How to Avoid Fresha's 20% Marketplace Commission on New Clients

Qualivo Team · Fri Jul 31 2026

Fresha's free plan looks straightforward on the surface — no monthly fee, unlimited bookings, a polished calendar. But buried in the pricing is a detail that catches a lot of salon and studio owners off guard: a 20% commission on every new client who finds you through the Fresha marketplace. Not a flat fee. Not a small percentage you can work around. Twenty percent, taken before you see a cent.

If you're actively building your client base — or trying to protect the margins on the one you've already built — that number matters. Here's exactly how the fee works, who pays it, and your real options for avoiding it without losing the discovery benefits a marketplace provides.

How Fresha's New-Client Marketplace Commission Actually Works

Fresha draws a specific line between two types of bookings. If an existing client — someone already in your Fresha client list — books with you through the marketplace, Fresha doesn't charge a commission. The 20% commission applies specifically to new clients who discover and book you through the Fresha marketplace for the first time.

In practice, that means every time the Fresha app or website surfaces your listing to someone who hasn't booked with you before and they tap "Book," Fresha takes 20% of that appointment's value. A $80 blowout becomes a $64 earner. A $150 lash set nets you $120. A $200 med-spa treatment leaves you with $160. The more new clients the marketplace sends you — which is ostensibly what you're paying to access — the more you pay in absolute dollars.

Fresha also charges standard payment processing fees and SMS notification fees on top of this. For a full breakdown of what Fresha actually costs once all the fees are added up, see our post on Is Fresha Really Free? Fresha Pricing and Fees Explained (2026).

Your Real Options for Avoiding the Fee

1. Direct New Clients to Your Booking Link Yourself

Once a client has booked with you once and appears in your Fresha client list, future bookings from that person don't trigger the marketplace commission. So some businesses focus on sourcing new clients through their own channels — Instagram, Google, referrals — and sending those clients directly to their Fresha booking link rather than letting them find the business through marketplace search.

The problem with this approach is that it defeats the purpose of being listed on a marketplace at all. You're doing your own marketing, paying for your own discovery, and then routing people into Fresha as a calendar tool. That's a perfectly valid use of scheduling software, but if you're doing all the client acquisition yourself anyway, you should be asking whether Fresha is the right tool for that job.

2. Opt Out of the Marketplace Listing

Fresha does allow businesses to disable their marketplace listing and use the platform purely as booking software. If you already have a full, stable client book and have no interest in new-client discovery, turning off your marketplace presence means you'll never trigger the commission — because no new clients will find you through Fresha at all.

The trade-off is straightforward: you lose access to passive discovery entirely. If your book ever thins out — slow season, staff changes, a new location, a rebrand — you're starting from scratch through your own channels with no marketplace safety net.

3. Move Your Marketplace Listing to a Platform That Doesn't Charge the Fee

This is the option most businesses eventually reach once the math of the 20% fee becomes concrete. There are booking platforms with genuine consumer-facing marketplaces that don't charge a commission for new clients who book through them.

Qualivo is built around exactly this model. The free Starter plan includes a public booking page, a listing in the Qualivo marketplace, and the Book the Look feature — where you post photos or short videos of real work (a cut, a nail set, a lash look, a med-spa result, a tattoo), attach the exact bookable service with its price and duration, and clients tap "Book this look" to book that specific result directly into your calendar. New clients who discover you through the Qualivo marketplace don't trigger a commission. That listing costs $0, with no trial clock and no credit card required to maintain it — not a trial that expires, but free to keep.

Why Some Businesses Stay on Fresha Despite the Fee

It's worth being straightforward here: Fresha is a mature platform with an established consumer user base in many markets. If Fresha's marketplace is actively filling your calendar with new clients, the 20% can feel like a reasonable cost of acquisition — especially if your average service value is lower and the volume is there. Fresha also has strong reputation tools, a well-known consumer brand, and a clean booking experience that clients trust.

The commission becomes harder to justify when your average ticket is high (the absolute dollar cost scales directly with service price), when you're in a market where Fresha hasn't built significant consumer traffic yet, or when you're early-stage and paying structurally into the fee before the discovery benefit has materialized.

What a Commission-Free Marketplace Looks Like in Practice

Qualivo's marketplace works differently by design. On the free plan, there's no per-booking commission because Qualivo doesn't process payments at that tier — your revenue from marketplace-sourced bookings stays entirely with you. The listing, the booking page, and your marketplace presence are free to maintain indefinitely.

For businesses that want online payments, deposits, automated reminders, revenue analytics, and marketing campaigns, Qualivo Pro is $19/month, with an optional 30-day free trial before billing starts. Online payments run at standard Stripe processing rates — there's no per-booking commission added on top of that either. Qualivo's revenue model is built on the Pro subscription, not on a cut of the clients its marketplace sends you.

For a direct comparison of how the two platforms stack up across pricing, marketplace model, and feature set, the Qualivo vs. Fresha comparison for 2026 walks through the specifics. If you're a solo practitioner weighing your options, the guide written specifically for solo beauty professionals covers the decision in more detail.

The Bottom Line

There's no clever workaround that lets you stay listed on the Fresha marketplace and avoid the 20% new-client commission — it's structural to how Fresha funds its free plan. Your real options are: opt out of the marketplace and lose passive discovery, accept the fee as a client acquisition cost and decide if the volume justifies it, or move your listing to a platform that offers marketplace discovery without the commission.

If you're putting time and money into building a client base, that 20% compounds fast. Understanding that a commission-free marketplace option exists — and what it actually includes — is worth doing before you assume the fee is simply the price of being found online.

Claim your free Qualivo profile today — no credit card, no trial clock, no per-client marketplace commission. Set up your booking page, post your first Look, and get discovered in the Qualivo marketplace for $0, for as long as you want it. Get started at getqualivo.com.

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