Vagaro costs a small salon $30 a month at list price ($23.99 for the first six months), plus $10 a month for each extra bookable calendar. A four-stylist salon with forms, text marketing and a website lands around $110 a month before card fees; AI-powered tools are included, with Vera Fill My Books charging fees.
The base figure is easy to find. The total is not, because each add-on is priced separately and the number of bookable calendars is the biggest multiplier. Card processing, which the pricing page does not itemise, usually costs more than the whole subscription, so the costed salon below carries it as a separate line.
What the pricing page lists
These are the USD list prices on Vagaro's pricing page as of October 2026. The page says that exclusions apply, and that it does not specify whether the base price is per location or per account, so confirm both when you sign up. A free 30-day trial and no cancellation fees are mentioned.
| Item | List price | Needed by a small salon? |
|---|---|---|
| Base plan | $30 a month; $23.99 for the first six months | Yes: includes calendar, payments, waitlist, memberships, reports and online booking |
| Extra bookable calendar | $10 a month each per location, up to seven licences | One per stylist who takes bookings |
| Forms | $10 a month | Useful for consultation and patch-test forms |
| Text marketing | From $20 a month | Only if you will send campaigns |
| Email marketing | Free to start; 1,000 free emails a month on every plan | Often enough |
| MySite website builder | $20 a month | Only if you have no site |
| Online shopping cart | $10 a month | If you sell retail online |
| Check-in app | $10 a month | Rarely, for a small waiting area |
| Branded app | $100 a month | Almost never at this size |
| QuickBooks integration | $10 a month | If your bookkeeper uses it |
| Xero integration | $30 a month | If your bookkeeper uses it |
| Payroll | $34 a month plus $5 per employee | Only if you replace a payroll service |
| Vera Fill My Books | Fees apply; no amount listed | A decision for later |
Payment processing rates are not itemised on the pricing page. Vagaro's merchant services page quotes processing "as low as 2.2%", and a free card reader on sign-up, so ask for your actual in-person, online and keyed-in rates before assuming that figure.
The costed example: owner, three stylists and a receptionist
An illustration. A salon has the owner and three stylists taking bookings, plus a receptionist who handles the desk and no clients of her own. That is four bookable calendars, not five. The salon wants consultation forms, text campaigns and a simple website, and takes about $25,000 a month on card.
| Line | Monthly at list | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Base plan (includes first calendar) | $30.00 | $23.99 for months 1 to 6 |
| Three extra bookable calendars | $30.00 | 3 x $10 |
| Forms | $10.00 | Consultation and patch-test forms |
| Text marketing | $20.00 | Starting price |
| MySite website | $20.00 | Replaces an existing site if you have one |
| Subtotal | $110.00 | $103.99 in months 1 to 6 |
Year one: base plan 6 x $23.99 = $143.94 plus 6 x $30 = $180, so $323.94. Calendars 12 x $30 = $360. Add-ons 12 x $50 = $600. Total $1,283.94. From year two with no intro rate the figure is $1,320 ($110 x 12). The difference is $36 across the year, which is the whole value of the introductory price.
Card fees sit on top. At $25,000 a month and an optimistic 2.2%, that is $550 a month before any per-transaction charge, so processing is a larger line than the entire subscription. Two practical consequences follow. First, a rate difference of 0.2 percentage points is worth $50 a month at this volume, as much as the text marketing add-on. Second, ask what rate applies to keyed-in and online payments, which are normally higher than card-present.
Three scenarios: solo, small team and growing
- Solo stylist: $30 a month with the first calendar included. Add forms at $10 if you do colour work, so $40. With a free email allowance of 1,000 a month you may need nothing else.
- Owner plus two stylists: $30 plus 2 x $10 = $50. Add forms and you have $60. Most salons of this size can stop there.
- Eight bookable staff: the page prices licences up to seven and says employees beyond seven are free. Reading that literally, the calendar cost stops at $70 on top of the $30 base, so about $100. Ask sales whether the eighth and later bookable staff truly cost nothing, because that is unusual among booking apps that charge per person.
