Who Is This For?

💡 The short answer: VoxelBooking is a free, open-source, self-hosted booking system. One installation runs branded booking pages for one business or for every client you manage: reservations, appointments, classes, and stays. Full source code, your server, your data, and no per-booking fees, ever.

Booking software is a tax on small businesses. The hosted platforms charge per seat, per location, per booking, or per month, and the meter never stops. VoxelBooking removes the meter. This page explains who it fits, how they use it, and what to expect.

The Use Cases

1. Freelancers & Agencies: One Install, Every Client

You manage websites and digital presence for multiple local businesses, and you're tired of configuring a different booking SaaS for every client.

VoxelBooking is booking infrastructure you own. Install it once. Create a business for the hair salon. Another for the restaurant. Another for the B&B. Each client gets their own branded booking page, schedule, staff, and customer list, isolated from the others, while you manage everything from one dashboard.

How agencies monetize it:

• Setup fee for each client's booking page, at your normal project rates
• Bundle booking with the hosting and maintenance you already bill
• Replace the $30 to 100/month per client that hosted booking tools charge, and keep that margin or pass the saving on, your choice

The software costs you nothing, on one client or on fifty. There are no per-business fees, no per-booking commissions, and no license tiers to outgrow. Your stack, your brand, your client relationships.

2. Single Business Owners: Your Bookings, Your Server

You run a salon, restaurant, B&B, yoga studio, barbershop, or any business that takes bookings, and you'd rather own your booking system than rent it.

Install VoxelBooking on your hosting (or have your web person do it once), set up your schedule, services, and staff, and put your booking page behind your own domain. Customers book; you confirm; nobody charges you per appointment.

Booking patterns combine on one installation: a restaurant can take table reservations and sell cooking classes; a B&B can manage stays and spa appointments. One business, all the features, because there is no higher tier where the rest of the features live.

What this replaces: the $25 to 90 every month that hosted booking platforms collect from businesses like yours, plus the customer data they keep on their servers. Your customer list is an asset; with VoxelBooking it lives in your database, in your jurisdiction, under your control.

3. Developers: A Booking Foundation You Can Read

You build for clients or for yourself, and you want booking capability without writing scheduling logic from scratch.

Scheduling is deceptively hard: time zones, staff availability, capacity, overlapping patterns, no-shows. VoxelBooking gives you that logic as a working, readable PHP codebase under AGPL-3.0. Use it as-is, extend it, or study how the four booking patterns are modeled. The source is at github.com/NowSquare/VoxelBooking, and nothing about how it works is hidden from you.

The License

VoxelBooking is licensed under AGPL-3.0. In practice: use it, modify it, and self-host it freely, also commercially, for yourself or for clients, on as many installations as you want. If you offer a modified version of VoxelBooking to others as a service, your changes stay open. That is the entire obligation.

Who This Is NOT For

Clear boundaries, so you can decide with confidence:

• Enterprises needing SSO, compliance certifications, and a contractual 99.99% SLA. Different category, different price point, and that's fine.
• People who want zero setup. There is no hosted version to sign up for. You install VoxelBooking on your own PHP hosting; that's the trade that makes it free and yours.
• Hosting that can't run it. You need PHP 8.3+ and MySQL 8.0+. Most modern shared hosting qualifies; check yours before you start.

What You Actually Get

Frequently Asked Questions

"Can I really run all my clients on one installation?"

Yes. That is the architecture, not a workaround. Each business you create has its own booking page, schedule, staff, and customer data, kept apart from every other business on the install. The license puts no limit on the number of businesses or installations.

"What does it cost as I grow?"

Nothing changes. Ten bookings or ten thousand, one business or fifty, the software is free and stays free. Your only costs are your own hosting and your time.

"What happens if I stop using it?"

Your data is in your own MySQL database, exportable like any data you own. There is no platform holding your customer list, so there is nothing to escape from.

"Who maintains it?"

NowSquare, in the open, at GitHub. Bugs and improvement requests go through GitHub issues. There are no guaranteed response times; there is a public commit history you can judge for yourself. Agencies that need custom development can send a message; custom work is available at agency rates, separate from the open-source issue queue.

Summary

Still Have Questions?

• Check the full documentation for technical details
• Browse the source code
• Send a message for project inquiries

We'd rather you make an informed decision than install something that doesn't fit your needs.