Booking fees explained: commission vs flat fee

Many platforms are free to set up and charge a percentage (often around 6%) of every booking, sometimes plus a flat per-order amount. The fee may be passed to your customer at checkout or absorbed by you.

The catch: the fee scales with your success. The more you sell, the more you pay — forever.

A flat-fee platform like Theybook charges one predictable monthly price no matter how much you sell. Your processing cost is just Stripe's standard card rate, paid to your own account.

The fee stays put as you grow, so every extra booking is pure upside.

Take your annual bookings revenue and multiply by the commission rate. On $300,000 of bookings, a 6% fee is $18,000 a year. Compare that to a flat annual subscription — the gap is often five figures.

The more you sell, the more lopsided the comparison becomes in favor of a flat fee.

If you're brand new with very low volume, a pure commission model has no fixed cost. But most operators cross the break-even point quickly — and once you do, flat-fee pricing wins every month after.

Commission models often carry costs that don't appear on the pricing page. Guest-paid booking fees raise your effective price versus competitors, suppressing conversion in ways you never see in a report. Funds routed through the platform's merchant account can mean slower payouts and less control over refunds. And tier ladders gate basic features — waivers, gift cards, decent reporting — behind plans that cost more precisely when you grow.

There's also a strategic cost: a platform earning a percentage of your sales has every incentive to insert itself between you and the guest — marketplace listings, platform-branded emails, 'their' customer accounts. The commission isn't just a fee; it's the business model that shapes every product decision.

Build a one-line spreadsheet: last 12 months of gross bookings × the platform's percentage + monthly fees × 12 + any per-booking or guest-paid fees you absorb in pricing. Put the flat-fee total next to it ($996–$1,188/year for theybook). For most operators past roughly $20,000 of annual bookings, the flat fee already wins — and the gap widens every year you grow.

Then sanity-check the switching cost: with self-serve setup measured in hours, the payback period on switching is usually measured in days, not quarters.