Everything, answered

Yes. The platform is free — unlimited bookings, unlimited clients, your whole team, reminders, gift cards, passes, marketing tools, the mobile app, all of it. No card is needed to sign up. Exactly three optional extras are paid: SMS (pay-as-you-go credit), the AI phone receptionist (£49.99 per 100 minutes, prepaid), and Nita, the AI assistant (a monthly subscription from £9.99).

Never. 0% commission on bookings, gift cards and passes. Your prices are your money.

No catch: no ads, no selling your data, no commission. We built the platform to be radically cheaper to run than the incumbents, and we grow by salons recommending us.

Card payments are optional and run on your own Stripe account. Slotora adds 0% — you only pay Stripe's standard card processing fee (about 1.5% + 20p for UK cards), the same as any card machine.

Yes — SMS is one of the three paid extras, because every message costs us money to send. You buy credit up front, you see the price of a send before you confirm it, and the rate depends on the country you are texting. Email reminders and confirmations are unlimited and free, and a salon that never touches SMS never pays us anything.

About 15 minutes. A guided 7-step setup wizard walks every new account through the essentials — business basics, your services, your team, money at the counter, working hours, booking rules and sharing your booking page — explaining what each setting does, and your page is live at slotora.io/b/your-name.

Yes — usually in a day. Export your client list from your old system and use our Import Centre: it accepts any Excel or CSV file, auto-detects the columns, and imports clients, services with prices, and photos.

Any time. Your clients, bookings and services can be downloaded as CSV files, or everything at once as a JSON bundle. Your data is yours — you're never locked in.

No. Clients book on your web page in a few taps — name, email, done. They get email confirmations, reminders and a self-service link to reschedule or cancel.

Yes — per-person weekly hours, split shifts (several time slots a day), one-off date exceptions, and their own services with custom durations or prices. Clients pick a professional or 'Anyone'.

Yes. Set a processing window on a service (e.g. colour developing) and your calendar automatically frees up for another client while the product works.

Yes — capacity-based sessions (yoga, masterclasses, group PT) that fill up spot by spot, with a waitlist when they're full.

The guest gets a cancellation email, the slot opens instantly, and anyone matching on your waitlist is notified automatically so the gap gets refilled.

Drag & drop any booking to a new time or to another team member — a small dialog confirms the exact time before anything changes, and the client is emailed automatically.

Three ways, and you choose: an email, a push notification on your phone, and a bell inside Slotora that keeps the list even when your phone is in a drawer. Bookings, cancellations, moves, payments, forms and reviews each have their own switch, so you can be told about money and left alone about everything else.

Yes. Build your own forms — allergies, patch tests, medical questions, consent — and attach them to the services that need them. The client fills them in when they book or from a link afterwards, the answers sit on their record, and questions can appear only when a previous answer makes them relevant.

Yes, and with Google or your iPhone's calendar (iCloud) you can go one better. Connect either one and your bookings appear in a calendar Slotora creates for you there, while the hours you are already busy in it stop being offered to clients. For Outlook — or for any calendar, if you would rather not connect an account — subscribe once with a private, read-only iCal link, with a per-staff link if each team member wants only their own day. Either way it stays up to date on its own, and a subscribed calendar can never change a booking.

Yes — the AI phone receptionist is an optional paid add-on: £49.99 per 100 minutes, prepaid, no subscription. You apply from the admin, choose the answering window (say, the AI takes calls every day from 6pm to 7am while your team answers in the day) and forward your line with the codes shown there. It speaks the caller's language, reads your real services and prices, books free slots straight into your calendar (labelled 'phone AI'), offers fresh alternatives when a time is taken, and takes complaints politely as a message for you. If a service requires an online deposit, it directs the caller to your booking page instead of taking an unpaid booking.

Yes — optional card payments via your own Stripe account: a percentage, a fixed amount, or full payment at booking. You choose, and you can turn it off any time.

Yes. Set your fee and your cancellation window; the client's card is saved securely by Stripe at booking, and if they don't show or cancel late the fee comes off it by itself about an hour later. Switch that off and it waits for you to charge it in one click instead.

Automatic email reminders go out before every appointment (you choose how many hours ahead), in the client's own language, with a reschedule link — most 'no-shows' are really just forgetfulness.

Yes — allowing on-site payment alongside (or instead of) online payment is a single toggle, and Slotora records what you take at the counter. Every booking shows the balance still owed; press Take payment for a QR code the guest scans to pay by Apple Pay, Google Pay or card, or record cash, your own card machine or a bank transfer. Tips, emailed receipts, refunds and a day-end cash count are all built in.

It depends on what your front desk is, so here is the whole picture. If it is a phone or a tablet, a SumUp or Square reader works: Slotora hands the amount to their app on that same device and the result comes back onto the booking — which does mean their app must be installed there, signed into your merchant account, so this route does not work from a desktop PC. If your front desk is a computer, a Stripe Terminal reader does the same job with no phone involved. If you want no hardware at all, the QR code works on any counter. And if you already have a card machine, keep it — take the card on it and record the payment against the booking. Slotora takes 0% of all four; the reader you buy and the processing fee belong to SumUp, Square or Stripe.

