Deposits on Fresha, Booksy, Square and Vagaro: what each actually supports

The comparison at a glance

The pattern is hard to miss: deposits are never just a setting. They're a setting inside each platform's payments business. That's not sinister; someone has to move the money. But it explains why so many owners have a booking system with deposit support and still don't take deposits.

Fresha

Fresha's payment policies offer two mechanisms. A deposit takes part of the service cost upfront (a percentage or a fixed amount), with a point you choose where it becomes non-refundable and the balance collected at checkout. Card capture moves no money but stores the client's card so a fee can be charged later. Policies can apply by client, service, appointment, or booking value, which is genuinely flexible. The prerequisite: you need Fresha Payments enabled, meaning payment processing through Fresha, before any of it is available.

The friction shows up on the day someone doesn't come. You have to mark the no-show yourself, and Fresha only allows it from the appointment's start time until the end of that same day; miss the window and the fee can't be charged. Saved-card charges can also simply decline, and a charged no-show fee can't be reversed. If you're already on Fresha for reconciling payouts, deposits also show up as their own line in your money — the payout decomposer keeps them separate for exactly that reason.

Booksy

Booksy files deposits under "no-show protection": clients booking online pay part or all of the price upfront, from 1% to 100% per service with a $5 or £5 minimum, and the prepaid amount comes off the total at checkout. On a no-show or late cancellation, you keep what was paid. Loyal clients can be exempted after a number of visits, which is a nice touch for regulars who'd bristle at being asked.

The prerequisite is the same shape as Fresha's: Booksy Mobile Payments has to be on. The quirk to know before configuring anything is that a service can carry a deposit or a cancellation fee, never both. You're choosing a strategy per service, not layering protections. One flag: Booksy doesn't publicly state which plans or countries get the deposit feature, so check it exists on your account before writing it into your policy.

Square Appointments

Square is the outlier: there is no partial deposit. Its online booking offers three policies — no requirement, full prepayment for fixed-price services, or a card hold with a no-show fee charged on violation (flat per appointment, flat per service, or a percentage). Prepaid appointments can't be cancelled by the client online at all; you handle changes and refunds yourself.

Both paid policies are gated to the Plus and Premium plans, so on free Square Appointments the answer is simply no. Details worth knowing: the fee can be charged up to 14 days after the appointment (more forgiving than Fresha's same-day window), a held card covers a single appointment only and isn't saved for future bookings, and per-service fees require a fee amount configured on every service in your catalogue.

Vagaro

Vagaro supports percentage or fixed deposits, required at online booking per service or collected manually from the calendar, plus a separate automatic cancellation/no-show fee feature and card-on-file-to-book. Its own guidance for hair suggests deposits of around 50% or a flat $50, the highest of any platform's suggestion — a data point about Vagaro's advice, not about what clients accept.

The lock-in is stated with unusual directness in Vagaro's docs: it only accepts and processes deposits and fees through Vagaro Merchant Services. No third-party processor, full stop. Exact plan requirements aren't published, so confirm the feature on your own account before planning around it.

What this means for your policy

If you're already processing payments through your booking platform, the deposit feature is probably a settings page away, and the friction is operational: manual marking windows, declined saved cards, per-service configuration. If you're not (you like your current card machine, or you're on Square's free tier), then "just turn on deposits" quietly means "move your payment processing", which is a much bigger decision than the feature suggests.

Either way, the deposit works only as well as the policy wrapped around it. Write that first: a salon cancellation policy clients accept, with a template. And to size what's at stake before you change anything, run your own no-show numbers. The same page shows what collecting a deposit through a WhatsApp conversation looks like, whatever booking system the appointment lives in.

Platforms move their features and pricing around, so treat this page as a snapshot of their docs from July 2026 and check the linked help pages before you commit.