Which salon software has built-in memberships?

Built in should mean three things working together: the software bills the client on a schedule, it knows what the plan includes, and it counts what has been used. Recurring billing on its own is the easy part. Counting the four facials a month, resetting the counter when the next payment lands, and applying the member price at checkout without anyone remembering to do it is the part that either exists or does not.

Every competitor row was read from that vendor's own pricing or feature page on 2 September 2026, and the Bella Booking rows from the code that runs the feature. "Not published" means the vendor has not said, which is different from a no. Two of these sites also serve prices by location: fresha.com and vagaro.com both returned Australian dollars when we opened them, so this page uses their pricing structure rather than a figure that would be wrong in half the world. The US dollar figures come from the US pages of Square, Mangomint, Boulevard and GlossGenius.

The second question is what a plan can actually hold, because "memberships" covers two different products. One is a discount card that recurs. The other is a plan with included work in it, which is the one that needs counting. Where the client buys it matters just as much, and the next section counts that too.

Square is the honest outlier and worth reading carefully if you are already on it. Square Appointments plans are Free, Plus at US$49 a month per location and Premium at US$149 a month per location, and neither the Appointments pricing page nor its FAQ lists memberships or client subscriptions at all. Square Subscriptions exists, it is free to build from the Dashboard, and it will take the money every month. Square's own help article then says the feature will not track entitlements, using a gym selling five classes a month as the example: the subscription bills, and nothing counts how many classes the subscriber has actually taken. You can sell the plan. Someone on your team counts the visits.

GlossGenius needs the same care for a different reason. Its pricing page lists Packages and Memberships from the Standard plan up, tagged as new, with Standard at US$24 a month billed annually. Its own memberships product pages still said coming soon on 2 September 2026, twice on one page and again on another. Packages with automated billing look like the shipped half. Ask them directly which half you are buying before you sign anything.

Phorest is the clearest case of memberships costing extra. Its six plans run Starter, Grow, Complete Advantage and Elite for salons and spas, plus Core Aesthetics and Elevate Aesthetics for medspas, and none of them publish a price. On Phorest's US pricing page, memberships is included on Elite and on both medspa plans, Core Aesthetics and Elevate Aesthetics. On Starter, Grow and Complete Advantage it is marked Optional and sold from the add-to-any-plan block at a price that is also unpublished. The Australian page uses different plan names (Grow, Complete Advantage and Complete Advantage Plus, plus two Aesthetics Advantage tiers) and includes memberships only on the two Plus tiers. Selling courses and series is included on five of the six US plans (everything except Starter), so the prepaid half of the concept is close to universal at Phorest and the recurring half is not.

Memberships sit on the Professional plan at $99 a month with unlimited team members, and the same number applies in US and Australian dollars. There is no membership add-on and no per-member charge. Bella's standard 1% platform fee rides on membership billing the way it does on any other payment taken through Bella, which is the honest version of "no extra cost". Memberships run on Stripe, so a business taking payments through Square in Bella cannot use them yet.

A plan carries one or more benefits, and each benefit covers either services and bundles or retail products, never both. That keeps every allowance a clean pool: four included facials cannot quietly become four bottles of shampoo. A benefit can be a percentage off, a fixed amount off, a set number of included sessions per cycle, unlimited access, an included product, or a discount that also waives the deposit the service would normally ask for. When two benefits could apply to the same line, the one that names the service wins over a general all-services benefit, even at a lower discount.

1. 1Build the plan with a price, a billing cycle and its benefits, then choose whether clients can buy it on your booking page
2. 2Cap it with a maximum number of members if the plan only works at a certain size, which blocks online self-purchase once it is full and warns the front desk on manual enrolment
3. 3Make it a fixed-term instalment plan instead if you are selling a course of treatments: 4, 8 or 12 weeks, billed every 4 weeks, with the included allowance granted once for the term rather than refilled each instalment
4. 4Set each member to card on file or manual collection, so a client paying cash still sits on the renewal schedule and your team marks the invoice paid at the till

Clients buy on your booking page through Stripe Checkout, and My Membership then shows them their status, what is left of each allowance, the next charge date, or the next instalment and end date on a term plan. They can cancel there without messaging you. On your side there are commands for the awkward days: retry a failed payment, update a card, change a plan, pause and resume, undo a cancellation a client has already scheduled.

When a covered appointment is cancelled, refunded, or has the covered line taken off at re-checkout, the session comes back if it was spent inside the current billing window, and the reversal is recorded either way so the history stays honest when it does not. Walk-in retail redemptions and online shop orders each have their own restore path, keyed so one redemption can never hand back two credits.

Members-only services are a separate switch from the plan itself. Flag a service or a bundle as members only and Bella checks coverage again when the booking is submitted, using the same check that paints the badge, so the label and the gate cannot drift apart. Since September 2026 you also choose what everyone else sees: leave it as it is and the service stays on the booking page with a Members only badge and a way through to your plans, or switch on Hide members-only services under Settings > Online booking > Appearance and it disappears from the service list, the search, the landing page and the structured data for anyone the plan does not cover.