You’re about to open. Here’s what we wish someone had told us.

Squarespace and Wix make it effortless to bolt scheduling onto your new site — one login, one bill. It feels like the obvious choice when you’re setting everything up at once. The catch is that those tools were built for one-person-at-a-time appointments. A guest booking your candle class for four often can’t buy four seats in one clean transaction, and your booking data lives inside the builder’s reporting, not yours.

Keep the website you love. Run bookings on a tool built for group experiences — party size, add-ons, and buyouts included — that plugs into any site with a single embed.

Some booking platforms sit between you and your money and pay you on their schedule. New operators have reported funds held for weeks after a single refund. When cash flow is everything in year one, you can’t have a middleman deciding when you get paid.

ArtistryHost runs on your own Square. Money lands in your account on Square's normal schedule — we never touch it, so we structurally can't hold it.

A haircut is one person in a chair. A paint-and-sip is a party of six, one of whom books for everyone, sometimes with a bottle add-on and a private-room upgrade. Generic schedulers treat a class as an appointment with a headcount cap — which breaks the moment a real group tries to book the way groups actually book.

Party-size logic, per-guest add-ons, private events, and full buyouts are the core of ArtistryHost — not a workaround.

A 6–8% booking fee feels painless when you’re doing a few reservations a week. Then a holiday season hits, you finally sell out, and the platform quietly takes its biggest check of the year out of yours. Percentage pricing charges you more precisely when you’re winning.

Flat fee. $50/mo locked for life as a founding operator. When you grow, you keep every dollar of it.

Which class times actually fill? Where do bookings come from? How many first-timers come back? Most booking tools hand you a payments export and call it reporting. In year one, those answers are the difference between guessing and growing.

Fill rate, a booking funnel, and source attribution come standard — the numbers you actually run the business on, from your very first week.