Fresha vs Allvio for Australian Salons: Commission, Coverage and Control

Verdict first, as always in this library: Fresha is a genuinely polished booking platform with the largest consumer marketplace in beauty, and if your chairs are empty and you need strangers to find you, that marketplace is a real asset that Allvio does not have and will not pretend to. The costs of that asset are a 20 percent commission on the new clients it brings, processing fees on every card payment, and a client relationship that lives partly on a marketplace that keeps showing your clients other salons. Allvio is the opposite trade: no marketplace, no commissions, and the whole business, bookings, POS, payroll and finance, on one flat bill. Which trade is right depends almost entirely on one question: are you still buying new clients, or are you running on rebookings? 

Everything below is the working behind that verdict, with published prices, worked examples and a coverage table you can check line by line. Prices are as at mid September 2026 and both vendors change theirs, so treat the linked pricing pages as the final word on any given day. 

What Fresha costs in Australia 

Fresha's pricing has three layers, and the sticker only shows the first. 

1. The subscription. Fresha moved off its famous free model: current published pricing starts at about 19.95 US dollars a month for a solo operator, with team plans priced per bookable team member at roughly 15 US dollars each. Note the currency: billing is in US dollars, so the Australian cost moves with the exchange rate. 

2. The marketplace new-client fee. When a brand-new client finds you through the Fresha marketplace and books, Fresha charges a one-time commission of 20 percent of that first booking, with a minimum of 6 dollars, per Fresha's own help documentation. Existing clients you import before listing are exempt, which makes the import step genuinely important. 

3. Payment processing. Card payments processed through the platform carry a fee of roughly 2.19 percent plus 20 cents per transaction on published rates, applying to every card payment, not just marketplace bookings. 

Put those layers on a real salon. Take a four-chair salon doing 400 appointments a month at an 80 dollar average, with 15 of those being brand-new marketplace clients: 

None of those lines is hidden or unfair; they are all published. But almost no salon owner has ever added them up as one number, and independent Australian analyses that have run similar sums land in the same territory, several hundred to over a thousand dollars a month once volume is realistic. The free-software era trained the industry to read the subscription line and stop; the business model lives in the other two lines. 

What Allvio costs 

One number, deliberately: Allvio is 399 dollars a month flat, currently 49 dollars a month for the first six months, billed in Australian dollars, with a 30-day free trial that needs no card. That price is not for a booking tool; it includes the salon booking system, POS, client CRM, rosters, payroll and finance as one system. There is no commission on any booking from any source, and no percentage of your sales beyond standard card processing on payments. On the salon above, the comparison is roughly 1,100 dollars of layered fees against one flat bill, and the gap widens with every appointment you add, because percentages grow and flat prices do not. 

The marketplace question: who owns the client 

Now the part that matters more than any monthly total, because it compounds for years. Fresha's marketplace works like every marketplace: it aggregates demand, and it keeps that demand circulating. Independent Australian reviews of the platform make the dynamic plain: a client who found you on the marketplace remains a marketplace user, and the marketplace continues to show them nearby salons after their visit. That is not a flaw in Fresha; it is what marketplaces are. You are renting distribution, and the landlord's incentive is browsing, not loyalty. 

This creates the strategic math that decides the whole comparison. A new client costs you 20 percent of their first booking. Whether that was a brilliant purchase or an expensive one depends on what happens next: if she rebooks with you directly for two years, the 16 dollars was the best marketing you ever bought. If the marketplace nudges her somewhere new in March, you paid to introduce her to your competitors. The salons that win on marketplaces treat them the way smart venues treat Uber Eats: a discovery channel to be milked and graduated from, client by client, into a direct relationship they own. 

On Allvio, the client list is simply yours: every booking, from your website, Instagram, Google profile or walk-in, builds a client record in your own CRM, exportable any time, marketed to on your terms. Allvio brings no marketplace demand, which is the honest cost of that ownership, and why the verdict below splits the way it does. 

