Why We Stopped Charging Everyone 4.9%

The problem with one percentage

A percentage prices the booking. It does not price the work.

Take two of our customers. One runs paddleboard rentals: about 800 bookings a year at roughly $120 each. The other runs fishing charters: about 10 trips a year at $10,000 each. Under a flat 4.9%, the charter operator paid $490 on a single booking. The paddleboard operator paid $5.88.

Now look at what each one actually costs us to run. The paddleboard operator sends 800 confirmation emails, 800 reminder texts, collects 800 digital waivers, runs 800 ID checks, and processes 800 separate card charges. The charter operator does ten of each.

The operator generating eighty times more load on our platform was paying a fraction of what the charter operator paid. That is not a pricing model. That is an accident of arithmetic, and the people it penalised noticed long before we fixed it.

We measured how bad it was

Before changing anything we priced every booking across our customer base at 4.9% and worked out the software cost per booking. It ranged from $5.82 to $101.59.

A 17.5x spread, for identical software, identical support, and identical uptime. The only variable was what our customers happened to rent.

The second problem was entirely ours. Where the flat rate clearly did not fit an operator's business, we adjusted it for them, one account at a time. That works right up until you look up and find you are running a collection of one-off arrangements instead of a rate card. If the number needs an exception that often, the number is wrong, and the honest fix is to publish pricing that fits the businesses we actually serve.

What we changed

Free stays free: $0 a month, every feature, 4.9% per booking, no contract. If that works for you, nothing about your account changes.

On top of that there are now three optional annual plans. They do exactly one thing: put a hard ceiling of $25 on what any single booking can cost you. The percentage stays at 4.9% on every plan.

That charter operator, ten trips a year at $10,000, went from paying $4,900 to paying $2,650. The $490 booking now costs $25.

The paddleboard operator stays on Free and pays nothing up front. And notice what the plan price is banded on: booking count, which is the thing that actually drives our cost. When that operator does grow into a plan, they are paying for the transaction volume they generate, while the cap stops booking value from inflating anyone's bill. Both halves of the problem, priced on what each one really costs.

Why a cap and not a discount

The obvious version of this change was to pair the cap with a lower percentage, and that is what we built first. Then we priced it against our own customers and did not like what we saw.

A lower rate is a discount on every booking, including the small ones the 4.9% was always fair on. It grows without limit as an operator grows, and it pays out to businesses the change was never meant to address: we found operators whose bookings average under $200, who would never once have touched a $25 ceiling, being shown thousands of dollars in projected savings for a product that would have done nothing for them. Selling someone a cap their bookings never reach is not a fairer price. It is just a discount with a story attached.

A cap cannot do that. It is bounded by the thing it replaces, so it can never save you more than the fee you would otherwise have paid, and it only ever pays out on the bookings that were overpriced in the first place. If your bookings are mostly under $510, a plan is worth nothing to you and our own calculator will say so.

Three decisions worth explaining

Bookings, not revenue

Plans are banded by how many bookings you take, never by how much money you make. What you earn is your business, not ours, and asking for it just to work out what software costs is intrusive. Booking count is a number you already know, and it is the one that actually reflects what running your account costs us.

The cap is per transaction, not per seat

A twenty-seat tour sold as twenty tickets is twenty payments, twenty confirmations and twenty messages. One whole-boat charter is one of each. Our costs are per transaction, so the ceiling is too. It means the model tracks what we actually spend rather than what we could get away with charging.

Card processing stays separate

Card processing is billed at your local rate on every plan, including Free, and is never folded into a plan price. Interchange genuinely differs by market. An Australian operator pays materially less than a North American one, and burying a single global figure in a plan would quietly overcharge them.

What happens if you grow

You move up a plan. Your rate never goes up.

If you pass your plan's booking ceiling we move you to the next one and charge the pro-rated difference for the days left in your term. You are not back-billed for the months you were over, and there is 10% of headroom first so a busy fortnight does not bounce you between plans. Growing is the outcome we want. Punishing it would be a strange way to run a business.

Most operators should stay on Free

This is the part we want to be direct about. A plan only ever saves you money on bookings above $510, because that is where 4.9% passes $25. If your bookings are smaller than that, a plan saves you nothing at all and buying one would be a mistake, however much volume you do.

So the number that matters is not your revenue. It is how much of your fee sits above the ceiling. A plan repays itself once that total clears its annual price: Core needs $2,400 of it, which is about 100 bookings a year at $1,000, or 33 at $2,000, or 6 at $10,000. An operator taking a thousand $150 rentals has more revenue than any of them and should still stay on Free.

The calculator on our pricing page takes your booking count and your average booking value and tells you which is cheaper, including when the answer is "do not pay us anything". Inside the app, the comparison runs against your own last twelve months of real bookings, one booking at a time, so it sees the large ones an average hides.

Nothing is being taken away

Every feature is on every plan, including Free. Unlimited bookings, locations, inventory and staff. Point of sale, card terminals, digital waivers, tours and charters, memberships, marketing, the full API, and AI chat, phone and agents. Plans change your price. They never change what you can do.

The only thing that scales with size is your monthly AI credit allowance, and that follows your revenue rather than your plan. A larger operator gets a larger allowance on Free too.

One thing does go the other way, and it is worth saying plainly because it is the only place a paid plan buys more than a rate. Paid plans get 50% off Vectra GPS, our tracking product, for as long as the plan is active. That is deliberate. The operators a plan makes sense for are the ones running real fleets, and a real fleet is exactly where tracking stops being optional.