A spa does not schedule people. It schedules rooms. Almost every booking tool — including this one — schedules people. That single mismatch is what you are shopping for, so let us start there.
Two therapists are free at 3pm. You have one treatment room with a hydro table. A generic booking calendar will happily sell both slots, and at 3pm somebody is standing in a corridor holding hot towels. That is not a software bug — it is a booking tool being asked to model a resource it does not know exists.
| Your constraint | What to buy |
|---|---|
| You have more therapists than rooms, or shared equipment (hydro table, sauna, float tank, laser) | A spa suite with resource booking. Bookafy schedules staff, not rooms. Do not fight it. |
| Each therapist effectively owns a room — book the person, you have booked the space | Bookafy. The person is the resource, which is exactly what it models. |
| You are a solo or two-person spa and your problem is no-shows and phone tag | Bookafy. Deposits, reminders, calendar sync, running today. |
| You sell memberships, packages or gift cards and they are core revenue | Not us. Bookafy has no memberships, no packages and no gift cards. |
That first row is the honest answer for a lot of day spas, and we would rather you read it here than discover it in week three.
A missed 90-minute hot stone is not a missed haircut. The room sat empty, the therapist was paid to be there, and you cannot sell 2pm twice. On Pro you can require payment at booking through Stripe or Authorize.net — a partial deposit is usually enough. Pair it with a cancellation window written in plain words on the booking page, and the pattern breaks within a month.
The single most common spa scheduling error is treating the treatment time as the appointment length. A 60-minute massage is 60 minutes of massage plus consultation, plus linens, plus the room being aired and reset. If you book it as 60 minutes you will run 15 minutes late by mid-morning and an hour late by four. Build the buffer into every service. It is the difference between a calm spa and a stressed one, and no software will save you from getting it wrong.
Therapists are frequently part-time, and they often work somewhere else. On Pro each one connects their own Google, Outlook, Exchange or iCloud calendar. Whatever is on it — the other clinic, the school run — disappears from your booking page automatically. Nobody has to remember to phone in and block it.
Contraindications, allergies, pregnancy, medication: you want that read before the client is on the table, not scribbled on a clipboard while the room waits. Send the form with the confirmation email. If you handle protected health information, note that HIPAA support is on the Pro+ plan ($11/user/mo), not Pro.
| Plan | Price | What it means in a spa |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | One user only. Unlimited appointments and email confirmations, but no calendar sync, no SMS and no deposits — so no protection against no-shows. A solo therapist’s starting point. |
| Pro | $7/user/mo billed yearly | The working plan: unlimited therapists, two-way calendar sync, SMS reminders, card deposits via Stripe or Authorize.net. |
| Pro+ | $11/user/mo | Adds HIPAA, a second SMS reminder, custom API and optional white-label. Take this one if you are handling medical intake information. |
No. Bookafy schedules staff, not rooms or equipment. If you have more therapists than rooms, or shared equipment such as a hydro table or float tank, you need a spa system with resource booking. If each therapist effectively has their own room, Bookafy fits.
Require a deposit at booking. On the Pro plan payments run through Stripe or Authorize.net, and a partial deposit on longer treatments is usually enough. Email reminders come on every plan and SMS reminders on Pro.
HIPAA support is available on the Pro+ plan at $11 per user per month. It is not included on Free or Pro, so if you collect health information at intake, budget for Pro+.
Yes, and you should. Set each service duration to the treatment plus consultation, linen change and room reset. Booking a 60-minute massage as exactly 60 minutes is the most common reason a spa runs late all day.
No. There are no memberships, no treatment packages and no gift cards. If those are a core part of your revenue, a full spa suite is the right purchase.
Try it on your own calendar. Bookafy is free for one user with unlimited appointments, and Pro is $7 per user per month billed yearly.
If you are still working out which tool you need, start with the overview: appointment scheduling software — what it does, what it costs, and when you should buy something else.
Also useful: every Bookafy integration, in three honest lists — what is native, what needs Zapier, and what we simply do not do. And the pricing page, where the feature matrix is the real answer to “is that on the free plan”.
