Why We Stopped Charging Everyone 4.9%

The problem with one percentage

A percentage prices the booking. It does not price the work.

Take two of our customers. One runs paddleboard rentals: about 800 bookings a year at roughly $120 each. The other runs fishing charters: about 10 trips a year at $10,000 each. Under a flat 4.9%, the charter operator paid $490 on a single booking. The paddleboard operator paid $5.88.

Now look at what each one actually costs us to run. The paddleboard operator sends 800 confirmation emails, 800 reminder texts, collects 800 digital waivers, runs 800 ID checks, and processes 800 separate card charges. The charter operator does ten of each.

The operator generating eighty times more load on our platform was paying a fraction of what the charter operator paid. That is not a pricing model. That is an accident of arithmetic, and the people it penalised noticed long before we fixed it.

We measured how bad it was

Before changing anything we priced every booking across our customer base at 4.9% and worked out the software cost per booking. It ranged from $5.82 to $101.59.

A 17.5x spread, for identical software, identical support, and identical uptime. The only variable was what our customers happened to rent.

The second problem was entirely ours. Where the flat rate clearly did not fit an operator's business, we adjusted it for them, one account at a time. That works right up until you look up and find you are running a collection of one-off arrangements instead of a rate card. If the number needs an exception that often, the number is wrong, and the honest fix is to publish pricing that fits the businesses we actually serve.

What we changed

Free stays free: $0 a month, every feature, 4.9% per booking, no contract. If that works for you, nothing about your account changes.

On top of that there are now three optional annual plans. They do one thing: buy your rate down from 4.9% to 2.9%, and put a hard ceiling of $25 on what any single booking can cost you.

That charter operator, ten trips a year at $10,000, went from paying $4,900 to paying $2,650. The $490 booking now costs $25.

The paddleboard operator stays on Free and pays nothing up front. And notice what the plan price is banded on: booking count, which is the thing that actually drives our cost. When that operator does grow into a plan, they are paying for the transaction volume they generate, while the cap stops booking value from inflating anyone's bill. Both halves of the problem, priced on what each one really costs.

Three decisions worth explaining

Bookings, not revenue

Plans are banded by how many bookings you take, never by how much money you make. What you earn is your business, not ours, and asking for it just to work out what software costs is intrusive. Booking count is a number you already know, and it is the one that actually reflects what running your account costs us.

The cap is per transaction, not per seat

A twenty-seat tour sold as twenty tickets is twenty payments, twenty confirmations and twenty messages. One whole-boat charter is one of each. Our costs are per transaction, so the ceiling is too. It means the model tracks what we actually spend rather than what we could get away with charging.

Card processing stays separate

Card processing is billed at your local rate on every plan, including Free, and is never folded into a plan price. Interchange genuinely differs by market. An Australian operator pays materially less than a North American one, and burying a single global figure in a plan would quietly overcharge them.

What happens if you grow

You move up a plan. You never go back to 4.9%.

If you pass your plan's booking ceiling we move you to the next one and charge the pro-rated difference for the days left in your term. You are not back-billed for the months you were over, and there is 10% of headroom first so a busy fortnight does not bounce you between plans. Growing is the outcome we want. Punishing it would be a strange way to run a business.

Most operators should stay on Free

This is the part we want to be direct about. Below roughly $120,000 of bookings a year, a paid plan costs you more than staying free, and buying one would be a mistake.

The calculator on our pricing page takes your booking count and your average booking value and tells you which is cheaper, including when the answer is "do not pay us anything". Inside the app, the comparison runs against your own last twelve months of real bookings and says the same thing.

A plan repays its annual price once your yearly bookings clear fifty times it: $120,000 for Core, $300,000 for Scale, $600,000 for Fleet. Below that, Free wins.

Nothing is being taken away

Every feature is on every plan, including Free. Unlimited bookings, locations, inventory and staff. Point of sale, card terminals, digital waivers, tours and charters, memberships, marketing, the full API, and AI chat, phone and agents. Plans change your price. They never change what you can do.

The only thing that scales with size is your monthly AI credit allowance, and that follows your revenue rather than your plan. A larger operator gets a larger allowance on Free too.