The booking was thrown in. The card reader is the product.
There is nothing wrong with free — but it explains the shape of what you get. Booking bundled with a payment terminal exists to keep your payments on that terminal. Everything a schedule actually needs tends to arrive late, thinly, or not at all.
You'll recognise this if…
- Your booking page looks like a checkout, because underneath it is one
- Anything beyond a single appointment — a group, a multi-day job, a crew — is a workaround
- You cannot change payment processor without also losing your booking setup
- Client notes, if they exist, are a text box
- Your schedule is locked to one payment processor by design
- Group sessions, recurring work and multi-person jobs don't really fit
- Little control over the booking page: their layout, their flow, their branding
- No deposits or cancellation rules worth the name
- Exporting your clients means exporting a customer list built for receipts
- Bring your own processor — connect your existing payment account, or use ours
- One-to-one sessions, group classes, multi-day and multi-person jobs, all first-class
- Your logo, your colours, your domain — clients book on a page that looks like you
- Deposits, cancellation cutoffs and no-show handling you configure per service
- Take your full client list with you at any time, in one file
What moving actually involves
Import your services and your client list from a spreadsheet, check how they landed, then share your new booking link. Nothing changes for your clients until you send them the new link — so you can set everything up and look at it first. Your old tool keeps working while you do.
Zeitlup is month-to-month, so the decision is reversible. If it isn't right, export everything and go.
When not to bother
If your whole business is walk-ins at one counter and a booking is a rare convenience, the bundled tool is doing its job and switching buys you little.
Using something else?
Set it up before you switch anything over
Start free, import your services and clients, and look at the result. Your current tool keeps working while you do.