Is SimplyBook.me actually free?
Disclosure: There are no affiliate links on this page. We have an application pending with SimplyBook.me's affiliate programme, which pays a recurring commission and would be the most lucrative arrangement available to this site. It has not been approved, and the most critical thing on this page is about the free plan they would be paying us to recommend. We are stating this so you can read the rest knowing which way our interest points.
The answer
Yes — 50 bookings a month, free forever. But you must press a renewal button every single month, or the account is deleted and the booking address is gone for good.
- 🚨Renew it by hand, monthly. Three missed months and SimplyBook.me deletes the account — and you cannot re-register the same login. Set a calendar reminder today.
- ✅Genuinely free: 50 bookings/month, booking website, widget, admin app, WordPress widget. No trial clock.
- ⚠️One custom feature only. The product is a base plus switch-on features. You get one switch.
- ❌You cannot take payment. Payments, deposits and tips start at Basic (€13.9/mo). Booking 51 costs you €13.90.
Jump to: The renewal trap What free includes The 51st booking Which one are you?
The renewal
From SimplyBook.me's help documentation for free accounts, three statements in sequence:
“Free plan should be manually renewed each month in Plans & Prices → Subscriptions by pressing ok under Free tariff.”
“Free accounts with expired subscription for more than 3 months are automatically deleted by the system.”
“If the free plan is not renewed and gets deleted, you will encounter a 404 error when trying to access the account. In such a case, it's not possible to regain access to the account or create a new account with the same company login.”
Source: SimplyBook.me Help — Important for Free accounts, checked 15 August 2026.
Read the third one again, because it is doing more work than it appears to. It is not saying you lose your data, though you do. It is saying you cannot have your name back. The company login is the thing your booking address is built from — the one on your business cards, in your Instagram bio, in the automated confirmation emails your clients have kept. If the account is deleted, that address is gone and you may not re-register it.
For a paid plan this would be unremarkable, because a paid plan renews itself by taking your money. The free plan has nothing to charge, so the renewal is a button you have to remember to press, forever, on a product whose entire appeal is that you can set it up and stop thinking about it.
If you use the free plan, do this now: put a recurring monthly reminder in your calendar that says renew SimplyBook, and give it a nine-month runway. It costs thirty seconds a month and it is the difference between a free tool and a deleted business address.
Three consecutive misses is the documented deletion threshold. A quarterly reminder is not enough margin. Make it monthly.
What $0 — or rather €0 — actually includes
A note on currency before the numbers. SimplyBook.me quoted us in euros. Vendors in this category frequently show different currencies and occasionally different figures depending on where you browse from, so the prices below are the ones we were served and are stated as euros for that reason. Check your own page before committing.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual, per month | Bookings/mo | Custom features | Providers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | €0 | €0 | 50 | 1 | 1 |
| Basic | €13.9 | €11.9 | 100 | 3 | 5 |
| Standard | €29.9 | €24.9 | 500 | 8 | 15 |
| Premium | €59.9 | €49.9 | 2,000 | unlimited | 30 |
Source: simplybook.me/en/pricing, checked 15 August 2026. An Enterprise tier with custom pricing sits above these.
The free tier gives you a booking website, a booking widget, the admin app and a WordPress widget. For a one-person business that is a complete front end: clients find a page, pick a slot, and you get told. Many competitors charge for exactly that.
The one that matters: one custom feature
SimplyBook.me is not built like most scheduling tools. There is a plain booking core, and then a large catalogue of "custom features" you switch on individually — intake forms, coupons, memberships, class packages, and so on. Your plan does not decide what the product can do. It decides how many of those switches you are allowed to flip.
On the free plan the answer is one.
That is a genuinely different kind of limit from a booking cap, and it is easy to misread as generous. One custom feature is enough to run a simple appointment book. It is not enough to run a simple appointment book and collect an intake form, or and sell a class pack. Each thing you want the tool to do beyond taking a booking consumes the only slot you have.
Note also which capability is absent entirely rather than rationed: taking payments. Payments, deposits and tips appear on Basic as an addition to what Free offers, which means the free plan is a booking system, not a booking-and-getting-paid system. If you want a deposit to hold the slot, that is a paid plan, and this is the same trade Square Appointments makes with its free tier.
The other free-plan limits
From the same help page, three more restrictions that do not appear on the pricing table:
| Limit | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Daily and monthly caps on system emails | Confirmations and reminders are emails. SimplyBook.me states the free plan has send limits but does not publish the numbers, so we cannot tell you where the ceiling is. |
| Email notification templates cannot be edited | Your clients receive SimplyBook.me's default wording. If tone of voice is part of how you present yourself, you do not control it on this plan. |
| Blank theme with redirect is unavailable | You cannot use the option that hides the SimplyBook.me booking page behind your own site. Paid plans only. |
| One user / provider | Correct for a business of one, and a hard wall the moment you take on an assistant. |
All four from Important for Free accounts.
The fifty-first booking
Fifty bookings a month is around two and a half a working day. A part-time practice fits inside it comfortably. A full diary does not, and the moment it does not, the pricing does something worth seeing laid out.
€0.Fifty-one bookings cost
€13.90, because there is no tier between Free and Basic.So the fifty-first booking, considered alone, costs
€13.90.
