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The comparison
Same shop, same three chairs, same list of things.
Every headline below is what a 3-chair shop pays that platform for what our plan includes — their base, their per-chair fee, texting, a website, forms, and their own AI assistant where they sell one. The maths is printed under each number. These are their own published US prices, read in September 2026; where a rival does something better than us, it says so.
snpz
Built by a barber
$68/mo · 3 chairs, all in
$19 base, any number of chairs, + $49 for the Shop receptionist band (350 minutes).
From $19/mo without the receptionist
Base — booking, site, texting, all chairs
$19/mo
Receptionist minutes in the base
10
Receptionist — Shop, 350 min
+$49/mo
Per extra chair
$0
Website on your own domain
Included
Commission on a new client
$0
Solo, 1 chair, all in
$48/mo
6+ chairs, all in
$108/mo
AI receptionist on the phone that actually books — checks the calendar, reads it back, writes it, texts a confirmation. Nobody else on this page does that.
Online booking, on your own site, on your own domain
Intelligent Booking — learns each client's real time with each barber and rounds to 5 minutes, so the book stops lying
Walk-in queue merged into the same calendar — one "who's next"
Reminders 24h + 2h, reply to confirm or cancel
Rebooking on each client's own measured cadence — texts the guy who comes every 17 days on day 20, not on a fixed 3-week timer
AI video editor + auto-post — drop a clip, it cuts the before-and-after, you hit PostLaunching soon
Consent flags and quiet hours enforced in the send path, not in a policy doc
No-show tracking on the client record
IOU — let a regular settle up next visit
Popup notes that open when you open the client. Birthdays.
Daily drawer and money view — for any date, including last Tuesday
Reports: payment distribution, sales, transactions, deposits, per employee
Day view keeps working with the internet down
Import your clients from Booksy, Vagaro, Square, Squire or theCut
Deposits and no-show feesComing
Standing weekly and fortnightly slotsComing
No marketplace commission. No per-chair fee. No contract.
Booksy
Priced per barber
$69.99/mo · 3 chairs, like for like
$29.99 + $20 × 2 extra barbers. Website, forms, deposits and unlimited reminder texts are already in the $29.99 — Booksy does not nickel-and-dime. It sells no AI receptionist at any price.
The most included of the five. Booking website, widget, Reserve with Google, intake forms, waivers, deposits, card-on-file, cancellation policy, unlimited reminder texts and 2,000 free marketing texts — all inside the $29.99.
The biggest marketplace — real discovery, if you want to be found there
$20 per extra barber, every month. Three chairs is $69.99. Five is $109.99.
Boost takes 30% of a new client's first visit, $10 minimum. A $35 cut clears that floor by fifty cents, so you pay almost the whole 30%. Ten new clients a month is $105 — more than the subscription.
Nothing answers the phone. No AI receptionist exists in the product at any tier.
No self-serve client export — you email support for your own client list, and a human makes the file by hand.
Rebooking runs on a fixed 3-week timer for everybody
Vagaro
Priced per calendar, then per add-on
$103.99/mo · 3 chairs, like for like
$23.99 base (one calendar) + $10 × 2 extra calendars + $20 text plan + $20 MySite + $10 Forms + $10 Vera. The $23.99 is a six-month promo; list is $30, so month seven is $110.
Deep checkout, packages, memberships, retail — the most product of the five, if you want all of it
The add-ons are the price. Texting, a website, forms, deposits and Vera are five separate monthly lines on top of the base.
Vera, $10/mo — real AI, but by Vagaro's own documentation it cannot see an employee's calendar, schedule or reschedule. It sends a booking link. Every Vera message burns an SMS credit, and it needs a paid text plan to run at all.
Nothing answers the phone
Fill My Books takes 20% of a brand-new client's whole first cart, regardless of where the lead came from — a customer you paid Meta to reach still costs 20%, and the barber's commission is worked out after the fee comes off.
No offline mode anywhere in the product — internet down means no calendar and no payments
No pause, no refunds, and reactivating after non-payment costs the balance plus a $5 late fee
Square
Priced per location
$49/mo · 3 chairs, like for like
$49 Plus, per location. Unlimited staff calendars, booking site, custom domain, no-show fees and the waitlist are all in it — nothing per chair, and no marketplace commission. The cheapest like-for-like on this page, and it should be.
The cheapest of the five, honestly. The Free plan really is $0, priced per location rather than per chair, and it's the best POS hardware in the trade.
Booking site, custom domain and appointment reminders included from the Free plan up. No marketplace, so no commission on your clients.
Square Assistant answers texts so clients can confirm, cancel or reschedule — included free, and genuinely good
Nothing of Square's answers the phone. The phone AIs in their marketplace are other companies, and another bill.