Note how the cap changes the comparison. Tools that charge every extra person, such as Booksy at $20 per extra team member, get more expensive as the salon grows, while a capped model gets cheaper per head. At three stylists the picture is the opposite: Vagaro's $10 is the lower rate. Five alternatives compared on AI and price runs the numbers for several tools.
Which add-ons to question
Text marketing at $20 a month
Reminders and confirmations are part of booking. The add-on is for campaigns: a quiet-Tuesday offer, a rebook nudge to clients who have not been for ten weeks. Do the sum before you buy it. If a campaign to 200 clients rebooks six appointments at an average of $70, that is $420 of revenue against $20 of subscription, so it pays for itself once a quarter. If you will send two campaigns a year, it does not.
MySite at $20 a month
A website inside the booking system saves you a separate site, but it also ties your web presence to the platform. Compare against a basic site builder, which costs roughly the same, and ask whether you can point your own domain at it. The cost question is covered in Vagaro MySite pricing.
Accounting integrations at $10 or $30
The difference between QuickBooks at $10 and Xero at $30 is $240 a year. If your bookkeeper can work from a monthly sales export instead, you can skip either. Ask what the integration does that a CSV does not.
Branded app, payroll and data lake
The branded app at $100 a month is $1,200 a year. For a small salon, the booking link plus Instagram and Apple Maps booking (included with every plan) covers the same need. Payroll at $34 plus $5 per employee is only worth it if it replaces a separate payroll subscription. Skip the rest unless you have a specific reason.
Vera and the AI features: what costs what
The pricing page says AI-powered business tools and marketing are included with every plan. Vera Fill My Books, which promotes open slots, is named as carrying fees without a figure. I could not find any further Vera pricing on Vagaro's own pages, so the honest advice is to put four questions to Vagaro before relying on any Vera feature.
- Which Vera features are included in the $30 plan, and which carry a charge?
- If Fill My Books charges per booking, what is the fee and who counts as a new or returning client?
- Can I turn Vera features off per stylist or per service?
- Does Vera answer clients on its own, or does every reply need approval? And where does it hand over to a person?
Write the answers down with the date. If an AI feature is billed per outcome, set a monthly cap in your own tracking, and review it after a month. Vagaro AI explained covers what Vera does and where it stops.
An illustrative worked check: say Fill My Books fills eight slots in a month, and the fee is a percentage of each booking. If the average booking is $80 and the fee turns out to be 15%, the cost is 8 x $12 = $96, and you gained $640 of revenue from slots that would have stayed empty. If the slots would have filled anyway, you paid $96 for nothing. The test is whether the clients are new, so compare with your pre-Vera rebooking rate.
Mistakes that inflate the bill
- Setting up everyone as bookable. In an illustrative case, a salon assistant who only washes hair and a receptionist both appeared as bookable calendars because the staff list was imported with default settings. Four people at $10 each, $40 a month, bought nothing. Review each profile once.
- Planning on the introductory price. The first six months are $6.01 cheaper per month, so the bill rises by about $6 at month seven. Small, but it breaks a budget built to the cent.
- Add-ons nobody uses. Check your add-ons every quarter against actual use. A $10 shopping cart for a salon that has sold nothing online in six months is $120 a year wasted.
- Ignoring processing fees. They are the largest line. Ask for the rate in writing and compare with a standalone card provider.
- Counting a trial as a commitment. The page mentions a 30-day trial and no cancellation fees. Use it to test your actual set-up with a real week of bookings.
A 20-minute audit of an existing Vagaro bill
If you already use Vagaro, do this once a quarter.
- Download the last three invoices and list every line.
- Match each line to the pricing page above. Anything that does not match is a question for support.
- For each add-on write one sentence about what you used it for last month. No sentence, no add-on.
- Count bookable calendars and compare to the people who actually had clients booked in the last 60 days.
- Calculate processing fees as a percentage of card takings and compare with the rate you were quoted.
