Kairo
The software a salon runs its whole day on
The diary that answers the phone
Bookings, the calendar, the client book, payments, stock and every message that goes to a customer. One system, one login, no commission.
You are nota search resulton someoneelse's platform.
Every booking platform will take your diary online. The question is what it costs you to get there — in commission, in clients shown your competitors, and in a system that was never built for a chair in the first place.
Three differences that show up in your takings, not your settings screen.
They send youto a directory.We send them to you.
Marketplace platforms — Fresha and the ones like it — put your salon in a listing. A client who searched for you by name lands on a page showing four other salons who'd happily take the booking, and the platform takes a cut of the ones it introduced. Kairo has no directory to be listed in. Your booking page is on your own link, under your own name, and nobody else is on it.
- Your own branded link
- No competitors on your page
- No commission, and no monthly fee
- The client list stays yours
Built for hairand blades. Not forevery business.
General-purpose booking tools — Square Appointments and its peers — come from companies serving restaurants, retail and trades from the same codebase. They handle a 30-minute slot fine. They struggle with a four-hour full head of braids, a price that varies with hair length, a colour that needs a patch test 48 hours before, and a client who books a cut and a colour as one visit. Kairo was written for those, because it was written in a salon.
- Multi-service visits as one booking
- “From” pricing for anything hair-length dependent
- Colour formulas and allergies on the appointment
- A column per stylist or barber, colour-coded
A booking pagethat looks like you.Not a template.
Your name at the top, your services, your prices, your hours, your cancellation terms in plain sight before they commit. Availability is computed from real bookings, blocked time and each person's working hours, then re-checked at the moment of confirming, so two people tapping at once still cannot double-book you. And the link never goes stale — it always reflects today's menu.
- Branded to the business, not the platform
- Only genuine openings are offered
- Cancellation terms shown before booking
- Self-service cancel that reopens the slot
$400 to set up.Then nothing,every month after.
No subscription, no per-booking fee, no commission. One setup cost that a salon or barbershop clears in a handful of visits — move the sliders to your own numbers and see how few.
Your salon
What a typical visit is worth — services and retail together.
Your current booking platform's monthly fee. Set it to zero if you don't pay one.
And if you like, assume
Both are scenarios you switch on yourself, priced at your own ticket. Turn them off and the visits figure still stands on its own.
Setup pays for itself in
5
visits.
$400 to set up, once. At $85 a visit that's 5 clients through the chair — then nothing per month, for as long as you use it. On the assumptions you've ticked, that's about 5 weeks.
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
The whole price
$400 once. $0 a month.
No subscription, no per-booking fee, no commission, no cut of what you charge. A platform at $50 a month passes $400 in 8 months — and keeps charging after that.
The only figures asserted here are Kairo's own: $400 to set up, and nothing per month. The ticket price, the monthly fee and the two scenarios are yours to set, and the arithmetic is plain — we don't estimate what another platform costs you, because that depends on terms we can't see.
Dependencies
No frameworks, no packages, no build step
Login
Diary, payments and messages in one place
Per month
No subscription — a one-off $400 to set up
To undo
The client's message held back two minutes
One login replaces
A salon doesn't losemoney on the haircut.It loses it betweenthe haircuts.
The empty chair nobody filled, the client who drifted off, the no-show nobody reminded, the change nobody passed on. Most of it is admin nobody had time for.
- 01The diary is on paper, and it's the only copy
- 02Client numbers live in a spreadsheet, or in your head
- 03Reminders go by hand, when there's a gap — so mostly they don't
- 04Someone moves an appointment and forgets to say so
- 05The card machine doesn't know what the diary knows
- 06Stock is counted when you notice a shelf is empty
- 07Rebooking is whoever you happen to remember to chase
- 01One system, one login, on every device you own
- 02A profile per client, with notes that resurface next visit
- 03Confirmations, reminders and review requests send themselves
- 04Every change asks who to tell, and tells them
- 05Payments and receipts settle against the booking itself
- 06Stock warns you before the shelf is empty, not after
- 07A win-back list of regulars who've quietly drifted
A Thursday at
Luxe Hair Studio
From the first coffee to the last invoice. Every frame below is the real system running, set on the same morning at 11:40 — four visits done, one in the chair, the afternoon filling up. Keep scrolling and the day plays out.
