"Free" has three meanings in salon software

Search "free salon booking software" and every result says free. Read the pricing pages and you find three different things hiding behind the word:

• Free to start. A trial, usually 7 to 30 days, then a monthly bill.
• Free plan, paid tiers. No subscription for the basics, but the features a salon actually needs sit on a paid tier.
• Free listing. No subscription and no cut of bookings, because the product's job is to bring you clients, not to run your till.

Here is where the five names salon owners ask about most land in November 2026, using the numbers on their own pricing pages. Prices change; links to each page are at the end.

The short version

• Fresha: not free. $19.95 a month for one calendar, $14.95 per team member for teams. 20% of a new client's first booking when they come through Fresha's marketplace.
• Vagaro: not free. $30 a month for one calendar ($23.99 promo for six months), $10 per extra calendar, paid add-ons for the website builder and text marketing.
• Booksy: not free. $29.99 a month plus $20 per extra staff member. Boost marketplace takes 30% of a new client's first visit, capped at $100.
• Square Appointments: free plan for one location with unlimited staff. The no-show and custom reminder features start at $49 a location a month.
• Kiri: free to list, with no commission and no card on file. Booking requests arrive in Kiri Studio, where you accept or decline them. A fuller booking system is planned as an opt-in add-on at $20 a month plus $10 per staff member; the listing stays free.

Fresha

Fresha used to be the free one, which is why it still ranks for the phrase. Its pricing page now lists an Independent plan at $19.95 a month and a Team plan at $14.95 per bookable team member a month, with a 7-day trial.

The number to watch is the marketplace fee: 20% of a new client's first booking, minimum $6, when the client comes through Fresha's app. Bookings from your own links are not charged.

Good for: when you need polished instant booking, deposits and payments in one place today, and are fine paying for marketplace clients.

Vagaro

Vagaro is the all-in-one of the group: calendar, payments, forms, memberships, payroll and inventory. The pricing page shows $30 a month for one calendar, a $23.99 promotional rate for the first six months, and $10 for each extra calendar up to seven. There is a 30-day trial and no free tier.

Vagaro does not take a marketplace commission. Where the bill grows is add-ons: the website builder, forms and text marketing are each extra, and owner reviews on G2 are mostly about the gap between the headline price and the real monthly total.

Good for: when you want one paid suite for everything.

Booksy

Booksy is $29.99 a month plus tax for all features, and $20 a month per additional staff member, with a 14-day trial. Reminder texts are free and 2,000 marketing texts a month are included.

The marketplace program, Boost, charges 30% of a new client's first visit with a $10 minimum and a $100 cap. It is off by default. The recurring complaint in owner reviews is attribution: clients the owner brought in being counted as Boost clients. If you turn Boost on, keep your own record of where each new client came from.

Good for: when the Booksy app already has real booking volume where you work.

Square Appointments

Square Appointments is the one paid-software company with a real free plan: $0 for a single location with unlimited staff, including instant online booking and automated reminders. The Plus tier at $49 a location a month adds no-show fees, cancellation policies and custom text reminders.

What Square does not have is a consumer marketplace. Nobody opens a Square app to find a salon. Your booking page ranks for your own name and little else, so the free plan is a free calendar, not a source of clients.

Good for: when you already take payments on Square. The calendar and the till become one system.

Kiri

Kiri is free in the third sense: a free listing. Your salon gets a page with your menu and prices, your team, your portfolio and a booking request button, and the Kiri team builds it from your Instagram or website. No subscription, no commission on bookings, no card on file.

The reason it can be free is what it does. Every photo in your portfolio becomes a style page that people find by searching the cut or color, and your salon page is marked up so Google and AI answer engines can read it. Kiri's job is to bring you the client; your existing software can keep running the chair.

Two honest limits. Booking on Kiri is a request you accept, not instant self-booking, and there are no text reminders yet. Kiri plans a fuller booking system later as an opt-in add-on at $20 a month plus $10 per staff member, and the free listing stays free either way.

Good for: solo stylists, small teams and salons of any size that want new clients to find them by the work they do, without paying a platform for the introduction.

How to choose

If you need instant self-booking with deposits today, you are choosing between Square (free calendar, no discovery) and one of the paid three (discovery with a fee or a subscription).

If what you are missing is new clients rather than a calendar, start with the free listing. Put the Kiri page in your bio and your Google listing, keep whatever runs your till, and add confirmed requests to your calendar by hand. It costs nothing to find out how many people are searching for the cuts you already do.

Sources

Prices and commissions read from each company's public pricing page on November 9, 2026. Card-processing rates are left out on purpose: they depend on your volume and hardware, and they are not what makes one of these free.

• Fresha: fresha.com/pricing
• Vagaro: vagaro.com/pro/pricing
• Booksy: biz.booksy.com/en-us/pricing, and the Booksy support article on Boost pricing
• Square Appointments: squareup.com/us/en/appointments/pricing
• Kiri: kiri-me.com/for-salons

Side-by-side pages with sources: kiri-me.com/for-salons/vs-fresha, /vs-vagaro, /vs-booksy and /vs-square-appointments.

Every tool we have compared, in one table: kiri-me.com/for-salons/compare. What each marketplace takes from a new client's first visit, with a calculator: kiri-me.com/for-salons/new-client-fees.