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What are no-shows really costing you?
Most appointment pros underestimate it, because the loss arrives one empty hour at a time. Put in your own numbers and it will show you the year, then what a deposit or a card on file would have got back, with our own fee subtracted rather than left out.
Counted with no-shows, because to a calendar they are the same thing: an hour you held and cannot refill.
Missed appointments cost you
$14,976
a year, $1,248 a month, $288 a week
If every fee were charged
Arithmetic on the numbers you set, not a measurement and not a forecast. It shows the ceiling, what you would recover if every single fee were charged.
Two recovered no-shows a month more than cover Pro at this price point. The rest is yours.
Try Pro free for 7 daysStarter is free forever and will run your booking page and reminders. It just won’t collect any of the above. Compare the two plans.
The bigger number is the one we left out
Everything above assumes the same people miss the same appointments and you simply charge them for it. That is the small half of the effect. The larger half is that when a client has money on the line, or has agreed in writing to a fee, they turn up, or they tell you at 6am instead of going quiet.
Nobody publishes a reliable no-show rate for solo practitioners, so use your own number above rather than an industry average. What is well established is the direction: appointments with a deposit or a card attached are missed far less often than free ones, and reminders help further. In the largest randomised trial of appointment reminders, a second reminder cut missed appointments by another 7% to 11%. What a deposit settles, though, is not how many people turn up. It is who pays for the ones who do not.
We have deliberately not modelled it. We would have to guess at how much your own rate would fall, and a made-up multiplier in a calculator is worse than an honest ceiling. Drag your no-show rate down a few points by hand if you want to see the shape of it.
The fee is what turns a missed hour into their cost instead of yours. The seven things that reduce no-shows →
Where the money shows up
A recovered fee you can see, or it may as well not have happened.
The figures above are hypothetical. In the app they are a screen: collected is money in your Stripe account, held is a card saved with nothing taken, and recovered is what came back from appointments that never happened. Three different facts, three different words.
Money goes straight to your own Stripe account. There is no commission on your appointment prices. The 2% capped at $10 applies only to deposits and no-show or late-cancel fees, and packages and gift cards are 0%.
$100
Owed to you
A client still owes this. Nothing has arrived.
$125
On cards, nothing taken
Nothing charged. Used only if someone misses.
$1,565
In your Stripe account
Money that has actually arrived.
$830
Over six months
11% of revenue, from appointments nobody attended.
FAQ
How this calculator works
How is the cost worked out?
Appointments a week, multiplied by your combined no-show and late-cancel rate, multiplied by your average price. That gives a weekly figure, which is shown per month at 4.333 weeks and per year at 52. Nothing is hidden and nothing is weighted.
Why does the recovered figure not match the cost?
Because what you recover depends on what you hold. A deposit of half the price recovers half of each miss; a card on file for the full fee recovers all of it; holding nothing recovers nothing. The calculator shows the ceiling if every fee were charged, not a forecast.
Does it include what Sessurely charges?
Yes. Our fee is 2% capped at $10, applied per deposit or no-show fee, and it is subtracted in the ledger before the net figure. The Pro subscription is shown against the annual net too, at $599.99 a year.
Are these numbers a prediction?
No. They are arithmetic on the numbers you type in. The larger real effect of taking a deposit is that fewer people miss at all, and that is deliberately not in this figure because we cannot measure it for your business.
Keep reading
More on no-show protection
How no-show fees work → How to stop no-shows → Cancellation policy template → Sessurely vs. Calendly →
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