A useful AI task here is the arithmetic. Paste the line items into an assistant, ask it to total them and flag any item over $20 a month, and then check the total yourself. It will not know your prices, so give it the figures and tell it to use only those.
Here are the lines from my booking-software invoices for the last three
months. Total each month, show the sums, flag any charge that appears
in one month and not the others, and list the add-ons over $15 a month.
Use only the figures I paste. Lines: [paste lines]Trimming the same salon from $110 to $70 without losing anything
Take the four-calendar salon above at $110 a month and cut with reasons, not by feel.
- Drop MySite ($20) if a simple one-page site already exists, and link to the booking page from it. Saving: $20.
- Hold text marketing ($20) for a quarter. Send rebook nudges through the free email allowance of 1,000 a month first, and only add texting if open rates are poor. Saving: $20.
- Keep forms ($10) because consent forms protect the salon. No saving, and that is the point: cut what has no job, not what protects you.
New monthly bill: $30 + $30 + $10 = $70, or $840 a year against $1,320. The saving of $480 a year is about the cost of a single colour client's year of visits, so it is worth an hour but not a crusade. If those two add-ons were each earning more than they cost, the saving is false. Test by looking at the last quarter: did any booking come from a text campaign or a MySite visit? Vagaro's reporting should show where bookings came from.
Cost per appointment is the number to watch
Monthly totals hide whether the software is expensive for what it does. Divide the full monthly cost, subscription and card fees, by appointments. Say the four-stylist salon does 520 appointments a month. Subscription $110 plus processing $550 is $660, so about $1.27 per appointment. On a $75 average ticket that is about 1.7% of revenue. Subscription alone is 21 cents an appointment.
Seen this way, a $20 add-on is 4 cents an appointment, and a 0.2-point drop in card rate saves 10 cents. Both are small, which is the honest conclusion for most small salons: the big costs are your people and your rent, and the software bill is worth tidying but not worth losing sleep over. The exception is when add-ons creep. Five $10 extras that nobody uses cost $600 a year.
Questions to put to Vagaro sales, in one email
Pricing pages leave gaps, and a written answer is worth more than a call. Send one message with all the questions and keep the reply.
Hi, I run a small salon with [number] bookable staff and about
[number] card payments a month. Please confirm in writing:
1. The monthly price of the base plan and whether it is per location.
2. Whether the introductory rate applies to my account and when it ends.
3. The cost of each extra bookable calendar and any cap.
4. My card processing rates: in person, online and keyed-in.
5. Which Vera features are included and which have charges, with amounts.
6. Any set-up, migration or cancellation fees.
Thank you, [your name]Compare the reply with the pricing page. Where they differ, ask which one applies to you. Keep the reply in the same folder as the monthly invoices so the audit above has something to check against.
Could a general AI assistant replace some of the paid extras?
For content, often yes. A subscription to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini costs about $20 a month on a personal plan, and it can write your service descriptions, reminder wording and campaign copy. It cannot book anyone or touch your diary. So the sensible split is: the booking system owns calendar, payments and reminders; an assistant drafts the words that go into it.
An illustrative prompt and result for a rebook message:
Write a 40-word text to clients who have not booked in ten weeks.
Friendly, no pressure, mention that Tuesday afternoons have space.
Leave [first name] as a placeholder. No emojis.Hi [first name], it has been a little while since your last visit. We
have a few spaces on Tuesday afternoons if you would like to book in.
You can pick a time here: [link]. Hope to see you soon.What you would fix: the draft includes no price or deal, which is right, and you should check the placeholder merges correctly in your system's preview before sending to anyone. If you would rather not use a paid assistant, free plans exist, though they have usage limits. The point is that wording is a cheap job, so do not pay a platform extra for it unless the convenience is worth the fee.
A simple year-one budget to copy
| Line | Months 1-6 | Months 7-12 | Year one |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base plan | $23.99 | $30.00 | $323.94 |
| Three extra calendars | $30.00 | $30.00 | $360.00 |
| Forms | $10.00 | $10.00 | $120.00 |
| Reserve for one add-on you might need | $0 | $20.00 | $120.00 |
| Total subscription | $63.99 | $90.00 | $923.94 |
Notice that this budget includes a $20 reserve from month seven. Rather than guessing which add-on you will need, give yourself a ceiling and make any new purchase fit inside it, or replace something. That habit keeps a small bill small.
