You have one space. You’re paying for fifteen.

Every enquiry starts the same way. Someone emails asking if you’re free on the 14th. You open the calendar. You reply. They don’t reply for three days. You hold the date anyway. Then someone else asks about the 14th.

Then there’s the deposit — an e-transfer you have to remember to check for, and chase when it doesn’t arrive.

I ran The Yurt that way for a long time. Every booking was an email thread, a calendar check, a held date for someone who never replied, and a payment I had to chase. Rough count, moving it onto the site gave me back most of a working day every week. That’s my own estimate rather than a measured number — but the part I’m sure about is that I got my Saturday mornings back.

So you signed up for booking software. It works. It also costs around $99 a month whether you take four bookings or forty, it’s priced for a facility fifteen times your size, your booking page sits on their domain instead of yours, and the day you stop paying, your booking history goes with it.

The three-year arithmetic

At $99 a month, a booking subscription costs $1,188 a year — $3,564 over three years. It never stops, and it never becomes yours.

A Foundwork site with booking built in starts at $1,250 for the build, then a care plan from $29/month for hosting, security, backups and fixes. Over the same three years that’s about $2,294 — and it includes the entire website, not just the booking. Every booking page you publish builds your Google ranking instead of the platform’s, and your customer list stays yours.

What gets built

A booking flow on your own domain: availability, enquiry-to-confirmation, deposits through your own payment processor, automatic confirmation emails, and an admin view you actually understand. Your customer list and booking history stay yours. No per-space pricing — it costs the same whether you have one room or six.

The Yurt KW booking system — built into the site, live at theyurtkw.ca

One thing to be straight about

This gets built as part of your website, not bolted onto whatever you already have. Booking has to sit inside the site’s own structure to work properly — sharing its pages, its styling, its Google footprint. Retrofitting one onto an existing site someone else built is a different job with different risks, and it isn’t what I do.

So if your current site is working and you like it, this probably isn’t for you, and I’ll say so on the call. If your site is dated, or you’ve been meaning to replace it anyway, then you get the rebuild and the booking system together for less than three years of a booking subscription on its own.

The honest fit check

Sometimes the subscription is the right answer. If you run multiple locations, complex recurring bookings, waitlists, or sub-hour scheduling, dedicated platforms have years of edge cases built in that a custom build won’t match — and a double-booked wedding is not a problem worth saving $99 a month over. If that’s your situation we’ll say so before taking a fee. This is built for the single-space operator paying enterprise pricing for a room and a calendar.