Booking software pricing compared: Skedful, Fresha and Booksy

A pricing page for booking software is easy to read and hard to compare. One vendor charges per team member, another per location, a third looks free until the card reader arrives, and "AI included" can mean anything from a chatbot to a receptionist who answers your phone. This article does the arithmetic in the open.

Two ground rules. First, every competitor figure below comes from the vendor's own pricing page, checked on 15 July 2026, and we link each one so you can verify it. Prices change, and some of these will have changed by the time you read this. Second, Skedful's own numbers come from the source code that drives our billing, not from a marketing document. Where a competitor is cheaper or includes more, we say so.

The short version

	Skedful	Fresha	Booksy
Solo price per month	$19 (Starter)	Per team member; ₪78.95 Independent on the Israel page	$29.99 + tax
3 people per month	$39 flat (Pro)	3 × ₪48.95 = ₪146.85 (Israel page rate)	$69.99
10 people per month	$49 flat (Studio)	Per member × 10	$209.99
AI tools	Emma, from Pro ($39)	Intelligent Scheduling and AI Concierge, live at no add-on fee (their announcements, May 2026)	None advertised on the pricing page we checked
Fee on your own bookings	None; no commission mechanism exists	None on direct bookings; an opt-in marketplace fee applies to new clients the marketplace sends	None; Boost is opt-in at 30% of the first visit
Trial	30 days, no card	7 days	14 days, no card

Sources: Fresha pricing, Booksy pricing, Skedful pricing. All figures checked 15 July 2026.

One honest gap in that table: Fresha's pricing page geo-locks to the visitor's region, and from outside the US we could not verify a US dollar rate, so we quote the shekel figures its Israel page renders, plus the model, which is per team member. If you are in the US, open their pricing page and substitute the rate you see; the arithmetic below works the same way.

One person, working solo

• Skedful Starter, $19/mo: one professional, unlimited bookings and clients, 150 SMS/WhatsApp reminders a month, email reminders unlimited. Waitlist automation and consent forms are not in Starter; they start at Pro.
• Booksy, $29.99/mo + tax: one user, and every feature Booksy sells, including waitlists and forms. That is more included than our Starter, for more money. Compare the plan you need, not the entry price.
• Fresha Independent, ₪78.95/mo as listed on its Israel pricing page (ex-VAT). Its marketplace can send you new clients; in some regions a fee applies to clients the marketplace sends, while your own direct bookings carry none.

Three people

• Skedful Pro, $39/mo flat, covers up to three professionals including the owner, and this is also where the automation tier starts: smart waitlist auto-fill, consent forms, 600 messages a month, and Emma, the AI copilot.
• Booksy: $29.99 plus $20 for each additional team member, so $69.99 for three and $209.99 for ten.
• Fresha Team: ₪48.95 per team member per month on the Israel page, so ₪146.85 for three and ₪489.50 for ten.

Per-seat pricing is not a trick, and for a solo owner it can be the cheapest option on the page. It just scales in a straight line, so the number worth comparing is your team's total, not the entry figure. Skedful's Studio plan is $49 flat for a team of any size, which is why the gap widens with every hire.

Which ones include AI tools

"With AI" is the least standardised line on every pricing page, so here is what we could verify rather than what the ads say.

• Fresha announced its Intelligent Scheduling and AI Concierge in May 2026, describing automatic redistribution of flexible bookings between team members, live globally at no add-on fee. On the "AI that runs your calendar" axis, Fresha is the incumbent, not the challenger.
• Skedful: Emma is a copilot you instruct in plain language: "book Dana a cut Tuesday after 4". She finds the client, checks real availability and books it, and when a message goes to your client she drafts it and waits for your confirmation. She is included from Pro at $39, not on Starter.
• Booksy: the pricing page we checked advertises no AI features. That is an absence on one page, not proof none exists.
• For context beyond the three columns: Square Appointments, as of our July 2026 research, ships its Square Assistant free and offers a permanent free tier for solo sellers, and Vagaro markets an AI receptionist called Vera. We could not verify current pricing details for either from the pages we checked, so we claim nothing about what they cost.

Where competitors are cheaper or include more

This is the part comparison articles usually skip, so we will not.

• Booksy's $29.99 includes everything it sells. Our $19 Starter includes no waitlist automation and no consent forms; those start at Pro, $39. If you need both on day one, Booksy's entry plan buys more than ours.
• Fresha and Booksy run real consumer marketplaces. Fresha lists 130,000+ partner businesses; Booksy's marketplace claims 44 million clients (both figures are theirs). Skedful has no marketplace at all: your clients come from your own booking link, site and socials. That is the trade for never charging a percentage, and if what you need is new-client traffic, it is a real gap.
• Square has a free tier. We do not; we have a 30-day trial, no card, and then a subscription.
• Nobody here is unlimited. Our message bundles are 150 / 600 / 2,000 a month by plan, and Fresha's include 20 free SMS then metered sending. These are caps, ours included.

Do your own arithmetic

Three steps. Write down your team size for the next twelve months, not just today. Price each platform at that team size, including the tier that has the features you actually need. Then add the percentage costs: a marketplace that sends you clients and charges for them can still be worth it, but it belongs in the same column as the subscription.

If you want to run those numbers against Skedful, start a 30-day trial and you will be live in under ten minutes. Every plan is also billed yearly at about 10% less, and if our prices have moved since this article, the canonical source is our pricing page, which reads the same figures our billing code does.