subba alternative to Fresha: The Honest Comparison

Per-head pricing is a tax on growing

Fresha's Team plan is £9.95 per bookable team member per month, ex-VAT, with no cap. Three staff is £35.82 inc VAT. Ten is £119.40. Twenty is £238.80. The meter runs on headcount, not on how busy anyone is — so a quiet January costs exactly the same as a flat-out December.

subba prices on AI enquiry volume instead: 50 a month on Starter, 150 on Managed, 300 on Pro, 750 on Studio. Bookings are never metered, so every plan takes unlimited bookings, and your team size is irrelevant to your bill. Take on a Saturday junior, a second stylist, a seasonal front-desk hire — nothing changes.

A ten-person salon on subba Pro pays £599.88 a year. The same salon on Fresha's Team plan pays £1,432.80 before a single add-on, text or commission. That's £832 back in the business, and it's the smallest of the three savings on this page.

The 20% new-client fee, compounding

Fresha charges a one-time 20% commission, minimum £4 plus VAT, on the first appointment of any new client who finds you through its marketplace. It's capped and it's one-off per client — but it lands every single time, on every new face.

Run it at realistic numbers. A salon picking up 20 new marketplace clients a month at a £60 average first visit pays £240 in commission, £288 with VAT. That's £3,456 a year, on top of the subscription, on top of the add-ons.

subba takes 0% on every booking, from every source, permanently. Your Google listing, your Instagram, your word of mouth, your website — when someone books, the full amount is yours. And because payments run through your own Stripe account rather than the platform's, the money lands with you directly. You own the merchant relationship, the client list and the domain.

AI answering: the gap that isn't close

This is the one that decides it for most people.

Fresha's AI Concierge is a paid add-on at around £79.95 per location per month. Per location — so a second unit doubles it before you've taken a single call. And it's an add-on: nothing in Fresha's base subscription answers your website chat or your email.

With subba, the AI is the plan. From £9.99 a month it reads every enquiry, filters the spam, replies in your voice in under ten seconds, checks live availability, books the customer in and takes the deposit. The phone receptionist is an optional £29.99 a month for 100 minutes, £74.99 for 300, £119.99 for 600 with 30p/min after that if you want it.

Like for like, a solo operator with an AI on the phone:

• Fresha: £14.95 + £79.95 = £94.90, or £113.88 inc VAT

• subba: £9.99 + £29.99 = £39.98

Same job. A third of the price. And subba starts in draft mode — it writes the reply, you approve it, and you switch to fully automatic only once you trust it.

You keep your website, your domain, your data

Fresha's model points your clients at Fresha. Your booking page lives on their platform, your profile sits in their marketplace next to your competitors, and your client list is inside their system — where there's no public API to get it out again. Independent reviews grade Fresha's API access an outright fail: the only programmatic route is a read-only data connector for BI tools. No write access to appointments or clients. No webhooks. No Zapier app.

subba runs on your site. If you don't have one, we build you a booking website and register and manage your .co.uk domain, live in about five working days for £200 plus £19.99 a month. If you do have one, it's a one-line change to your existing contact form — no rebuild, no new tools.

And every subba account ships a public booking API: list services, check slots, create bookings. Plus an MCP server, so ChatGPT and other AI agents can find you and book you directly, and an agent manifest served on your own domain. As more customers start asking an assistant to book their next appointment, businesses on Fresha are simply invisible to them.

One more thing, free

The day after every visit, subba asks your happy customers to leave you a Google review. Automatically, every time, at no extra cost. Fresha sells its Google Rating Boost as a separate add-on.

When Fresha is the better call

Worth saying plainly. If the Fresha marketplace is genuinely bringing you new clients you'd never have found otherwise, that commission is buying something real, and subba has no equivalent — bookings come from your own channels. If you run a retail counter with stock control and staff payroll through your booking software, Fresha does more than we do. And if you take most of your money in person, Fresha's UK card rates can come in under Stripe's.

For everyone else — the businesses that already get found and just can't answer fast enough — the maths is one-sided.