Why we’re not a marketplace.
Most booking apps promise to bring you clients. Then they take a cut of every one, keep the reviews you earn, and quietly own the relationship. We made the opposite trade — and here’s the honest case for it.
A marketplace rents you clients. We help you own them.
A marketplace doesn’t sell you clients — it leases them, and keeps the lease in its own name. You pay every time that client books, the reviews you earn stay on their platform, and if you ever leave, the relationship doesn’t come with you. MassageHub is built the other way round: every tool here builds something you keep. The question that matters isn’t “who sends me a client this month” — it’s “after three years, who owns the practice I built?”
The first booking is the expensive one — and the least loyal.
Marketplaces charge on new clients. Fresha takes 20% (minimum £4) on each one; Treatwell takes 35% on the first booking; Urban takes 30–40% of everything. And because the platform only earns when someone tries a new business, it’s structurally rewarded for sending you one-off, voucher-driven clients and then moving them along again. For some therapists the volume is real; for others it never quite arrives. But the pattern is the same either way: you’re renting attention, not building loyalty.
There’s a subtler cost too. While you’re on a marketplace, it decides how and where your brand appears — and it’ll happily bill you for a “new” client who actually found you through your own Google ranking or scanned your card. See the full sum on the comparison.
What you build with MassageHub instead.
Not a slice of a shared directory — a set of assets that belong to you and travel with you.
A profile that ranks as yours
Your public page carries proper search markup and sits in our sitemap, so Google indexes it as your business — not ours. Therapists already turn up in their own Search Console for their own name and area.
Links that point outward
Your page links straight to your own website, Instagram, email and phone. We are a launchpad to your properties, not a cage around them — the opposite of a platform that buries your contact details.
Reviews that stay yours
We help you gather reviews on your own Google Business Profile and show them off. The social proof builds where it actually grows your discoverability — and it is still there if you ever leave.
A referral engine
Your clients refer new clients with a code. The reward and the relationship are both yours — no per-introduction fee skimmed off the top.
An export button that works
Your full client list, notes and appointment history, downloadable any time. Leaving is a button, not a battle.
Tools to grow and keep a practice
Gift cards, loyalty milestones, treatment packages and memberships — all pointed at the same thing: a practice that grows and stays yours.
The honest part.
We won’t pretend a marketplace never works — some therapists do get real bookings from one, and the better ones let you export your contact list. What they can’t give back are your reviews, your brand, and a client who books you rather than whoever’s cheapest this week.
And we’ll be straight about our side too: if you’re brand new with no clients at all, we won’t drop a stranger into your diary on day one. What we’ll do is hand you every tool to build that diary yourself — and never take a slice of it once you have.
Your clients, your brand, your business.
It’s all written down — five plain lines, no small print — in the Therapist Promise. Start free, keep everything you earn, and leave whenever you like.
Get started freeSee also: compare to other platforms · who builds MassageHub