A custom booking system built around how you actually work

Who needs a booking system of their own

If you hand out appointments or class spots, you know the friction. The schedule sits on your website as a PDF and is out of date after the first change. Bookings arrive by chat message, email and phone and end up in a paper diary or a spreadsheet. Cancellations reach you the evening before, sometimes not at all. Spots stay empty even though other people would have come, and you spend more time on admin than on the work you are actually good at.

A custom booking system, instead of squeezing yourself into an off-the-shelf tool, makes sense when your process has its own rules: classes with a fixed number of participants, one-to-one sessions with preparation time, subscriptions with a monthly allowance, packs with an expiry date, or a cancellation window that you set yourself. Typical businesses:

• Yoga, pilates and fitness studios with a class schedule, waitlist and subscriptions
• Personal trainers with one-to-one sessions and ten-session packs
• Practices for physiotherapy, massage or nutrition advice with appointments and reminders
• Salons for hair, beauty or nails with services of different lengths
• Course providers such as driving schools, language schools, tutoring or workshops with recurring dates

What the booking system does

You decide the scope. The building blocks below are part of most booking systems. You can leave any of them out, call them something else or add your own rules.

How Melta builds and runs your custom booking system

1. Describe - You explain in plain language what gets booked, which rules apply and how people pay. No technical background needed.
2. Read the concept - Melta turns it into a concept in plain language: pages, flows, payment model. You can refine it as often as you like until it fits.
3. The fixed credit price for the build includes the complete first build.
4. Let it build - Melta builds the product. A full build can take up to about a day.
5. Check the preview - You get a preview with test accounts and seeded demo data. You book, cancel and read the emails your customers would receive.
6. Go live - You decide when the booking system goes online. Preview and live are separate environments.

After that, every change is a chat message: a new cancellation window, an extra class type, a field in the sign-up form. You describe it, the change lands in the preview first, and you release it.

Operation included

Melta operates the product for you. That covers hosting, payments (one-time, subscriptions, checkout), transactional email such as booking confirmations and reminders, your own domain (buy one through Melta or connect an existing one), the legal pages for imprint, privacy and terms generated from your operator data, a support inbox with automatic categorisation, cookieless first-party analytics and error monitoring. The legal pages are general information and not legal advice.

You own what runs. The booking system carries your name, runs on your domain, and you decide what goes online and when.

Example product: SOMA Yoga Zürich

SOMA Yoga Zürich is an example product for a yoga studio: a public class schedule with the styles on offer, sign-up with a customer account and booking of classes straight from the schedule. It shows what a custom booking system looks like when it comes from a description in plain language rather than from a template, and how schedule, accounts and booking work together in one product. See the example product SOMA Yoga Zürich.

What it costs

A concept uses only a few credits; afterwards your product runs on a plan per organisation with credits every month. All numbers and how the price is made up are on the pricing page.

Common questions about a custom booking system