Two Published Rates, Two Missing Ones, and One Flat Fee From Cascadia

You compare what you can and you are honest about the rest. Calendly publishes, at ten dollars a seat a month on Standard and sixteen on Teams, both on the annual terms. Setmore publishes, at five dollars a user a month on the annual term and twelve on the monthly one, with a free plan covering four users. Doodle publishes its free tier and a fifteen thousand dollar a year enterprise floor and hides the two plans in between. Acuity publishes nothing we could fetch. So the comparison you can run before the calls is about what each one counts and what each one includes, and there the gaps are real: Calendly holds round robin and routing for Teams, Setmore holds SMS reminders and calendar sync for Pro, and half of what Doodle sells is polling rather than booking. Count your staff calendars first, because three of the four are pricing that number.

Rarely on the software. It goes wrong on the durations and on the handover, and nobody quotes for either. Somebody capable sets up something genuinely useful in a week, the front desk starts relying on it, and then that person changes role and nobody left can safely add a service or change an availability rule. Meanwhile the timings that fitted a quiet spring do not fit a full summer, and the fixes get bolted on sideways until the day is running fifty minutes late by two in the afternoon. Ask who maintains it before you ask what it costs.

You do, and it is not a clause we negotiated for you. The Zoho account is in your name and billed to you, we do not resell the licenses, and every customer record, appointment history, intake answer and payment record stays inside it. Stop paying us and nothing switches off. That matters more here than with most software, because a booking system collects contact details and often health or intake answers alongside them, and the day somebody asks what you hold on them is not the day to work out whose login it sat under.

For a lot of businesses, yes, and we would rather say so here than after an invoice. If you are three or four people, Setmore Free covers you outright and Setmore Pro is five dollars a user, and three hundred does not need spending. Where the arithmetic turns is staff count and enforcement: enough calendars that the per user meter starts to bite, enough services with different durations and different qualified staff that the rules have to be enforced rather than remembered, and enough integration that a booking has to reach your CRM and your invoicing without anybody retyping it. What no platform price includes is that somebody.

Setmore, clearly, and we are not going to dress that up. Its free plan covers four users and two hundred appointments a month, and Pro is five dollars a user a month on the annual term, which is the lowest real number on this page. Calendly Standard is ten dollars a seat. Our figure is three hundred dollars a month flat, so at four staff we cost roughly fifteen times what Setmore Pro does. Flat rate only overtakes them once the seat count is large, somewhere around thirty seats against Calendly Standard and sixty users against Setmore Pro, and the honest reason to pay us before that point is the configuration and the upkeep rather than the license arithmetic. Doodle and Acuity cannot be ranked here at all, because one hides its middle plans and the other publishes nothing.

On a subscription the platform is supported and whatever you configured on it is not, and almost everything that goes wrong is the thing you configured. A double booking caused by the way a buffer was scoped is not a bug their support desk can fix, because somebody scoped it. Here it is one company and one number, fixes sit inside the fee rather than being quoted for, and when Zoho ships a platform change that breaks a workflow you depend on, that is our problem before it is yours.

No, and most should not. The usual order is the service you book most often, because that is where the time comes back soonest and where you find out quickly whether the duration and the buffer are honest. The rest follows once that one is running. A once a year consultation that gets arranged over the phone in two minutes can stay that way, and there is rarely a reason to rush it. Moving everything in one week is how a business ends up running two half finished calendars and trusting neither.

Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read the services and their durations, the availability and buffer rules, the staff and resource assignments, the reminders and templates, the payment settings, the calendar connections and the reports nobody has opened in a year, then say plainly what is worth keeping and what should be rebuilt. Inherited booking setups tend to be sound in the parts somebody tested and quietly wrong in the parts nobody did, and working out which is which is most of the first month.

Two to six weeks for most businesses, and longer where several people do not currently agree on how long a job actually takes. The services and their durations come first, then the staff and resource calendars and the buffers around them, then the booking pages and the intake questions, then the reminders, the payments and the reporting. Configuration starts the week we begin rather than after a discovery phase that bills separately. What people notice first is rarely the software. It is that nobody is ringing the front desk to ask whether a slot is really free.

Quite possibly nothing, and that is a fine answer. Somebody who owns the diary and actually keeps it current is most of this. Where we tend to be useful alongside one is the parts that are not their job at all: the service and resource structure that is expensive to change later, the Deluge scripting, the availability logic that has to hold at the edges, the retention rules, the integration into the rest of Zoho so a booking reaches your books and your CRM, and noticing the week a calendar connection stops syncing. Plenty of clients keep that person and hire us for the engineering around them.

Two cases, and both are common. If you take four appointments a week and a shared calendar already handles them, buy a cheap plan or nothing at all, because there is no process here worth managing. And if what you actually need is the whole operation rather than the appointment end of it, meaning jobs, stock, staff rotas and what gets invoiced afterward, then stretching a booking tool to cover it is an expensive way to arrive somewhere a proper business system already is.

We will say so before taking your money, and the fit review costs nothing. A diary that feels chaotic is usually chaotic because two people disagree about how long a job takes, not because the booking page is slow. A fair number of these conversations end with one agreed set of durations, one person accountable for the calendar, and no new software at all.

One flat monthly rate of three hundred dollars, listed on the managed Zoho Bookings page and on this one. It covers the services and their durations, the staff and resource calendars, the booking pages and the intake questions on them, the availability and cancellation rules, the reminders and their timing, the payment and deposit setup, and integration with the rest of your Zoho environment. Your Zoho licenses sit outside that and are billed to you by Zoho, because we do not resell them. Nothing in our figure moves when you add staff or take more bookings.

Thirty days’ notice ends it and nothing is stranded. The Zoho account, the configuration and every customer record in it were always yours and always billed to you, so there is no migration and nothing to hand back. What stops is us. The booking pages keep taking appointments, the reminders keep sending and the calendars keep syncing. What you give up is the person who would have noticed the week one of them stopped.

Whatever you are booking out of now, in whatever state it is in, read access to wherever the customer records live, a list of the services you offer with how long each one honestly takes, and an hour with whoever actually answers the phone rather than whoever owns the diary on the org chart. The walk through takes a few days and costs nothing, and it ends with a plain answer about whether Zoho Bookings suits the job or whether you want something else entirely.