Fresha Alternatives for Sauna and Wellness Studios

Almost every search for a Fresha alternative starts the same way: a plan that used to be free stopped being free. Fresha moved off its free model during 2025, and studio owners reported the change landing in waves through the year. The product did not get worse. The bill just started existing, and a bill is what makes anyone open a comparison page.

We make SerenityBook, which appears in the list below, so we are not a neutral party. What we can do is stick to what each vendor publicly advertises, tell you where each option fits badly including ours, and be straight about the thing most of these articles get wrong: on the base plan alone, Fresha is cheaper than we are. If your only complaint is that it costs money now, you may not have a problem worth migrating over.

What Fresha actually costs now

Rates are as advertised at the time of writing; confirm on Fresha's own pricing page before deciding anything.

Read that honestly and the headline is not outrageous. A solo operator pays $19.95 a month and nothing at all for repeat customers. The pricing scales by bookable team member, so the number that matters is how many people in your business take bookings: three is $44.85, five is $74.75, ten is $149.50.

The add-ons are where the bill actually lives

The subscription is not the whole price, and this is the part worth doing arithmetic on before you renew rather than after.

Two of those deserve a second look, because they are not exotic extras. Client Loyalty is rewards and repeat-visit incentives, and Insights is richer reporting with team access controls. On a lot of platforms, including ours, those sit in the base price. Here they are $59.95 a month and $9.95 per person a month on top of a subscription you are already paying.

Here is what that looks like for a three-person studio that wants loyalty and real reporting:

Nobody is forcing you to buy any of it, and a studio that wants none of it genuinely pays $44.85. But "Fresha is $14.95 a month" and "Fresha is $149.60 a month" can both be true for the same three-person business, and only one of those numbers appears in most comparison articles. Price the configuration you would actually use, not the headline.

The fee that lands differently on a sauna business

Fresha's marketplace charges 20 percent of the service when it sends you a brand-new client, one time, with a minimum of $6. That minimum is the whole story, because it only bites below a $30 ticket, and sauna sessions live below a $30 ticket.

A salon selling a $120 service hits the 20 percent line and never notices the floor. A sauna studio selling $20 drop-ins pays 30 percent of that first visit. The fee was calibrated for a market whose average ticket is four times yours.

Two things stop this being a reason to run, and they are worth saying plainly. It is a one-time acquisition cost, not a cut of every booking, and returning clients cost nothing. If a marketplace-sourced customer becomes a member who visits twice a week, $6 was cheap. Recovery is a habit business with genuinely high repeat rates, which is exactly the case where paying for acquisition works.

So the question is not "is 20 percent too much." It is what share of your bookings actually come from the Fresha marketplace rather than your own door, your Google Business Profile, and word of mouth? Check your own attribution before you weight it either way. Studios in thin markets often discover they are paying for a discovery channel that produces almost nothing.

What Fresha's group booking actually is

Fresha's spa and sauna page advertises group bookings for infrared and traditional saunas, so the capability exists and you should not believe anyone who says flatly that it does not.

Be precise about what it is, though, because the detail decides whether the tool fits. The group booking is something your staff put together. A customer on your public booking page cannot reserve three seats for a 7pm session and check out once by themselves. Every group either becomes a phone call, a message, or a person at the desk.

For a spa where an appointment is arranged in conversation, that is fine and always has been. For a sauna studio it is the whole product, because sauna is social and a large share of your bookings are two or three people deciding on a Friday afternoon. The ones who will not phone you either book a single seat each, which several of them then forget to do, or they book nothing.

Do not take our word for it or Fresha's. Open the customer-facing booking page of anything you are evaluating, not the staff dashboard, and try to reserve three seats in one session and pay once. Watch what happens. That one test separates the tools built for shared sessions from the tools that can be made to approximate one, faster than any feature list. The rest of the checklist is in sauna booking software: what studio owners actually need.

Neither Fresha's sauna page nor most of this list mentions waiver enforcement or keyless door access, which are the two requirements unstaffed and heat-exposure businesses raise most often. Ask about both by name.

The alternatives

Wunderbook

The most directly sauna-shaped option here. It markets itself specifically at sauna operators and advertises multi-seat booking and fast checkout through Apple Pay and Google Pay, which addresses the self-serve group case head-on. If your business is purely sauna and walk-up checkout speed is your bottleneck, it belongs on your shortlist. Pricing is not published in a form we can quote, so ask directly and get a total at your volume.