Free can't take a no-show fee, has no waitlist, no multi-staff booking and no SMS marketing — and it's funded by the rate spread: 2.6% versus Premium's 2.4%, about $36/month more on an $18,000 shop.
It's a payments company. Nothing in it is shaped like a barbershop: no walk-in queue, no learned cut times.
Squire
Flat per shop, but the good bits are two tiers up
$274/mo · 3 chairs, like for like
$150 Executive + $25 branded site + $99 Operator, their AI — the site and the AI are Executive-only. Pro at $50 is flat for any number of barbers and reminders are free, but it has neither.
No per-barber fee, and they say so themselves — one flat shop price whatever the headcount. At 4+ chairs Pro is the cheapest paid base in the whole trade.
Reminders free and unlimited on every tier, and no marketplace: "your clients won't be sold or shown to other businesses"
The tiers are the trap. Want a site on your own domain? Executive. Want their AI? Executive. That's $50 → $150 before either add-on is billed.
On Pro your "website" is a Squire page, not your own domain
The card processing rate is published nowhere — not on the pricing page, not on the payments page, not in the terms. Get it in writing before you sign.
Contract length and refund terms are not published either; refunds are discretionary under their terms
theCut
Free, until your clients need a text
$75/mo · 3 chairs, like for like
$25 × 3 barbers on PRO — PRO is the only tier with SMS reminders, so every chair needs one. No shop fee at all, and no AI: what your clients book on is a theCut booking link and portfolio, not a site on your own domain.
The free tier is real and it is generous — booking, payments, deposits, Tap-to-Pay, portfolio, reviews, client notes, chair-utilisation reporting. Owners use it free.
Recurring appointments on the free plan — Mr Kowalski, 9am every other Saturday, forever. We don't ship that yet and they do.
FREE cannot send an SMS reminder. Push and email only. For a barbershop that isn't a tier difference, it's a missing product — a no-show costs you $35 and a reminder costs a cent.
It's $25 per barber, so the shop only gets reminders if every chair is on PRO
Your client is charged $0.95 on every transaction — that's on the payments page, not the pricing page, and your own 2.75% isn't reduced by it
There is no export of any kind. Four reports, none of them a client list, all expiring after 30 days. The hardest platform in the trade to leave — ask us before you sign up for it.
Where every number comes from, September 2026: Booksy's pricing page ($29.99/mo + tax, $20/month per additional person; website, widget, Reserve with Google, forms, waivers, deposits and unlimited reminder texts included) and its published Boost terms (30% of a new client's first visit, $10 minimum, $100 maximum). Vagaro's published plan and add-on prices ($23.99 promo / $30 list, $10 per extra calendar, $20 text, $20 MySite, $10 Forms, $10 Shopping Cart, $10 Vera) and its Fill My Books take rate. Square's Appointments pricing ($0 / $49 / $149 per location, unlimited staff calendars, 2.6% / 2.5% / 2.4% + 15¢). Squire's pricing page ($30 / $50 / $150 / $250 per shop, no per-barber fee, +$25 branded landing pages and +$99 Operator on Executive) — Squire does not publish a card processing rate anywhere. theCut's pricing and payments pages ($0 FREE, $25/barber PRO, 2.75% to the barber plus $0.95 charged to the client, $10 per discovered client on FREE). Our own figures are the $19 base plus one receptionist band. Prices change; check them yourself before you switch.
The price
One base. One phone band. Nothing per chair.
The booking, the website and the texting cost us almost nothing to run, so they're one flat price for a shop of any size. Talk time on the phone is the one thing that genuinely costs money, so it's a separate line and you pick the size. We'd rather show you both numbers than quote you $19 and bill you $68.
The base
$19/mo · any number of chairs
Everything except the phone. No per-chair fee, ever.
Online booking and a calendar per barber
Your own website, on your own domain
Reminders and texting
Walk-in queue in the same grid as the bookings
One-tap reschedule and cancel for your clients
Client import, reports, day view that works offline
One-button export of everything, any time
10 receptionist minutes — a taste, so you can hear it answer your own phone before you pay for it
Then pick how much the phone rings. Add one, or none.
Receptionist — Chair
+$29/mo
150 minutes of talk time
A solo barber whose phone rings while his hands are busy.
Receptionist — Shop
+$49/mo
350 minutes of talk time
Two to five chairs. This is where most shops land.
Receptionist — Busy
+$89/mo
700 minutes of talk time
Six chairs and up, phone going all day.
When the minutes run out, your phone just rings in the shop again — exactly as it did before us. No overage, no surprise bill. We tell you at 80% and at 100%.
