Mawedly vs Fresha: What Each One Actually Costs

Most comparisons between booking tools start with a feature list. That is the wrong place to start with Fresha, because Fresha wins a feature list against almost anything — including Mawedly, comprehensively. The useful question is narrower: what will each one actually cost you this year, and is the thing you are paying for the thing you need?

This is a comparison written by the people who build Mawedly, so treat the framing accordingly. What we can promise is that every Fresha figure below was read from Fresha's own pricing page on 11 November 2026, in Saudi riyals, and that both sets of prices exclude VAT. Prices change. Check before you decide.

Start by admitting what Fresha is

Fresha is an operating system for a salon. Calendar and scheduling, point of sale, retail and inventory, an online product store, memberships, gift cards, packages, staff commissions, wages, pay runs, timesheet clock-in, quotes and invoices, reporting, marketing campaigns — and a consumer marketplace that puts your business in front of people who have never heard of you.

Mawedly does one thing. It is a bilingual Arabic/English booking page that collects a deposit by manual bank transfer. No point of sale. No inventory. No payroll. No marketplace. That is not a roadmap gap; it is the shape of the product.

If you run a five-chair salon that sells retail products and needs to track staff hours, these two tools are not competitors. One does your job and the other does not.

What Fresha publishes, and what it does not

Fresha publishes exactly one subscription number:

• Independent, for a single bookable team member: SAR 149.95 per month, with a seven-day trial.
• Team, for more than one person: "custom rates", charged per bookable team member. No figure is published. You contact sales.
• Enterprise, for over 20 team members: custom rates.

Mawedly publishes all four tiers on its pricing page: free (15 appointments, one provider), SAR 49 (60 appointments, one provider), SAR 99 (120 appointments, up to five providers), SAR 299 (unlimited).

The structural difference matters more than either number. Fresha prices per person. Mawedly prices per plan. A salon with five chairs pays SAR 99 on Mawedly. On Fresha it pays five seats at a rate it cannot look up.

The honest counterweight: Mawedly caps appointments per plan and Fresha does not charge per booking at all. Cross 120 appointments a month and you are on the SAR 299 tier, not the SAR 99 one. That is our limit, and you should know it before reading further.

The variable costs are where bills diverge

None of the following is hidden — all of it sits on Fresha's public pricing page. But all of it is variable, which means your bill depends on how busy you are:

• Marketplace new-client fee: a 50% one-time commission on the first booking of any brand-new client who discovers you through the Fresha marketplace, with a minimum of SAR 10 per client. Returning clients are always free, and clients who arrive from your own site, Instagram or Facebook are not charged.
• Online payments: 4.90% + SAR 0.75 per transaction.
• Text and WhatsApp notifications: 20 free a month, then SAR 0.35 per text, or SAR 0.15–0.30 per WhatsApp message.
• Marketing emails: 50 free a month, then SAR 0.07 each.
• Paid add-ons: AI Concierge at SAR 225 per location per month (SAR 750 with calls), Insights at SAR 319.95, Smart Website at SAR 129.95, Data Connector at SAR 1,100 per location per month.

Mawedly carries none of these line items because it has nothing that would justify them. No marketplace means no commission. No payment gateway means no percentage. Notifications go by email and are unmetered. The number on the pricing page is the number on the invoice.

Deposits: a percentage, or your time

Both tools take deposits. They take them in opposite ways.

Fresha takes a card payment through its own gateway and keeps 4.90% + SAR 0.75. It is fully automatic and you never touch it.

Mawedly takes a bank transfer. The client transfers, uploads a photo of the receipt, and you confirm it by hand. No percentage, no per-transaction fee — and no automation either.

Run it on your own numbers. Forty deposits a month at an average of SAR 50 is SAR 2,000 collected. Fresha's cut on that is roughly SAR 98 plus SAR 0.75 per transaction — about SAR 128 a month. On Mawedly the cut is zero and the cost is forty manual confirmations, roughly a minute each.

If a minute of your time is worth more than about three riyals, Fresha is cheaper for you. If it is worth less, Mawedly is. There is no universal answer, and anyone who tells you there is has not done the arithmetic.

One thing that is not a trade-off but a hard fact: Mawedly does not process payments or hold funds. The transfer goes from your client straight to your own bank account. The platform records the receipt and nothing else.

A myth worth killing: the Arabic gap

Plenty of advice online assumes a foreign booking tool cannot serve an Arabic booking page. That is true of some tools — we wrote about one such case in the RTL gap article. It is not true of Fresha. Fresha runs a fully translated right-to-left Arabic site, prices in Saudi riyals, and states ZATCA compliance.

So if language is the reason you are looking for an alternative to Fresha, it is not a real reason. Pick a better one.

When Fresha is the right answer

Plainly, in a lot of cases:

• You sell products and need inventory and a point of sale.
• You have staff and need commissions, wages and timesheets.
• You want new clients from a ready-made marketplace. Mawedly has no acquisition channel whatsoever.
• Your clients pay by card and will not do a bank transfer.
• You need memberships, gift cards or packages.

In those situations there is nothing to compare. Fresha does things Mawedly does not do and will not do.

When Mawedly fits better

• You are solo or small, and you need booking and a deposit, not an operating system.
• Your clients already pay by bank transfer, and you would rather not lose a percentage of every one.
• You want a fixed bill you can predict, with no metered line items.
• You want a published price without a sales call.
• You are not in beauty at all — a private tutor, a consultant, a coach — where inventory and point of sale are dead weight.

What to do tomorrow

Do not compare the subscriptions. Compute two numbers on your own figures.

Multiply your monthly deposit volume by 4.9% and add SAR 0.75 per transaction. Then ask how many genuinely new clients you expect the marketplace to send you each month, and what half of each of their first bookings is worth. Add those to the subscription. That is your real Fresha cost.

Compare it to a flat SAR 49 or SAR 99 plus the time you will spend confirming transfers by hand. The bigger number is not automatically the loser: if the marketplace brings you clients you would never have reached, that commission is an acquisition cost, not a fee.

And if what you actually need is a bilingual booking page that takes a deposit and stops there, start on the free tier and test it across fifteen appointments before paying anyone anything.