You do not need a booking service and a website

Ask a small restaurant, a studio or a maker what they pay for software and you usually get a list. A website. A booking tool. A shop. Something that counts visitors. Four bills, four logins, and four places where a customer record might be.

Each one is defensible on its own. Together they are a job nobody wanted.

The cost is not the subscription

It is the seams. The booking tool does not know about the order. The shop does not know about the enquiry. The website is a brochure in front of three systems that do not speak, and every one of them has its own idea of who your customer is.

That is also why so many small sites quietly stop being accurate. Keeping four things in step is work, and the website is the one nobody is paid to maintain.

What we think is the right shape

One site, with the business end in it. The form, the calendar, the shelf and the visitor numbers are the same system, so a record is a record and there is one place to look.

That is not the right answer for everybody. If you already run a specialist booking platform that does something ours does not, keep it. But if you are assembling four subscriptions because that is what everyone does, it is worth checking whether you have to.

An account, a starting point, and a form that sends you a real email. Nothing is public until you say so.