product page, read 2026-08-01) — answers it directly:
"Does it take payment online?" — "No — deposits are quoted and tracked in admin; online payment gateways are roadmap."
If you take a deposit to hold an appointment — and most clinics and many salons do, because no-shows are the business's biggest silent cost — this is disqualifying today. Not a weakness to weigh against price. Disqualifying.
Where it fits instead: practices that confirm by phone or take payment on the day, and want the booking record and the never-double-book guarantee on their own server. It does handle group classes with a capacity, and reminders run from one cron line, which covers a lot of a small studio's actual needs.
Verdict on layer 1: do not own this one yet, unless you genuinely do not take deposits. Setmore's or Square's free tier is the honest recommendation for most readers.
Layer 2 — Waivers and consent
Where clinics differ from salons. If you collect medical history, consent, or liability waivers, you need a record — and the record is the product.
Hosted: Smartwaiver from $19/month (Basic; Starter $55, Business $155, Premium $199) and WaiverForever from $19/month (Essential; Standard $39, Scale $129), both (read 2026-07-05 and 2026-07-21).
Before owning this layer, read the custody-of-evidence problem — a self-hosted signed record is produced by the party it protects, which matters if a waiver is ever tested. We wrote that up honestly rather than skipping it, including the cases where you should pay a hosted vendor instead.
Verdict on layer 2: own it if your waivers are routine (a treatment consent, a patch-test acknowledgement) and your realistic alternative is a paper clipboard. Do not own it for anything medical or involving minors at scale.
Layer 3 — The staff rota
The layer with the clearest case for owning.
Deputy publishes $5/user/month on Lite with a $30 monthly minimum (read 2026-07-21). For a four-person salon, that minimum means $30/month — 50% more than the per-user arithmetic implies — or $1,080 over three years to write down who is working on Thursday.
A rota has no payment surface, no compliance exposure, and no consequence worse than inconvenience if the server hiccups for an hour. That combination is exactly what makes a layer safe to own.
Verdict on layer 3: own it. Rostera is $59 once against $1,080 over three years.
Layer 4 — Expenses and petty cash
Expensify publishes $5 per member per month and Zoho Expense $4 per user per month (both read 2026-07-05) — priced per member whether they claim or not.
For a four-person salon this is often the layer that should not exist at all: if your "expense process" is the owner keeping receipts in an envelope, adding software is overhead, not savings.
Verdict on layer 4: own it or skip it, but do not rent it — unless you issue company cards, in which case the hosted product is genuinely better and the card is the actual feature.
The stack, priced
A conservative hosted stack for a four-person practice:
| Layer | Hosted, per month |
|---|---|
| Booking (Acuity Starter) | $16.00 |
| Waivers (Smartwaiver Basic) | $19.00 |
| Rota (Deputy, at its minimum) | $30.00 |
| Expenses (Zoho, 4 users) | $16.00 |
| Total | $81.00/month |
| 12 months | $972 |
| 36 months | $2,916 |
Owning the two layers that make sense — rota and waivers — while keeping a free booking tier and no expense software:
| Rostera | $59 once |
| Waiverly | $39 once |
| Booking | $0 (Setmore or Square free tier) |
| Expenses | $0 (an envelope) |
| Total | $98 once |
That is the honest recommendation: own two, use a free tier for one, and delete the fourth. Not "own all four" — because the booking layer is disqualified by deposits and the expense layer probably should not exist at your size.
The honest costs
You are now the IT department for two small apps. Backups, PHP updates, and a server that is your problem. For a rota and a waiver register, that is a low-stakes version of that responsibility — which is precisely why these two and not the till or the booking page.
Waiver retention is a records obligation, not a backup preference. Decide the period before you start.
Hosting. Both run on ordinary shared hosting. If you already have a website, the marginal cost is often nothing. For a concrete number from a named provider: Hetzner's own pricing — machine-read from the price API behind their pricing pages on 10 Aug 2026 — lists web-hosting plans from €1.60 to €16.72 a month and entry cloud servers from €3.99 a month (prices as returned for their German datacenters; confirm current pricing and VAT treatment at checkout). Any comparable host works — the point is that the "own" side of this comparison costs single-digit euros a month.
The short version
A four-person practice can easily be paying $81 a month — $2,916 over three years — across four small subscriptions nobody has reviewed since signup.
- Booking: use a free tier. Three of the five vendors have one, and self-hosted booking is disqualified today if you take deposits.
- Waivers: own it if they are routine. Read the custody-of-evidence caveat first.
- Rota: own it. No payment surface, no compliance exposure, and Deputy's $30 minimum costs a four-person salon 50% over the advertised rate.
- Expenses: own it or skip it. At four people, an envelope is a legitimate system.
Next steps
- Rostera — self-hosted staff rota · live demo
- Waiverly — self-hosted waivers · live demo
- Self-hosted software for salons and clinics
- The SaaS Price Observatory — every vendor above, quoted from its own page and dated
Prices are quoted from each vendor's own pricing page with the date read. Where a free tier exists, we have said so — including where it is the better answer than anything we sell.