That is not a criticism — every tiered product does this — but it means the cost per booking is at its worst immediately after each upgrade and improves the further you push into the tier you are paying for. Drawn out, it looks like this:
| Where you are | Bookings | Plan needed | Cost per booking |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free, at the cap | 50 | €0 | €0 |
| One over the free cap | 51 | €13.90 | €0.273 |
| Basic, at the cap | 100 | €13.90 | €0.139 |
| One over Basic | 101 | €29.90 | €0.296 |
| Standard, at the cap | 500 | €29.90 | €0.060 |
| One over Standard | 501 | €59.90 | €0.120 |
| Premium, at the cap | 2,000 | €59.90 | €0.030 |
The expensive places to sit are 51 bookings and 101 bookings, where you have just bought a tier and are using a fraction of it. If you are hovering near a cap, the useful question is not "can I afford the next tier" but "am I close enough to the next cap that the tier will earn out". At 101 bookings you are paying €0.296 each; at 300 you are paying €0.0997 each for the same subscription.
Paying annually
The pricing page offers annual billing with a badge reading Save 17%. That holds on two of the three plans.
| Plan | Year, paid monthly | Year, paid annually | Saving | Actual discount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | €166.80 | €142.80 | €24.00 | 14.4% |
| Standard | €358.80 | €298.80 | €60.00 | 16.7% |
| Premium | €718.80 | €598.80 | €120.00 | 16.7% |
Standard and Premium round to the advertised 17%. Basic comes to 14.4%, because the discount there is a flat €2 a month against a smaller base. Nothing is being hidden — both numbers are printed on the page and anyone can divide them — but if you are on Basic and budgeting on the strength of the badge, you are budgeting for about €4 a year that does not arrive.
Which one are you?
✅ Under 50 bookings a month, paid in cash or by transfer
The free plan fits you exactly, and costs nothing. Do one thing before you build anything on it: put a repeating monthly reminder in your calendar that says renew SimplyBook. Three missed months deletes the account and the address.
📅 I am at 40–50 bookings and growing
You are about to hit the cliff. Booking 51 costs €13.90 on its own. If you expect to settle near 100, Basic is fine at €0.139 a booking; if you will hover at 55, you are paying €0.25 each for a tier you barely use. Time the upgrade to where you will land, not where you are.
💳 I need deposits, or to take payment at booking
The free plan cannot do it at all — payments start at Basic. If deposits are the reason you are shopping (usually no-shows), skip the free tier and compare paid plans, or look at Square Appointments, whose free tier also stops short of this.
📋 I want an intake form AND something else
You get one custom feature on free. One intake form, or one class package, or one coupon — not two. Basic gives you three for €13.9/month. Count what you actually need before assuming free covers it.
🔄 My business goes quiet for months at a time
This is the case the deletion rule catches: seasonal closures, parental leave, illness. Either set the reminder and honour it, or pay for the dormant months and treat it as insurance on your booking address. Losing the address is not recoverable.
What we could not verify
The email limits. SimplyBook.me states that free accounts have daily and monthly caps on system emails but does not publish the figures. Since confirmations and reminders are the free plan's most useful function, this is a material unknown and we are not going to guess at it.
Currency and regional pricing. We were shown euros. We could not confirm what a visitor in the US or elsewhere is charged, or whether the figures differ beyond the currency symbol.
Whether the renewal is prompted. The help page says the free plan must be renewed manually; it does not say whether SimplyBook.me emails you a reminder before the three-month deletion. We have assumed nothing either way, which is why the advice above is to set your own reminder rather than rely on theirs.
Questions worth answering first
Is the free plan a trial?
No. There is no expiry date and no card required. It is a permanent tier — conditional, as above, on the monthly renewal.
What actually happens at booking 51?
You need a paid plan to keep accepting bookings that month. SimplyBook.me describes upgrading as a single click that preserves your existing setup, so this is an interruption to your billing rather than to your configuration.
Can I take deposits on the free plan?
No. Payments, deposits and tips are listed as an addition available from Basic upward. If deposits are the reason you are shopping for booking software — usually because of no-shows — the free plan does not solve your problem, and you should compare paid tiers rather than free ones.
Is one custom feature really that limiting?
It depends entirely on whether the thing you need is a custom feature. If all you want is "clients pick a slot, we both get an email", you may never touch the limit. If you had in mind an intake form, or a package of six sessions, or a coupon for first-timers, you are choosing one of them and doing the others by hand.
What if I stop trading for a while?
This is the scenario the deletion rule is most likely to catch, and it is worth planning for. Parental leave, a long illness, a seasonal business closed over winter: any of these can produce three months without a login. Set the reminder anyway, or move to a paid plan for the dormant period and accept the cost as insurance on your booking address.
How does this compare with Square Appointments?
Square's free tier has no booking cap and no manual renewal, but takes a percentage of every card payment and cannot charge a no-show. SimplyBook.me's free tier takes nothing from your payments — because it cannot process them at all — but caps you at 50 bookings and one feature. Those are different shapes of free, and which is cheaper depends on whether your constraint is volume or money. We have written that one out side by side.
The decision underneath the decision
For a genuinely small practice — under fifty bookings a month, paid in cash or by transfer, no deposits, no intake forms — SimplyBook.me's free plan is one of the better things available at the price, and the price is nothing.
The catch is not in the limits. It is that the plan asks you to do something every month, forever, and punishes forgetting with permanent loss of the address your clients use. Free software normally fails by nagging you. This one fails by going quiet.
So the question to settle before you build a booking page on it is not whether fifty bookings is enough. It is whether you trust yourself to press a button every month for the next several years — and if the honest answer is no, whether €13.90 a month is a reasonable price for never having to.
Related: SimplyBook.me vs Square Appointments — the head-to-head. Is Square Appointments actually free? — the same treatment on the other free tier. And Best appointment scheduling software for solo practitioners, the six-tool overview.