The number Treatwell will not show you on a pitch deck
Treatwell's sales team pitches the platform as "just £2.50 per booking on Connect Lite". That sentence is technically true, and structurally misleading. The £2.50 only applies to bookings you would have got anyway (retained customers re-booking). The marketplace bookings, the ones Treatwell actually sells you the platform for, are billed at a quietly different rate that compounds over time.
The calculator above models the full picture: Connect Lite booking fee + marketplace commission + Adyen card processing + the new-customer attribution that follows the client for 18 months on most Treatwell contracts.
Fresha is "free". Until it is not.
Fresha's £0 subscription is real. Their 20% new-client marketplace fee is also real and bites hardest on aesthetics, where the average new-client ticket is £200-400. Capped at the first £350 of the booking value, so on a £600 PRP treatment Fresha takes £70 of the first £350 and 0% of the remainder. That is still £70 they took for "sending you" a customer who probably searched for "PRP near me" on Google.
When direct booking through NuvenarHub wins
- You already have an audience. 500+ Instagram followers, 200+ WhatsApp contacts, or a steady walk-in rate. NuvenarHub turns those into a booking pipeline you fully own.
- Your average ticket is £100+. The Treatwell/Fresha commissions hit harder on higher ticket sizes. Direct booking break-even comes faster.
- You run repeat treatments. If your clinic relies on 6-week PRP sequences, 3-month botox refills, or 4-week colour appointments, those repeat bookings should not be paying marketplace commission every single time.
When the marketplace is still worth it
- You are brand-new. Treatwell and Fresha buying paid search traffic on your behalf is a legitimate customer acquisition cost in year one.
- You are in a saturated category. If you compete with 50 other gel manicure salons within 5 minutes, marketplace discovery probably accounts for a real share of new clients.
- You do not yet have WhatsApp + ads infrastructure. Setting up direct booking is meaningfully more engineering than ticking a Treatwell signup. The calculator is honest about this.