Turbo Link vs Booksy for barbers

Turbo Link is one flat monthly price with no per-seat charge and no commission on new clients. Booksy is a lower headline price with an add-on fee for every extra team member and a marketplace that takes a cut when it sends a first-time client your way. Which one costs less depends almost entirely on how many chairs you run and whether you want Booksy’s marketplace traffic.

Pricing side by side

	Turbo Link	Booksy
Base plan	$29 a month, billed annually (solo)	$29.99 a month plus tax
Team pricing	$89 a month, up to 9 chairs, no per-seat fee	$29.99 base plus $20 a month per added team member
Card processing	2.9% + 15 cents	2.69% + 30 cents (keyed/mobile), 2.49% + 10 cents (card reader), 2.49% + 20 cents (Tap to Pay)
New client marketplace fee	None, no marketplace	Boost is free to activate, then a one-time 30% commission on a Boost client’s first visit
Website	Included, your own domain	Not the focus of the product, booking page instead
Free tier	None, but $349 Done For You build option	14-day free trial, no credit card

Booksy’s numbers above are read from biz.booksy.com/en-us/pricing on September 2, 2026.

Where the real cost difference shows up

For a solo barber, Booksy and Turbo Link land close together: $29.99 versus $29 a month. The gap opens once a shop adds chairs. Booksy charges $20 a month for every team member past the base plan. A five-chair shop on Booksy is paying roughly $29.99 plus four times $20, which is around $110 a month before card processing. The same shop on Turbo Link’s Team plan is $89 a month flat, covering up to nine chairs, with room to add four more chairs before the price changes again.

Card processing rates run in Turbo Link’s favor for most transaction types too, though the difference is small on a per-swipe basis and adds up mainly on high card volume.

Boost: free to try, expensive per client

Booksy’s Boost feature is worth being clear about, because it is often described as free. Turning it on costs nothing. What it actually costs is 30 percent of the total ticket the first time a client who found the shop through Boost comes in. On a $60 cut and beard trim, that is $18 to Booksy for that one visit. Every visit after that is normal Booksy processing with no extra cut. For a shop trying to fill new chairs fast, that can be worth it. For a shop that is already busy from walk-ins and referrals, it is a cost with no upside.

Turbo Link has no equivalent feature and no marketplace, so there is nothing to opt into and nothing to pay a commission on. New clients come from your own site, your booking link, social, and search, and none of that carries a per-client fee beyond the standard card processing rate.

What Booksy does that Turbo Link does not

Being fair to Booksy: it runs an actual consumer-facing marketplace app where people search for a barber near them and book without ever finding the shop’s own site first. That reach is real and it is the main reason a lot of shops keep a Booksy listing even after moving their day-to-day booking somewhere else. Booksy also has years of marketplace SEO behind it, so a new shop profile can show up in local search results faster than a brand-new website would on its own. And its gift card and marketing tools are mature, built specifically around the marketplace model.

What Turbo Link does that Booksy does not

Turbo Link gives a shop a website on its own domain instead of a booking page hosted on someone else’s platform. That means the shop owns the domain, controls the design, and the site works for the shop’s brand even if the owner later stops paying for a booking tool entirely, since the site and the booking system are the same subscription rather than two separate products.

Turbo Link’s walk-in queue with live wait estimates is built specifically for how a barbershop actually runs a day, mixing walk-ins and booked appointments in one queue instead of treating them as separate systems. Booth rent tracking per barber, cut notes with fade and guard details, and chair utilization metrics are also part of the base subscription with no per-seat fee, so a growing shop is not paying more every time it adds a chair.

The honest way to decide

If most new business already comes from the shop’s own following, referrals, and a Google listing, and the shop wants control over its website and predictable pricing as it adds chairs, Turbo Link is the better fit. If a shop is opening cold in a new area and needs marketplace foot traffic to fill the book in the first few months, Booksy’s reach is worth the price of admission, including the Boost commission on those first-time clients.

Some shops run both: a Turbo Link site and booking system for the shop’s own brand and regulars, with a Booksy listing kept active for the marketplace surface. That is a real option if the extra monthly cost pencils out against the new clients it brings in.

See Turbo Link for barbers, the pricing overview, and how a barbershop website is priced.