Coverage, line by line 

Fees aside, what does each platform actually run? The honest table: 

The pattern is the one this whole library keeps finding: the specialist is deep inside its lane and stops at the lane's edge. Fresha runs the front of the salon beautifully. The back of the salon, award-correct wages for your team, Single Touch Payroll, payday super, the BAS quarter, is a second and third subscription on Fresha and a built-in on Allvio. If you have ever run a Saturday's timesheets from a booking app into a payroll app by hand, you already know which line of that table costs you the most Sunday evenings. Our weekend penalty rates breakdown shows the award maths that has to survive that handover; salons sit under different awards than venues, but the structural point is identical. 

Run your own salon's numbers 

Subscription plus commissions plus processing, added up for your real volumes, next to one flat bill with payroll included. Ten minutes, one honest answer. 

Start your free 30-day trial   |   See salon and barber software 

The rebooking economics that decide it 

If you want a single metric to settle this comparison for your own salon, it is your rebooking rate: the share of clients whose next appointment is booked before they leave the chair, or soon after. A high-rebooking salon is a subscription business wearing scissors; its client list is the asset, its marketing is retention, and every marketplace dollar it spends is buying introductions it no longer needs. A low-rebooking salon is refilling the top of the funnel every month, and for that salon a marketplace genuinely earns its 20 percent. 

Run the numbers on the two ends. The salon above at a 75 percent rebooking rate might take five genuinely new marketplace clients a month: 80 dollars in commissions, a rounding error, and the platform choice becomes purely about software and fees, where the flat bill wins. The same salon at 40 percent rebooking needs 25 new faces a month: 400 dollars in commissions that are arguably the best marketing it buys, and cancelling the marketplace to save fees would be amputating the growth engine. Know your rate before you choose your platform; it is the one number that turns this whole article from opinion into arithmetic. 

Where Fresha is the right choice 

• New salons and chairs to fill. If you are opening cold, the marketplace is real customer acquisition, and 20 percent of a first booking is a defensible acquisition cost while you build a book. 

• Solo operators optimising for the lowest fixed cost, who prefer a small USD subscription plus percentages over any flat fee. 

• Businesses whose whole workflow lives happily inside booking, retail and marketing, with payroll handled elsewhere and no appetite to change it. 

Where Allvio is the right choice 

• Established salons running on rebookings, where marketplace commissions buy little and the client list is the asset worth owning outright. 

• Teams. The moment you employ staff, rosters, award-correct payroll and super stop being optional, and running them inside the same system as the bookings and the till is the difference between a Sunday evening and a click. 

• Fee fatigue. If the layered percentages have started to feel like a silent business partner, a flat AUD bill is the structural fix, not another discount code. 

Switching without drama 

4. Export your client list, appointment history and product list from Fresha; the data is yours to take. 

5. Import into Allvio during onboarding; the team does this with you, clients, notes and future appointments included. 

6. Swap the booking links on your website, Instagram and Google profile to your own booking page. 

7. Tell your clients once, warmly: same chairs, new booking link. Regulars follow people, not platforms. 

8. If the marketplace was bringing you real volume, keep measuring it honestly for a season before you burn the boat; the right answer for some salons is a transition, not a cliff. 

FAQs 

Does Fresha charge commission in Australia? 

Yes, in one specific case: when a brand-new client discovers your salon through the Fresha marketplace, a one-time fee of 20 percent of that first booking applies, with a 6 dollar minimum, per Fresha's published documentation. Repeat bookings and clients you imported as existing clients are not commissioned. Separately, card payments processed through the platform carry processing fees of roughly 2.19 percent plus 20 cents, and the subscription is billed in US dollars. 

What does Fresha not cover for salons? 

Fresha runs bookings, the salon POS, retail, stock and marketing well. It does not run award-interpreted payroll, Single Touch Payroll reporting or payday super, so salons with employees typically pair it with separate payroll software and reconcile between the two. Full finance and BAS-ready reporting also sit outside the platform. 

Can Allvio replace Fresha and my payroll app together? 

For most salons, yes. Allvio runs the bookings, client records, POS, rosters, award-interpreted payroll and finance as one system for one flat monthly price in AUD, with no marketplace commissions. What Allvio does not replace is Fresha's consumer marketplace, so salons that rely on marketplace discovery for a meaningful share of new clients should weigh that channel honestly before switching.