Almost none of the software a small business runs on was chosen. It arrived. The booking widget came with the website, the delivery app came with the first order, the group chat got started by whoever was on that Saturday. Each one solved an afternoon’s problem and then quietly became permanent — and somewhere in the middle of that, the list of people who actually come back stopped being yours.
“The app that brings us orders also owns the customer”
Signing up to a marketplace was the fastest way to get going, and it worked — the orders came. But the customer belongs to the platform. You do not have their name, you cannot tell them you are shut on Monday, and the commission on a regular who would have walked in anyway is the same as on a stranger who found you by accident.
In your own app, the person joins you. You can send them a notification directly, and you sell through your own connected Stripe account, so the money lands in your bank rather than being held and remitted. Our fee on physical goods, tickets and real-world services is 2% on top of Stripe’s own processing — a platform fee, not a marketplace commission.
“The phone rings in the middle of service”
Bookings arrive by phone, by DM and by someone leaning over the counter, so the diary exists in three places and none of them is right. The no-shows are the worse half: nobody rings to cancel, they simply do not turn up, and you find out when the slot is already gone.
Put your services up as bookings with a shareable public page — a plain link that works for somebody who will never install an app, on a poster, in a bio, in a reply. Take the money at the time of booking if you want it committed. It lands in the same Stripe account as everything else, at the same 2%.
“Every casual knows a different version of the rules”
The prices changed in March and got explained to whoever was rostered that week. The opening checklist is laminated behind the counter, the allergen sheet is in an email somebody forwarded once, and new starters get shown the ropes by whichever casual is free.
One current copy of every document in the app’s resource library, a news feed for what changed this week, and a private group for the team so a question at 7am does not need four texts. Induction can be a short course whose modules unlock as they are done, with a certificate at the end where you need to show somebody was trained. Checklists, incidents and sign-offs are forms, and the answers export to CSV.
Nobody is being careless. There is just nowhere that is obviously the current version.
“We tried an app once and nobody used it”
It was a menu, an address and a phone number — all of which the website already did, and did better. So it got installed once, opened twice and deleted by March. The lesson everybody takes from that is that customers do not want an app from a business this size. The actual lesson is that it never gave them a reason to open it.
The reason has to be something they can only do in there: book the Thursday slot, pay for it, buy the thing you only have six of, get told at four o’clock that there is bread left. Products carry stock per variant with a low-stock warning, so “only six” is real rather than hopeful. Tickets, bookings and orders all settle into your own account.
An app with no reason to open it is not a cheap app. It is a deleted one.
“Every tool is another forty dollars a month”
A booking tool, a loyalty card app, an email platform, something for the roster, and the thing you signed up to for one campaign and never cancelled. Each was a reasonable decision on its own day. None of them talk to each other, and the total is a number you have quietly stopped adding up.
This is one app with one bill, and no charge per member ever — Starter is $10 a month, Community $39, Pro $99, and free is a real plan rather than a countdown. It will not replace your accounting, and we would rather say that than pretend. But the booking tool, the storefront, the staff noticeboard and the customer list are the same thing here.
When we are not the right answer
Worth saying plainly, because signing up for the wrong reason helps nobody and we would rather you knew now.
- You need a till. We are not a point-of-sale. We track stock for what sells through the app, per variant, with a low-stock warning — but nothing here knows about the sale you just rang up at the counter, and we do not reconcile the two.
- Your trade is almost entirely passing walk-in. If you never need to reach the same person twice, the whole argument above does not apply to you and an app will sit unopened.
- What you sell is mostly digital. Digital downloads and digital services carry a 30% rate in-app rather than 2%, because the app stores take their cut on digital content and somebody has to absorb it. If digital is your main line, sell it on the web instead — we would be the expensive way to do it.
- You need recurring billing that collects itself. We do not re-charge a saved card, so a membership or a retainer has to be asked for each time.
- You need it to be your system of record. Accounting, payroll, job costing, a real inventory system across every channel — we are not that and we do not pretend to integrate with yours out of the box.
If any of those describe you, we would rather point you somewhere better. If none of them do, the free plan will tell you the rest without costing you anything.
