Appointment booking with CRM, self-hosted
Appointment booking with a customer record, self-hosted: what a booking tool keeps, what it does not, and the honest gap in this catalogue.
self hosted CRM appointment booking is a query with a hidden assumption, and the honest thing to
do is name it first: this store does not sell a CRM. There is no pipeline, no lead stage, no deal
board and no marketing automation anywhere in the catalogue, and writing a guide that implied
otherwise would be the kind of thing that costs a reader an afternoon.
What the catalogue does hold is a booking tool that keeps a customer record, and an invoicing tool
that keeps a client record, and both run on your own server. Whether that is enough depends entirely
on which half of the query you meant.
Two different things get called a CRM
The first is a contact book with history: who this person is, what they have booked or bought, when
they last came in, and what was said. Small service businesses usually mean this. A booking tool
with customer records and an appointment history covers most of it.
The second is a sales system: leads arriving, stages they move through, forecasts, sequences of
follow-up, and reporting on conversion. That is a different product with a different shape, and no
amount of appointment software becomes it.
If you are booking appointments with people who are already your customers, you are asking for the
first. If you are chasing people who are not yet customers, you are asking for the second, and
nothing here is it.
What owning the copy changes
For the contact-book meaning, self-hosting changes who holds the list. Slotly keeps
customers, their appointment history, services and staff hours in one database on a server you
chose, with the whole booking record exportable as CSV and the database backed up from admin in one
click. There is no per-contact tier, because the licence counts installations rather than records,
and no per-booking fee, because no booking passes through anybody else.
Try the Slotly demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
The second useful piece is the money. Invora holds reusable clients and an item
catalogue, turns an estimate into an invoice, drafts every recurring cycle for a human to approve
before it goes anywhere, and puts your own payment link on each unpaid invoice. Run beside a booking
tool, that gives you the two records a small service business actually re-reads: what they booked,
and what they were billed.
What to look for
A customer record that is not just a booking form. Look for reusable customers, a visible
history per person, and a CSV import with a dry run so bringing an existing list in is a rehearsal
before it is a commitment.
An export you can perform yourself. The list is the asset. An admin-side CSV export and a
one-click database backup mean leaving is a decision rather than a support ticket.
An API, if you intend to join the pieces. Slotly ships an owner REST API with an OpenAPI spec,
revocable bearer keys and signed webhooks on booking events, which is how an appointment becomes a
row somewhere else without a person retyping it.
Honesty about the stages. If a candidate advertises a pipeline, read what a stage actually does.
A status field renamed is not a sales system.
The limits, stated plainly
Slotly is a booking engine with customer records, not a CRM: no pipeline, no lead source, no
sequences, no conversion reporting, and no marketing mail of any kind. It processes no cards, runs
one business per installation, and its calendar feeds go one way. Invora is not double-entry
accounting or a general ledger, never processes cards either, and emails nothing unless a person
presses the button.
Joining the two is your work. There is no packaged integration between them in the box; what exists
is an API on each side and a CSV in the middle. For a small operation that is usually a morning's
work and then nothing. For a sales team of ten it is the wrong starting point, and the right answer
is probably a CRM that is not in this catalogue.
Questions people ask
Is there a CRM product here?
No. The catalogue has a booking tool with customer records and an invoicing tool with client
records; it has nothing with leads, stages or pipelines, and there is no plan on this page to
pretend otherwise.
Can the booking tool push a new customer into something else?
Yes, through the owner REST API and signed webhooks on booking events, or through a CSV export. Both
are owner-side and both are revocable.
Will the price rise as the customer list grows?
No. The licence covers the sites you run the software on, not the number of records it holds.
Where to look next
The two product pages are Slotly for the bookings and Invora for the
invoicing, each with its own feature record and its own stated limits. The side-by-side
compares the booking half against what the rented services offer. If the question is really about
what a rented stack costs before you decide to assemble your own, read
the observatory: every figure there is quoted verbatim beside the date it was read
and a link to the page it came from. Prices are on the observatory; read them on the date shown
there.