What you're about to see
- 01The morning
- 02The day book
- 03When plans change
- 04The client book
- 05Getting paid
- 06The messages
- 07The shopfront
- 08In the hand
You open the app and the day is already answered
What do I need to know right now?
Twelve booked, four done, eight to come. What's actually been taken against what's expected. Two hours still free. And a live card showing who is in the chair and who walks in next — re-derived from the clock every thirty seconds, so it is never stale.
- Today at a glance
- With you now
- Free gaps called out
- Notes on the day
The diary, but it cannot be double-booked
A column per stylist, blocks the real length of the service.
Drag a booking to a new time or a different stylist. Drag its bottom edge to make it longer. Block out lunch, training or a whole day off with a private reason only you see — and it vanishes from online booking the moment you save it.
- Drag to reschedule
- Multi-service bookings
- Block out time
- Booked-online marker
Every change asks who to tell, and how
This is the part the others get wrong.
Move a booking and Kairo stops to ask one question: email them, text them, both, or nothing. Only the channels that client can actually receive are offered, each showing the real address or number. No silent changes, no guessing later whether anyone was told.
- Email · text · both · nothing
- Leads with the old time
- 15-second undo
- It refuses to lie
Everything you know about them, wherever you are
Notes that follow the client, not the appointment.
Lifetime spend, every past visit, every invoice. Anything typed on a booking is copied to their record as a dated line, so the colour formula you wrote in March surfaces by itself in September. Import from a spreadsheet, merge duplicates, and never create two of the same person.
- Full visit history
- Dated notes
- Import from Excel
- Merge duplicates
From the chair to the bank without a second app
Bill today's appointment or ring up a walk-in in a few taps.
Services, retail, custom lines and discounts. Card, cash, transfer, or a secure pay-link the customer opens on their own phone — Apple Pay and Google Pay appear there. The receipt sends itself the moment the payment lands, and a refund puts the stock back on the shelf.
- Point of sale
- Pay by link
- Receipts sent automatically
- Deposits up front
The single biggest no-show reducer, running itself
Nothing sends silently. Nothing fails silently.
Confirmations the moment a booking is made. Reminders the number of hours ahead you choose. Review requests after the visit. Email, SMS or both, set per message type — and a complete log of every message, its channel, its status and exactly what happened to it.
- Confirmations
- Reminders
- Review requests
- A complete log
The booking page that never closes
Only real openings are ever offered.
Your own link, branded to your business. Customers pick as many services as they like and the duration and price add up. Availability is computed from actual bookings, blocked time and opening hours — then re-checked at the moment of confirming, so two people tapping at once still cannot double-book you.
- Your own branded link
- Pick any services
- Real openings only
- Cancel link included
The whole salon in an apron pocket
Built for a thumb first and a desktop second.
The same workspace on a phone — not a cut-down companion app. Installs to the home screen straight from the browser, no app store and no download. Pull down to refresh. This is where most owners actually run their day, and where most customers actually book.
- Installs to home screen
- No app store
- Pull to refresh
- Same full workspace
Plans change.That's when mostbooking systems loseyou the customer.
Every booking and every move stops to ask one question — who to tell, and how. Only the channels that client can actually receive are offered. Try it.
Moving this appointment
Chantelle Dube moves from Thu, Aug 20 at 1:00 PM to Thu, Aug 20 at 1:30 PM.
A client with no mobile number never sees “Text them”. Kairo only offers what it can actually deliver.
Undo a cancellation
Chantelle Dube · 1:30 PM
Braids — Full Head · 4h · Sha
What Chantelle receives
Email · to chantelle.d@example.com
Your appointment has moved
Hi Chantelle — your Thursday 20 Aug, 1:00 PM appointment at Luxe Hair Studio has been moved to Thursday 20 Aug, 1:30 PM.
Braids — Full Head with Sha · 4 hours
Can't make the new time? Cancel here — the slot reopens straight away.
Notice the message leads with the old time. A client skimming their phone sees a change — not a second confirmation they'll scroll past.
Everything elsethe day needs,already in the box.
No tier that hides the useful half, no add-on that costs more than the software. What follows is simply part of it.