Yes — put your booking link in your Instagram bio and action button, a Story 'BOOK' highlight, and your Facebook page's Book Now button. Our help centre has the exact clicks for each.

Yes — a booking button, a popup widget or a fully embedded booking page. Ready-made snippets and step-by-step guides for WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and Webflow.

Both built in: sell gift cards with emailed codes, and multi-session passes (e.g. 10-session gel pass) redeemed with their code at booking or at the counter, with the balance coming off by itself from then on.

Yes — send offers to all clients, lapsed clients or tagged segments, with an AI copywriter to draft the text. Coupons with validity windows and usage limits are included.

Yes — points or a digital stamp card, whichever suits your trade, and you set what earns a reward and what it is worth. It runs on its own from the bookings you are already taking; nobody has to carry a paper card.

Yes — a native app for the business on iPhone, iPad and Android, with push notifications for new bookings. It runs the calendar (including drag-to-reschedule), the counter till, the client book, gift card and pass lookup, the day-end cash count and reports, on the same live data as the browser. Your clients don't need any app: they book on a web page.

Yes, for the part of a salon POS that matters at the desk. Every booking shows what is still owed, and you take it as a card, cash or bank transfer: a QR code the guest scans, a SumUp or Square reader through their app on the same phone or tablet, a Stripe Terminal reader from a computer, or the card machine you already own. Tips are recorded separately from service revenue, receipts are emailed, refunds and part-payments are handled, and the day-end close counts the drawer and shows the difference. What it is not is a barcode-driven retail till: there is no scanner and no shelf-goods checkout. Products themselves are covered — see the stock question below.

Yes, and not only the ones you sell. Tell a service what it consumes and completing the appointment takes it off the shelf on its own — you never type a stock movement for ordinary work. It counts whole things and measured amounts alike: one box of tint, or a 50 ml bottle of polish that a manicure takes 20 ml out of. Set the level you want to be warned at, per product, and your dashboard says so before you run out mid-appointment. Miscounts are fixed with a stocktake that records the difference as its own line rather than quietly agreeing with whoever typed last.

Yes. Because the shelf knows what each appointment consumed, Slotora can subtract it from what the appointment took and show contribution per service — revenue minus materials, per job, so a £120 colour that eats £34 of product is compared honestly against a £45 pedicure that eats £2. It also writes the sentence for you: 'Your balayage contributes 18% more per appointment than your highlights.' The word is contribution, not profit: rent, wages and card fees are not in it, and we would rather name it accurately than have you plan around a number that has not paid the landlord.

On your dashboard for the day at a glance, and in Reports for anything longer: takings by day, week or month, split by payment method, plus your busiest hours, your best-selling services and who your regulars are. There is a day-end summary you can close the till against, and everything exports to CSV.

Yes, both ways, with either one. Connect your Google account or your iPhone's calendar (iCloud) and Slotora reads the hours you are already busy there and stops offering them, so a client cannot book you while you are at the dentist; your Slotora bookings travel the other way, into a calendar called Slotora that it creates in that account. A few things to be clear about. It runs on a fifteen-minute cycle, so it is quick rather than instant. Slotora keeps only the times you are busy: Google sends us busy times and nothing else, so we never learn what your events are called, while your iPhone's calendar sends the events themselves and Slotora keeps only their times — never titles, guests or locations. You connect your own calendar and it closes only your own hours; colleagues each connect theirs. For the iPhone you create an app-specific password at account.apple.com and paste it into Slotora once; it is stored encrypted, and you can revoke it at Apple any time. Outlook subscribes to a private, read-only iCal link that shows your bookings and sends nothing back.

The product works in English, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, German and Turkish. Your clients see the booking page in their own language, and their emails follow it too.

Data is stored encrypted in the EU/UK (London region), we use only strictly necessary cookies, and we never sell data or run ad trackers. Full details in our Privacy Policy; account deletion and complete data export are built in.

Slotora is operated by Belavin Limited, a UK company registered in Birmingham (company no. 16735157), registered with the ICO. Support is answered by humans: hello@slotora.io.

Not yet — this is the honest answer, and if you need it today Slotora is the wrong fit. One account is one business with one address; there is no branch switcher and no per-branch reporting. What does work is a team of any size under that one business, each with their own schedule. And if the thing you actually need is separate money per person — chair renters, self-employed stylists — that exists: switch the business to per-person payments and each stylist's takings go straight to her own account, with the day-end close still showing the whole salon broken down by person.

No — there is no public API, no webhooks and no Zapier or Make app today, and we would rather say so than have you find out after moving your data. What exists for getting data in and out: two-way calendar sync with Google and iPhone (iCloud); a read-only iCal feed for Outlook and any other calendar app; the booking widget and popup you paste into any website; CSV import for clients, services and prices; and CSV or full JSON export of everything whenever you want it. Your data is not locked in — it just is not automated into other tools yet.