How much does an online booking system cost a UK venue?
There are three costs to think about when you take bookings online: the software, the card fees, and your own time. Here is how they add up for a typical small venue.
Cost 1: the booking software
Ready-made booking software is paid monthly or yearly. Published prices for tools aimed at halls and small venues mostly sit between about £12 and £50 a month for one venue.
Some tools have a free plan, but read the limits. Bookwhen's free plan, for example, allows 50 bookings a month but is for free events only. Its Lite plan is £16 a month, or £160 a year if you pay annually.
A custom-built system works differently. You pay a one-off build cost, then something for hosting and support. It only makes sense if ready-made tools can't handle the way you work.
Cost 2: card fees
If hirers pay online, the payment company takes a cut. With Stripe in the UK, the published rate for a standard UK card is 1.5% + 20p. Business cards cost more, at 2.8% + 20p.
On a £60 booking, a standard card costs you £1.10 (90p plus 20p).
Two details catch people out:
- Refunds don't give the fee back. Stripe says the processing fee on the original payment is not returned when you refund. If you take a £100 deposit and refund it after the event, you still pay £1.70.
- Disputes cost money. If a hirer disputes a payment with their bank, Stripe charges £20, plus another £20 if you challenge it (refunded if you win).
Cost 3: your time
This is the one nobody budgets for. Setting up rooms, prices and rules takes a few evenings. After that, someone still needs to approve bookings, answer questions and check the hall after each hire. Good software cuts this down but doesn't remove it.
A worked example
This is an example, not a real hall. Say a hall takes 30 bookings a month, each £60, all paid by standard UK card.
- Card fees: 30 × £1.10 = £33 a month, or £396 a year.
- Software: Bookwhen Lite on the annual plan, £160 a year.
- First-year total: £556, or about 2.6% of the £21,600 the hall takes in bookings.
Notice that the card fees cost more than the software. If you're comparing tools, a few pounds a month either way matters less than how you take payments.
How to choose
Before you look at any software, check these:
- How many bookings a month do you take now, and at what price?
- How many rooms, and do you have different rates for community and commercial hirers?
- Do regular hirers pay per session or monthly?
- Does anything need to connect to your accounts or website?
For a simple hall with standard rules, ready-made software is usually the cheaper choice. A custom system starts to pay off when your rules, rooms or other systems don't fit a template and you're spending hours working around it.
If you want to go further, our booking system cost guide compares several tools side by side and shows what a custom build costs.