[01]
Know which hours are worth protecting
Appointments by hour of day, revenue per day, and the services actually carrying the business. The quiet Tuesday afternoon shows up as a shape, not a hunch.
[02]
The clients who quietly drifted
Two or more past visits, nothing in eight weeks, nothing booked. Kairo builds the list; you send the message.
2+
Past visits
8 wks
Since last seen
0
Booked ahead
1 tap
To reach them
[03]
A menu that prices like a salon does
Fixed, “from” for anything that varies with hair length, and free for consultations — read straight off by the booking page.
[04]
Retail that pays for its shelf
Cost against retail margin, stock counted down as it sells, and a warning while there's still time to reorder.
[05]
Reviews you didn't have to ask for
A request goes out after the visit, on its own. Reviews land on your own page, and you can reply.
[06]
Set the hours once and stop thinking about them
Opening hours per day, including days that run only every 2nd, 3rd or 4th week. How far ahead customers may book. The notice after which the cancel link stops working.
[07]
Your team, their colours, their hours
Each person gets a colour that runs through the calendar, a title, and their own working hours — so the page never offers a slot with someone who isn't in.
Phone-first,not phone-tolerant.
You run the salon from an apron pocket, so every screen was built for a thumb first and a desktop second. It installs to the home screen straight from the browser — no app store, no download, nothing to update.
Built differently,on purpose.
You will never think about any of this. It is here because it is the reason the software stays fast, stays up, and doesn't quietly lose your Tuesday.
Zero dependencies
The entire platform is hand-written. No frameworks, no packages, no build step. Nothing breaks when a library updates, and there is no supply chain to be compromised through.
One file per business
Your salon is a single database file. It can be copied, backed up or moved in one move. Nothing is pooled with another business, because there is no shared pool.
Security taken seriously
Parameterised queries throughout. Signed HttpOnly session cookies, never localStorage. Server-side authorisation on every route, rate limiting on login and password changes, a password policy with breach checking, and public links that verify a token rather than trusting an ID in the URL.
Honest about its own state
It notices a misconfigured time zone, a database on a disk that will be wiped, and a default password still in use — and says so, out loud, instead of waiting for the day it matters.
System self-check
Thu 11:40When one of these is wrong, Kairo says so on the dashboard — in plain English, on the day it becomes true, not in a log file nobody opens.
What you get,next to whatyou're used to.
Yours. Your own file, on your own link.
Often held in a shared platform account.
Asks: email, text, both or nothing — then does exactly that.
Frequently silent, or a fresh confirmation that reads like a duplicate.
15 seconds to undo, message held two minutes.
Rarely offered — by the time you notice, it has gone.
$400 once, then nothing monthly. No cut of what you charge.
Usually a monthly subscription, and often a per-booking fee on top.
Your own branded link, your name at the top.
Often a marketplace listing your competitors too.
The same full workspace, installs to the home screen.
Usually a cut-down companion app.
Hair, barbering, beauty — written in a salon.
Every kind of business, from one codebase.
“The usual setup” describes the arrangement common across salon booking platforms as a category, not any one named product. Terms differ between providers, plans and countries, and change over time — worth checking your current one's before you decide.
$400 once.Then nothing,every month.
Kairo is sold white-label — one instance per business, set up for how you actually work. A one-off $400 to get you running, and then no subscription, no per-booking fee and no commission. The cost doesn't move when you have a good month, and it doesn't come back next month either.
or email hello@kairo.app
Every Kairo includes
- Your own Kairo, on your own booking link
- Bookings, calendar, clients, payments and stock
- Confirmations, reminders and review requests
- Unlimited team members and services
- Your data in a file that belongs to you
- Setup, and your existing client list imported
Getting started
Tell us about the business
What you do, how many chairs, how you work now. Ten minutes on the phone.
We set your Kairo up
Your hours, your team, your menu and prices. Your client spreadsheet imported, duplicates merged.
You open it on the floor
Add it to the home screen and run a day on it. The booking link goes live when you're ready, not before.
Not a demo
Kairo has been running a Melbourne salon's bookings, payments and customer emails in production since day one. The screens on this page are that same system, filled with invented clients so no real business's data appears anywhere on this site.