Top-up, only if you want one: $20 for another 150 minutes. Unused top-up minutes carry over.
$0 per chair. $0 commission on a new client. No contract — month to month, and you can export your whole client list yourself without asking anyone.
Card processing at cost. If we ever take payments for you, you pay the processor's published rate and we add nothing to it.
All in: solo $482–5 chairs $686+ chairs $108
Viral videos Launching soon
Drop a clip. Get a post.
The shops that grow are the shops that post, and nobody with a clipper in his hand has an hour to edit. So you do the ten seconds you were already going to do, and the AI does the rest.
Shoot it on your phone
The before, the cut, the reveal. Thirty seconds, held any way you like. Drop it in — that's your whole job.
The AI cuts it
It builds the before-and-after consultation format that actually gets watched: captions burned in, the dead air cut out, zooms on the detail, music underneath, and the beat drop landing on the reveal.
It pings you when it's done
You get a text. Watch it on your phone between clients — the whole thing takes as long as the video does.
Hit Post, or tell it what to fix
Post sends it to all your socials at once. Or type what you want changed in the chat box — "hold on the reveal longer", "different song", "cut the talking at the start" — and it re-edits and sends it back. If something's off, hit Report and a human looks at it.
Launching soon, and it will be part of the base — not another monthly line. None of the five platforms above ships anything like it.
Made by a barber
I built this on the other side of the chair.
I'm Grady Reisinger. I cut hair at Alpha Studios in Newport, Pennsylvania, and I got tired of paying a marketplace a cut of a client who found me on my own Google, and of missing the phone because my hands were busy.
So the receptionist answers while I'm cutting. The book knows I take 38 minutes on a fade, not 30. The walk-in who just came through the door is in the same grid as the 2 o'clock. None of that is a feature request someone wrote down in a meeting — it's what the day is actually like.
snpz is built by Reisinger Media LLC in Perry County, PA. Every shop that signs up gets me on the phone, not a ticket queue.
Barbers, services, prices, hours, days off. About ten minutes on a phone. You'll be looking at a real calendar before you decide anything.
Import your clients
Vagaro, Square, Squire and Acuity export a file themselves. Booksy and theCut don't — we tell you exactly what to ask their support for, and what to expect back.
We build your site
On your own domain, with your own name on it. Send a few photos — the ones on your Instagram are usually enough. You approve it before it goes live.
Forward your line
Point your shop number at the receptionist — always, or only when nobody picks up in four rings. Your number stays yours. Undo it in a minute if you hate it.
Questions
The ones everybody asks.
Is $19 really the price?
$19 is really the price for the booking, your website, your texting and every chair in the shop — and it comes with ten receptionist minutes so you can ring your own phone and hear it work. The receptionist is the part that costs real money to run, so it's a separate band: $29, $49 or $89, depending on how much your phone actually rings. Most shops land on $68 all in. We lead with that number rather than the $19, because quoting one and billing the other is the thing everybody hates about the software they're already on.
Is it a robot?
Yes, and it says so. Every call opens with "this is the automated booking assistant for [your shop]," and if the caller asks whether they're talking to a person, it tells them the truth. We're not interested in tricking your clients, and neither are you.
What happens when it can't handle the call?
It hands the call to you. One key, live, without dropping the caller — the same way a receptionist would put someone through. Anything it isn't sure about becomes a transfer, not a guess.
Can it invent a time that isn't free?
No. The AI never decides whether a slot is open — it asks the calendar. Then it reads the booking back to the caller, waits for a yes, writes it, and only then says it's booked. Every booking sends a text confirmation, so a mistake is visible to both of you within seconds.
What if the receptionist is on the phone all month?
Then it stops answering and your phone rings in the shop again, exactly the way it did before us. There is no overage and there is no bill you didn't choose. We tell you at 80% of your minutes and again at 100%, and if you want more you can add 150 minutes for $20 — but that's your call, not an automatic charge. Each band includes 150, 350 or 700 minutes, which is several hundred calls; almost nobody gets near the top of theirs.
Am I locked into a contract?
No. Month to month, cancel whenever. You can export your client list yourself, any time, without emailing anybody for permission.
Do you take a cut of a new client?
No. No commission on a first visit or any visit, no fee per chair, and no charge for the website or the texting — those are in the $19. The only other line on your bill is the receptionist band you picked.
Does it text my clients whatever it wants?
No. Reminders are transactional and always allowed. Marketing texts only go to clients who checked the box or sat in your chair in the last twelve months, never on a Sunday, never outside 9am–7pm, and never more than once a month. Those rules are enforced by the code that sends the message.
snpz
