Believe Websites vs Booksy: a booking app, or a website with booking built in?

Booksy is one of the most popular booking apps for barbers and beauty businesses in the UK, and its pricing is refreshingly simple: one plan, everything included, no feature add-ons. It is a strong product, and on a couple of points it beats us outright. We will say which.

The real difference between the two is not the calendar. It is what a new client finds when they look you up. With Booksy, they find a Booksy profile. With Believe Websites, they find your own website, on your own domain, with the booking system built into it.

The short version

Booksy is £40 a month, plus £5 a month for each additional team member, excluding VAT. Text confirmations and reminders are free, card payments work today, and Boost can put you in front of people browsing the Booksy marketplace for a 30% cut of their first visit.

Believe Websites is £49 a month flat, whatever the size of your team, with a bespoke website designed and built for £0 upfront. The price covers the website, your own domain, hosting, changes done for you and your own booking system, with 0% commission on every booking.

What you pay every month

Booksy's per-person charge is low, so the gap opens slowly. For one or two people Booksy is the cheaper bill. At three the two are within a pound of each other. From four upwards ours is lower, and every hire adds another £5 a month to Booksy's line while ours stays put.

Boost: what a new client costs you

Boost is Booksy's marketplace promotion. It is free to turn on and has no monthly fee. When it brings you a client, Booksy takes a one-time 30% fee, with a minimum of £5, on that client's first visit. Clients who find you through your own marketing, online, or on the marketplace with Boost switched off carry no commission.

So the honest comparison depends on whether you switch Boost on. If you leave it off, Booksy charges no commission at all. If you leave it on, here is what a year can look like for a five-person barbershop.

The other fees, side by side

Booksy's text reminders deserve a proper mention. Free, unlimited appointment confirmations and reminders by text are genuinely useful for cutting no-shows, and ours are not switched on yet. If text reminders are the one thing you cannot run your diary without this month, that is a fair reason to choose Booksy.

A profile on an app, or a website of your own

Booksy's pricing page talks about your Booksy Profile and a Booksy Profile Link you can share. It does not offer a website on your own domain. In practice most Booksy businesses send people to the profile link from Instagram, and that works well while the client already knows your name.

What we build instead is a website designed around your shop — your photos, your cuts and prices, your reviews, your area — on your own domain, something like www.yourbarbers.co.uk, with the booking system inside it. We design it, host it and change it when you message us. It is the thing that comes up when someone searches for you, and it stays yours rather than sitting on a platform's address.

• Your own domain, not a profile page on somebody else's app.
• Built for you. You tell us about the shop; the site is designed around it.
• Changes done for you. New price, new hours, new barber, new photos — message us, it is included.
• A new article every month about your town and your services, written to be read by search engines and AI assistants.
• Yours at the end. After the 12-month minimum term you can take ownership of the website.

Being found when people ask an AI

More people now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI overview something like "good barber near me for a skin fade" and act on the answer. Those systems answer from what they can read on the open web: clear pages about your services, where you are, what you charge, and real reviews.

Every site we build is set up for that: structured data, individual service pages, clear business information and a monthly article. You also get an AI Search Readiness score in your dashboard. You can see how it all fits together on our home page.

Where Booksy genuinely wins

• It is cheaper for one or two people. £40 or £45 a month plus VAT, against our £49.
• Text confirmations and reminders are free and work today. Ours are built but not switched on yet.
• Card payments work today, including Tap to Pay at 0.99% + 20p plus VAT. Ours are built but not switched on yet.
• A marketplace. Boost can send you people who are browsing Booksy right now. We have no marketplace and send nobody.
• No commitment and a 7-day trial. We ask for a 12-month minimum term, because we build the site for nothing up front.
• No feature add-ons. Reserve with Google, waitlists, no-show protection, gift cards and memberships are all in the £40.

Everything side by side

So which one should you pick?

Booksy, if

• You work alone or with one other person and the monthly bill decides it.
• Free text reminders or card payments are essential to you today.
• You want Boost to bring you new clients and you are happy to pay 30% of their first visit.
• You do not want any minimum term.

Believe Websites, if

• You have four or more people, or plan to, and do not want the bill to rise with every hire.
• You want a real website on your own domain, not just a profile link in your bio.
• You want the site built and kept up to date for you.
• You would rather keep 100% of every booking.

If you are weighing up the other big name too, we have compared Believe Websites and Fresha the same way, and put eight platforms side by side in our guide to the best booking platforms for beauty salons.