Booksy alternative for walk-in shops

How Booksy's pricing model works

Booksy is $29.99 a month plus tax, plus $20 a month for each additional staff member, according to its pricing page in October 2026. A salon with four stylists pays $89.99 a month before tax. Appointment confirmations and reminders are included, along with 2,000 marketing texts a month.

New clients can also find you through the Booksy marketplace. That part, called Boost, is optional: it has no monthly fee, but Booksy takes a one-time 30% of a Boost client’s first visit, up to $100. For a stylist who relies on Booksy to find new clients, that can be a fair trade. For an established salon whose clients come back on their own or walk in, it matters less.

Booksy is built around booked appointments. If walk-ins are a real share of your week, even two or three a day, you want a line customers can join from their phone, a live wait they can trust, and a TV that shows who is up next. That is what NextUp is built for.

Running a waitlist alongside your booked appointments

Many hair salons run a hybrid model: some clients book ahead, and some walk in on the day. The scheduling challenge is fitting walk-ins around the booked appointments without double-booking stylists or making walk-in clients wait without any information about how long it will actually be.

NextUp handles the walk-in side of this. When a stylist finishes a booked appointment and has a gap, or has availability between appointments, walk-in clients are already queued and ready to be called. The staff screen shows who is waiting and what service they need, so the stylist can call the next person and fill the gap without interrupting anyone or checking a paper list. The TV in the waiting area shows who is up next — walk-ins see their name move up the list in real time.

Flat pricing, regardless of visit volume

NextUp charges $29 per month for the first location and $19 for each additional one, with no per-seat fees, no per-visit fee and no new-client fee. A salon with eight stylists pays the same as a salon with two, and a salon doing 20 walk-ins a day pays the same as one doing 5. As your walk-in volume grows — which it tends to do as customers learn they can check in remotely and stop leaving because the wait looked long — your monthly cost does not change.

Included in every plan: the walk-in queue, staff screen, TV display mode, door kiosk mode, QR code and shareable link, service and stylist selection at check-in, loyalty stamp program, booth rent and suite rental collection, online tips paid straight to each stylist's bank, and 1,000 SMS notifications per month per location. Overages are $0.05 per text. Most single-location salons stay within the included allowance.

If you want to keep Booksy for appointments

You do not have to choose one or the other. Some salons use Booksy — or any appointment tool — for booked clients and NextUp for walk-in queue management. The door QR code captures walk-in traffic independently of the booking flow. Booked clients arrive knowing their time; walk-in clients join the queue and get a text when their stylist is free. Both operate in parallel without interfering.

If you are evaluating whether to simplify to one tool, NextUp includes appointment booking in every plan. Clients can book ahead from a link you share, and booked visits appear in the staff queue alongside walk-ins. NextUp does not include a card reader or point-of-sale, so keep taking in-person payments the way you do now. For salons that do not need Booksy's marketplace, that covers the rest at $29 a month. Start a 14-day free trial at nextupwalkin.com.