Acuity charges extra for everything that matters.
SMS reminders: paid plans only (Emerging starts at $20/mo). Recurring appointments: a per-booking toggle, no service-level "this repeats weekly" rule. Intake answers: stored. Harbor's free plan does the first two, and refuses to do the third.
Want a walkthrough? Contact us for a demo.
Tell us a little about your business and we'll set up a personal demo of Harbor Booking. No pressure, and nothing gets stored that you don't want stored.
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Everything Acuity has. Plus the things they hold back.
The features small businesses actually pay other tools for, included from day one.
SMS reminders
Twenty-four hour and one-hour text reminders fire automatically. Clients can reschedule from the link in the text. Carrier-registered for reliable delivery.
Deposits via Stripe
Charge a percentage of the service price at booking. Money lands directly in your Stripe account. Per-org refund rules for cancels and reschedules.
Intake questions
Ask what you need at booking. Answers go straight to your inbox. Harbor never writes them to a database. Marketable as a real privacy promise.
Embeddable widget
Drop a single iframe snippet on Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, or plain HTML. Your customers book without leaving your site.
Auto-waitlist
Slot fills up? Clients join the waitlist with one tap. When someone cancels, the next match gets a book-now link. No staff time required.
Recurring appointments
Weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Up to 26 occurrences booked in one click with automatic conflict detection. Cancel one or cancel the whole series.
Co-branded everything
Your logo and business name appear on the booking page, the admin dashboard, the confirmation emails, and the reschedule pages. Harbor sits underneath as "powered by".
Prices, deposits, buffer time
Per-service pricing and deposit percentage. Buffer minutes before and after each appointment so back-to-back slots stop wrecking your day.
Staff scheduling
Shift templates, time tracking, PTO, shift marketplace, internal messaging. Most booking tools make you pay extra. We don't.
Acuity stores intake forever. Harbor doesn't store it at all.
Acuity's intake answers live in their database as long as your account exists. That database is enormous, shared, and a target.
Harbor's intake is pass-through. The answers reach your inbox at booking time and disappear from our servers. There is no intake_answer table. We could not hand it over if we were asked.
- Intake answers never persisted
- Free-text capped server-side, no LLM piping
- Medical-info warning shown to every client
- Self-hosted on infrastructure we own
What other tools charge extra for.
Honest comparison. Things Acuity typically gates behind their higher tiers (or doesn't ship at all).
| Feature | Harbor Booking | Acuity |
|---|---|---|
| SMS reminders | Included | Paid add-on or per-message |
| Booking deposits | 2% platform fee, plus Stripe fees | Stripe setup required, plus plan price |
| Embeddable widget | One iframe snippet | Limited on free plan |
| Waitlist with auto-notify | Included | Often missing |
| Recurring appointments | Up to 26 in one click | Per-booking toggle only, no service rule |
| Staff scheduling, PTO, time tracking | Included | Separate product |
| Pass-through intake (zero storage) | Harbor only | Stored, indefinitely |
Two prices. No surprises.
Free covers most one-person operations. Pro covers everything else.
Why we can charge less: we don't store your data forever, we don't sell it, and we don't pay a vendor stack to babysit it. Less to keep, less to charge for.
Free
For solo operators and small teams.
- Unlimited bookings
- Email reminders
- Embeddable widget
- Pass-through intake
- Waitlist and self-serve reschedule
Pro
Multi-stylist shops and growing businesses.
- Everything in Free
- SMS reminders included
- Stripe deposits (2% platform fee, plus Stripe fees)
- Waitlist, recurring, buffer time
- Unlimited providers and employees
- Staff scheduling, PTO, time tracking
Same features.
Half the bill. None of the storage.
Import your Acuity services as a CSV. Connect your existing Stripe account. Switch the embed snippet on your site. Done.