When a stylist rents a chair or works part-time
Calendars are priced per bookable person, not per hour worked, so a stylist who works two days a week costs the same $10 as one who works six. That changes a few decisions.
- A part-time stylist at 12 clients a week who brings in perhaps $3,000 a month of takings makes the $10 irrelevant. Do not delay adding her to avoid it.
- A weekend-only helper who covers one Saturday a month could be handled by the owner's calendar with a note, saving $10. If clients ask for her by name, give her a calendar.
- If a stylist rents a chair and runs her own business, check whether she should have her own account. Sharing a login or a calendar blurs whose takings and card fees are whose, and that is a bookkeeping headache that costs more than $10 to untangle.
An illustrative sum: if six staff include two part-timers, the calendar cost is 5 x $10 = $50 for the six bookable people (the first is included in the base plan), whatever their hours. If you were thinking of cutting a calendar to save money, cut one that nobody books into, not one that happens to be quiet.
Before you pay: a short decision rule
Pay for the base plan and one calendar per bookable person. Add forms if you do colour or treatments that need consent. Hold every other add-on for a month and ask what problem it would solve, then buy it only if you can name a number it should move. For deeper reading on cost over a team, see Vagaro pricing per month for a team, and if you are comparing against other tools, Fresha vs Vagaro is the direct head-to-head.
Vagaro pricing questions owners ask
Does the $23.99 introductory price last?
No. Vagaro's page shows $30 a month next to $23.99, which it labels an exclusive rate for the first six months, and notes that exclusions apply. Budget with $30 and treat the first six months of savings, about $36 in total on the base plan, as a bonus rather than a plan.
Do I pay for a calendar for a receptionist who does not take appointments?
The $10 charge applies per bookable calendar licence. A receptionist or manager who never has clients booked into their own diary does not need one. Check each team member's settings so that only the people clients book with are set up as bookable.
Is there a cap on how much extra calendars can cost?
Vagaro's page prices bookable calendar licences at $10 each up to seven, and its FAQ says employees beyond seven are free. By that reading the calendar cost tops out at $70 on top of the base plan. Confirm this in writing for your account before you rely on it.
Is Vera, the AI assistant, an extra charge?
The pricing page says AI-powered business tools and marketing come with every plan, and it names Vera Fill My Books as carrying fees without listing an amount. Other Vera features may be priced separately, so ask sales which Vera features are free on your plan and what any others cost.
Further reads
- Fresha Pricing: Subscription, Marketplace Fees and Add-Ons Explained — How Fresha's subscription and marketplace fees add up instead.
- How Salons Use AI to Rebook Clients and Fill Gaps in the Diary — Fill diary gaps before paying for a promotion add-on.
- Salon Commission or Booth Rent? Model Both on Your Numbers With AI — Model chair rental against commission, which changes calendar counts.
- Vagaro for Salons: Services, Calendars, Reminders and Vera AI Set-Up — Set up services, calendars and reminders once you have chosen.
- How to Cut Salon No-Shows With AI Reminders and Deposits — Use the system you pay for to cut no-shows.
- Gift Voucher Terms and Conditions for a Salon: Draft Them With AI — Gift voucher terms for a salon: nine decisions, clauses to adapt, an AI drafting prompt and the checks a local professional should make.
- AI for Nail Salons: Walk-In Wait Estimates and Technician Matching — Learn service durations from your own tickets, write technician-match rules, work a 2pm queue step by step and text each walk-in a wait range.
- Can AI Manage Salon Inventory? Colour Stock and Reorder Points — How to set par levels and reorder points for salon colour from eight weeks of usage, with a ten-shade worked example, spreadsheet formulas and an order sheet.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: Vagaro pricing page, fetched October 2026 (USD list prices; the page notes that exclusions apply).