The Salon and Clinic Software Stack — Priced, and Which Two You Should Actually Own

A four-person salon or a two-room clinic runs more software than it realizes. 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:

Three of the five have a free tier. For a single practitioner, booking is close to a solved and free problem.

For a four-person practice, though, the deciding number on these pages is not the price — it is the booking allowance. SimplyBook.me publishes its tiers as counts (read 5 September 2026): Free holds 50 bookings a month with one provider; Basic 100 bookings with five; Standard 500 with fifteen; Premium 2,000 with thirty. The provider counts are generous — five covers the salon in this article twice over. The booking counts are the constraint. A hundred bookings spread across a working month is roughly four appointments a day for the whole business, which a four-chair salon passes before lunch. So the tier a busy small practice actually needs is Standard, and the cheap row on the table was never really available to it.

One more thing about that vendor, and it is a first for this ledger. SimplyBook.me's pricing page localizes to the visitor's country and publishes no currency selector — our 5 September read was served Brazilian reais (Basic at "R$33.75 per month, billed annually"), where the July reading recorded EUR 11.90. We are not going to convert one into the other, because an exchange rate is our arithmetic and not the vendor's price. Take it as a warning about every price in every comparison you read: this one is only true for the country the reader is standing in.

The question that disqualifies most self-hosted booking tools

Two constraints decide this category for a clinic or a salon. Team scheduling logic — shared availability across practitioners needs per-member calendars, buffers and a sensible way to assign the next free person; lighter tools fall short here. Payments — if you take a deposit at booking, how the money is taken becomes the deciding constraint and narrows the field considerably.

Apply the second one to the self-hosted option honestly. Slotly — $99.00 one time (product page, read 2026-08-20; FAQ re-read 2 September 2026) — answers it directly:

Try the Slotly demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.

"Does it take payment online?" — "Slotly never processes cards. Deposits are quoted and tracked in admin, and your own payment link (Stripe, PayPal — any page) is shown to the customer beside the amount due. The payment happens on your provider's page, not on your server."

Read that as two different customers. If a deposit shown beside a payment link — the customer pays on Stripe's or PayPal's page and you record it — is acceptable to the people who book with you, the constraint is met and the never-double-book engine, buffers, split shifts and group classes with a capacity are yours to own. If the card must be taken inside the booking flow itself, with no second page, this is still not it — and for a clinic whose no-show problem is severe, that can be decisive.

Verdict on layer 1: own it only if a payment link beside the deposit is acceptable to your customers. If the deposit must be taken by card inside the booking flow, Setmore's or Square's free tier is the honest recommendation. The direct answer to "self-hosted booking, simple to use, with an API" is the long form.

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; read 2026-07-05) and WaiverForever from $19/month (Essential; Standard $39, Scale $129; read 2026-07-21).

Neither would be read on 5 September 2026. Smartwaiver answered HTTP 403; WaiverForever returned a page whose only contents were a tracking pixel, with no plan cards at all. Both sets of figures therefore keep their July dates. It is worth noticing what that means for the layer under discussion: the two vendors selling you a durable record of what someone agreed to are the two whose own published terms we could not retrieve today.

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 acknowledgment) 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 2026-09-03, re-read 5 September 2026 — both figures unchanged). 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 $69 once against $1,080 over three years — the full Deputy cost breakdown runs the same arithmetic for a fifteen-person team.

Layer 4 — Expenses and petty cash

Expensify publishes $5 per member per month and Zoho Expense $4 per user per month (both re-read 5 September 2026) — priced per member whether they claim or not.

Two qualifications the flat "$5" hides, both from the announcement itself (post dated May 08, 2025; read 5 September 2026). The rate is "flat $5/member/mo" with "no annual commitment, even if you don't use the Expensify Card" — and it applies to "all customers who signed up after April 1st, 2025", with earlier accounts unaffected. So the published price is the price for new customers; a salon that signed up in 2024 is on terms this page does not state. Outside the US the same post lists £5, A$8 and NZ$9 a month. And Zoho, the cheaper of the two, gives the layer away below four people: its free plan holds three users (read 5 September 2026) — which is most of the practices this section is written for.

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:

Owning the two layers that make sense — rota and waivers — while keeping a free booking tier and no expense software:

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 depends on whether a payment link beside the deposit suits your customers, and the expense layer probably should not exist at your size. If it does suit them, the Studio Suite bundles Slotly with Waiverly, Gymora and Visitora for $199 once.

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 on 10 August 2026 from the price API behind its web-hosting and cloud pricing pages — 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, or own it if a payment link beside the deposit is acceptable. Three of the five vendors have a free tier; the self-hosted option never touches the card.
• 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
• What a twelve-staff gym pays for software every year — the same four layers at a larger site
• 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.