Get paid into your own bank account: how 0% commission keeps the money yours

When you run a salon, a studio, a clinic or a small restaurant, you watch every pound and every dollar. So here is a question worth asking about whatever tool you use to take bookings: when a client pays, where does that money actually go first? With a lot of popular platforms, the honest answer is that it goes to them, not to you.

The marketplace cut, in plain numbers

A booking marketplace makes money by standing between you and your customer and taking a percentage. The headline rates are not small. In beauty, Fresha charges a 20% commission on the first appointment from any new client who finds you through its marketplace, with a minimum fee per client (see the Fresha Help Center). In food, the third-party delivery apps are steeper still. As Rezku's 2026 breakdown shows, DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub commissions typically run from 15% up to 30% per order, and the real cost often lands higher once processing and promotion fees are added.

Put that in everyday terms. If a platform skims 20% of a $5,000 month, that is $1,000 gone before you have paid your rent or your staff. The busier you get, the more you hand over. The fee grows exactly when you would rather keep the upside.

0% commission means the price is the price

Bookatu works the other way around. There is no booking commission. When a client books a haircut, a training session, a table or a photo shoot, the full price is yours. The card processor still charges its standard fee, which every business that takes cards pays, but that is the payment network's cost, not a platform taking a cut of your work. Nobody at Bookatu is sitting in the middle of your sale.

Bookatu is one platform with a tailored setup for each kind of business: salon, spa, personal trainer, sports coach, fitness or yoga studio, restaurant and photographer. The wording, the storefront and the tools fit your trade. The pricing model stays the same across all of them: zero commission on bookings.

The money is yours, and clean for tax time

This is the part that matters most for your accounts. Bookatu sends payments straight to your own bank account using Stripe Connect. You set up your own Stripe account, in your own business name, and payouts go to your bank from there. Stripe's documentation on payouts to connected accounts describes exactly this: available funds are paid out to the account holder's own bank, usually one to two business days after a charge settles.

Because the money flows through your account and not a shared marketplace pool, your records are simple. Your sales are already in your name. There is no untangling of a platform's combined statement to work out what was really yours. Stripe's own guidance on tax reporting notes that the account holder is responsible for their own tax obligations, which is the point: your income is yours to report, cleanly, the way an independent business should.

If you cannot explain where your money is on any given day, you do not really control your cash flow. Owning the account is the whole game.

No waiting for a platform to release your cash

Holding funds is the other quiet cost of marketplaces. On Airbnb, for example, the platform holds the guest's payment and releases it to the host about 24 hours after check-in, and new hosts can face longer holds before their first payout (see Airbnb's own help article on payout timing). That model protects the marketplace and its buyers, but it means your money sits with someone else while you wait.

With money going to your own Stripe account, payouts run on a standard rolling schedule to your bank, typically within a couple of business days. You are not waiting on a third party to decide it is time to let go of your earnings.

What this looks like in your business

• Salon and spa: clients book and pay through your own branded storefront, and the takings reconcile to your account, not a marketplace's.
• Personal trainer and coach: sell session packs, for example buy ten and auto-decrement, and chase what you are owed with a simple who-owes-me board where you log cash or bank payments and send reminders.
• Restaurant: take online reservations and lay out your room with a visual floor-plan editor, with tables sized by seats, without paying a per-cover fee to a booking app.
• Photographer: deliver private, per-client galleries with watermarked previews and paid extra photos, and collect the payment into your own account.

Clients reach their portal with a passwordless magic link, so booking and paying stays easy for them while the money stays yours.

The benefit that compounds

A commission is a tax on your success. Every extra booking costs you more. A flat subscription with 0% commission flips that. You grow, your fee stays put, and the extra revenue is yours to keep. Over a year of being fully booked, that gap is not a rounding error. It is the difference between funding your next hire and funding someone else's platform.

The simplest test for any booking tool is this: when a customer pays, whose bank account does the money land in first? With Bookatu, the answer is always yours.

Sources

• Fresha Help Center: Marketplace new client fees (20% commission): https://www.fresha.com/help-center/knowledge-base/billing-and-fees/188-marketplace-new-client-fees
• Rezku: Third-Party Delivery Fees in 2026 (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub): https://rezku.com/blog/third-party-delivery-fees-in-2026-what-doordash-uber-eats-grubhub-really-cost-restaurants/
• Airbnb Help Center: When you'll get your payout: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/425
• Stripe Docs: Payouts to connected accounts: https://docs.stripe.com/connect/payouts-connected-accounts
• Stripe Docs: US tax reporting for Connect platforms: https://docs.stripe.com/connect/tax-reporting