RentalBuddy

Built for self-service, mobile and cabin saunas: guests book, pay, and unlock with a code. If you run unstaffed hours, that is the capability most of this list simply does not have, and it is worth weighing above almost everything else. The trade is scope, since it aims at the rental and self-access model rather than a staffed studio with a treatment menu.

TWICE

Comes from the rentals world and advertises real-time capacity tracking, which is the right underlying model for a room with seats. Worth a look if you also rent equipment, or run something closer to booking-by-the-slot than a practitioner-led operation.

SerenityBook

Ours, so read it with your guard up. Flat $40 a month (Basic) or $80 (Pro), plus 15 cents per transaction and standard Stripe rates. No percentage of your revenue, no marketplace commission, no per-team-member scaling, and no add-on tier.

Where it fits. It schedules three things side by side at one location, each with a workflow shaped to it: appointments against a practitioner's time, shared sessions against a room's capacity where a seat count draws down as people book and the customer can take several seats in a single checkout, and classes against a published timetable with a roster per occurrence. They share one calendar, one customer record and one checkout. Memberships, prepaid packs, gift cards, waivers signed at check-in and card-on-file no-show fees are included on both tiers rather than sold separately.

Where it does not. There is no consumer marketplace, so nothing brings you walk-in traffic the way Fresha's does; if discovery is the problem you are solving, we are the wrong answer. There is no smart-lock integration, so unstaffed access needs its own solution. And on the base plan a solo operator pays $19.95 on Fresha against $40 here, so we are the more expensive choice until the team grows, the add-ons stack up, or the mix changes.

The price comparison

Base subscription only, ignoring add-ons and the processing fees you pay either way:

On base plans alone the crossover sits around three bookable team members. Below that, Fresha is cheaper and you should say so out loud before migrating anything. The picture changes considerably once loyalty and reporting are things you actually want, since those are included on one side of this table and $59.95 plus $9.95 per head on the other.

Even so, the arithmetic decides nothing on its own. Migrating a booking system costs you a weekend, some client confusion, and the risk of a botched export. A $20 monthly difference does not justify that. A structural mismatch does.

How to choose

• You are solo, on the base plan, and only mildly annoyed about the bill: stay on Fresha. It is $19.95 and repeat clients are free. Migrating to save nothing is not a plan.
• Your bill has add-ons on it: price the same feature set elsewhere before renewing. Loyalty and reporting are base-price features on several alternatives.
• The marketplace is genuinely bringing you clients: stay where you are, or only move to something else with its own consumer directory. That channel is the one thing nothing on this list replaces, ours included, and it is worth more than a subscription saving if it is working in your city.
• You run unstaffed hours: RentalBuddy, or whoever else will name their smart-lock integrations out loud.
• Customers need to book groups themselves: Wunderbook or SerenityBook. Test the customer-facing flow, not the dashboard.
• You sell more than one kind of thing at one location: appointments, shared sessions and classes side by side is the case SerenityBook was built for, and the case per-person pricing handles worst.

FAQ

Is Fresha still free? Not in the way it used to be. Fresha moved off its fully free model during 2025 and now advertises $19.95 a month for a single bookable team member and $14.95 per team member for larger workspaces, with a 7-day trial. Returning clients still carry no booking fee.

How much does Fresha actually cost per month? The subscription is $19.95 for one bookable team member or $14.95 per member beyond that, but add-ons are priced separately: Client Loyalty at $59.95 per location, Insights at $9.95 per bookable team member, Google Rating Boost at $14.95 per location, AI Concierge at $99.95 per location, and Data Connector at $295 per location. A three-person studio using loyalty, insights and rating boost pays around $149.60 a month rather than $44.85.

How much does Fresha charge for a new client? A one-time commission of 20 percent of the service when the client comes from the Fresha marketplace, with a minimum fee of $6 per client. Because of the minimum, a first visit priced under $30 costs proportionally more: a $20 drop-in pays $6, which is 30 percent. Repeat visits from that client carry no fee.

Can customers book a group session themselves on Fresha? Fresha advertises group bookings for saunas, but they are assembled by staff. A customer on the public booking page cannot reserve several seats in one session and check out once on their own, so groups arrive as calls or messages. If self-serve group booking matters, test the customer-facing flow during a trial rather than the staff dashboard.

Should I switch away from Fresha? Only for a structural reason, not a $20 one. Good reasons: per-team-member pricing outgrowing you, add-ons pushing the real bill well past the headline, a marketplace that produces little in your city, or a scheduling model that cannot represent how you actually sell.

Selling shared sessions, classes and appointments from one location? Start a 15 day free trial at serenitybook.net, or walk a live booking flow first and try booking three seats as a customer before you talk to anyone.