Is It Free to Accept Payments Through SalonLife?
Partly. SalonLife’s payment feature is already included in your plan, but a small transaction fee applies to every card payment. Let’s break down both.
What’s Included in Your Plan?
Accepting payments, prepayments, payment links, and paid cancellations are all part of the SalonLife system. You don’t pay a separate monthly fee for them or need to buy an add-on module. You simply pay your regular SalonLife plan fee.
When Does the Extra Fee Apply?
Every time a client actually pays by card, a payment processing fee applies. Card payments are handled by our partner Stripe, whose fee for every successful payment is:
- €0.50 fixed fee
- + 1.85% of the payment amount
SalonLife doesn’t add its own margin on top of this — it’s Stripe’s fee directly, deducted automatically.
What Does This Mean in Practice?
Let’s say a client books a €30 haircut and pays a 30% prepayment, or €9.
Stripe’s fee on that €9 prepayment is €0.50 + 1.85% × €9 = a total of roughly €0.67.
That means €8.33 reaches your account, while you can also be more confident the client will actually show up, since they’ve already paid a prepayment.
If the client had instead not shown up, and there’d been no prepayment, that slot would simply have gone to waste. A €0.67 transaction fee is a much smaller cost than €30 of lost revenue.
A prepayment isn’t a cost — it’s peace of mind that your income stays stable.
In reality, the small card transaction fee is less of a risk than the loss caused by a last-minute cancellation. A prepayment means the slots in your calendar are firmly booked for the client, your income is more stable, and you can get on with your work without chasing bank transfers or anxiously watching for last-minute cancellations.
You can read about how to set up prepayments in SalonLife here: Setting Up Prepayments