Square Appointments alternative: what the free plan leaves out

I read Square's Bookings API page while writing this, and one line changed what I'd tell an agency. Write calls made on behalf of a seller need Square Appointments Plus or Premium. On the free plan they fail with a 403.

That sits oddly next to the headline on Square's pricing page, which says $0. Both are true. This article is about the distance between them, and about whether an alternative is worth the trouble of leaving.

Square Free is free if Square already takes your cards

I'll concede the strong point first. On Square's own pricing page, as of this month, Square Free is $0 per location with unlimited staff calendars, an online booking site and appointment reminders. Plus is $49 per month per location. Premium is $149.

If you already have a Square reader on the counter, the processing you pay for in person is the processing you'd pay anyway, so the software really is free. I'd leave you there.

Where the free plan stops

Square's page puts three things under Plus that people tend to assume come with the booking page: a cancellation policy with no-show fees, a waitlist, and multi-staff booking. The Free column lists unlimited staff calendars, which sounds like the same thing as multi-staff booking and might be. The page doesn't say how a customer chooses between two stylists on Free, and I didn't open an account to test it. Treat that one as unchecked.

The no-show line is clearer. If you want to charge a customer who doesn't turn up, the page puts that on a $49-per-location plan.

The API line

This is the part I'd have missed from the pricing page alone.

Square's Bookings API can search availability, create, update and cancel bookings. Seller-level write calls need a paid Appointments subscription, Plus or Premium, and without one they return 403. Buyer-level calls work on the free plan, but a buyer-level app can only touch bookings it created, can't create double bookings or off-hours reservations, and team members have to be marked "bookable" by hand in the Square dashboard. The docs say that last step can't be automated through the API.

If you're building one booking site for one barbershop, that's an inconvenience. If you're an agency building the same site for twelve shops, each shop is a separate seller account and each one needs the paid plan before your integration can write. That's $588 a year per client in subscription before anyone takes a payment, billed to people who were told it was free.

I wrote about what a booking API has to cover in the booking API guide, and about choosing between building and buying in booking systems for developers. For this comparison, one fact matters: Opencals puts the REST API, TypeScript SDK and webhooks on every plan, including the free development store. The developers page has the detail.

Per location, and then per location again

Square prices each tier per location. Two shops on Plus is $98 a month. Three on Premium is $447.

I put the software fees side by side below, with the rate Square or Stripe takes on top. The Opencals fixed plan figure is the $14.98 base, which covers 300 bookings; add-ons are extra and I price them in the next section.

The Opencals card rate is Stripe's standard US online rate, 2.9% + 30¢ on domestic cards; in other countries Stripe's rate differs, so check yours. Square's rates come from its pricing page, as of this month.

What the processing gap is actually worth

Square's tiers lower the card rate as you climb, and it's tempting to read that as the reason to pay. Run the numbers and it mostly isn't.

In person, Free is 2.6% + 15¢ and Plus is 2.5% + 15¢. That 0.1 point difference pays back $49 only at $49,000 of in-person sales a month. Online, Free is 3.3% + 30¢ against 2.9% + 30¢ on Plus, a 0.4 point gap, and that one covers the $49 at $12,250 of online sales a month. Going from Plus to Premium saves another 0.1 point in person, so you'd need $100,000 a month through the reader to justify the extra $100.

So a shop that takes most of its money online, and does under about $12,000 a month, loses nothing by staying on Free except the features. A shop that sells mostly at the counter will never earn Plus back through the rate. The reasons to upgrade are the no-show fees and the API, and those should be priced as features.

One line that section leaves out is what Opencals adds to a Stripe payment, which is nothing. Opencals adds no fee on Stripe payments. Each merchant connects their own Stripe account, the charge is made on that account, and our payment code sets no application fee, so Stripe's own rate (2.9% + 30¢ on domestic online cards in the US) is the whole processing cost. Take $50,000 of online card sales across 300 bookings in a month, an average of about $167. Stripe's rate comes to $1,540. Square Free's 3.3% + 30¢ comes to $1,740, and Plus or Premium's 2.9% + 30¢ comes to the same $1,540. So against Plus the processing is a tie and the argument is the $49; against Free, the same sales cost $200 a month more to process.

Pricing Opencals against that, including where it loses

Opencals has two plans. Elastic is $0.99 per completed appointment with no monthly fee and every feature included. The fixed plan is $14.98 a month with 300 bookings, then $0.20 each. Add-ons are priced separately: customer self-service $14.99, customisation $9.98, flexible duration $9.98, group appointments $7.49, white label $4.99. Our pricing page shows a typical salon at $39.95 a month, which is the base plus self-service plus customisation.

Here is the bad news for Elastic. At $0.99 a booking, it passes Square Plus's $49 at 50 bookings a month. At 120 bookings it's $118.80, more than double. If you're choosing Opencals for the pay-as-you-go plan and you're busy, you're overpaying, and the pricing page says so too: past about 16 bookings a month a fixed plan costs less than Elastic. The fixed plan at 120 bookings, with the typical salon add-ons, is $39.95, and that covers every location and every staff member.

That fixed figure sits under Square Plus at one location and far under it at three. It also doesn't include card processing, which goes to Stripe at the rates above. If Square already gives you a free reader and a good in-person rate, my $39.95 is a worse deal for you than it looks, because it comes on top of a processor you'd still want for the counter.

When I'd stay on Square, and when I wouldn't

Stay if you have a reader at the till, one location, and a shop whose website is whatever Square generates. Moving would cost you in-person payments, which Opencals doesn't do at all; it takes payments online through Stripe or Shopify Payments and doesn't ship hardware.

Look elsewhere in three cases. You run more than one location. You're an agency or freelancer who needs to write bookings from your own code. Or you sell through Shopify and want the appointment inside the same admin; best Shopify appointment apps covers that route.

If your question is the narrower "which scheduler is cheapest for my team size", I covered Acuity, Setmore, Jane and Square side by side in the pricing-per-booking comparison, and it's a better starting point than this page. Setmore is still the one I'd price first for a team under four. I'd skip Acuity here: its tiers count calendars, not staff, and the jump past six calendars is steep.

What I couldn't check

I haven't migrated a live Square account to Opencals, so I can't tell you what exports cleanly. Customers, services and past appointments are the three things to ask about before you commit, and Square's export options are worth reading on its own help pages.

I also haven't tested Square's booking page for customer-side features such as rescheduling. And Opencals isn't the right place for anything that depends on a card terminal. If that's your business, the honest answer is the one in the first section, and the real question left is whether $49 per location buys you anything you couldn't do on Free. Count your no-shows for a month and you'll know.