Custom booking system development,
built around your rules.
Online booking software for UK businesses whose appointments, rooms, equipment or classes do not fit Calendly, SimplyBook.me or Acuity: designed with your team, connected to your payments and calendars, and owned by you. Free working prototype in 5–10 days.
A booking system that fits,
rather than one you fit.
Magora is a London software company that builds custom booking systems for UK businesses: appointment and class booking, room and equipment booking, multi-location and business-to-business booking, with online payment and a web or mobile app. A free working prototype takes 5–10 working days, Discovery from £3,000 produces a fixed quote, and a first release starts from £10,000 and takes 6–8 weeks. If your bookings are simple appointments, a ready-made tool such as Calendly, SimplyBook.me or Acuity is usually the better choice, and we say so.
UK businesses that take bookings
Clinics, studios, venues, hire and training companies, and platforms where customers book other providers.
From £10,000, in 6–8 weeks
A booking MVP starts from £10,000 and takes 6–8 weeks; Discovery from £3,000 sets the fixed price first.
Your system, your data
No monthly plan fee. Code in your repository, data in UK or EU hosting you control, IP transferred on payment.
Booking software,
for the way you take bookings.
Most booking projects combine several of these. We start with the booking type that earns or saves the most and add the rest in phases.
Appointment & class booking
Customers pick a service, a person and a slot; staff see their own diary. Group classes, courses and waiting lists where you need them.
Room, desk & equipment booking
Rooms, vehicles, kit or people booked together, with the rules for what can be combined and when.
Multi-location booking
One system for several sites or franchisees, each with its own hours, staff and prices, and one view across all of them.
B2B & account bookings
Business customers with accounts, approvals, repeat bookings and invoicing. Agents or partners can book on behalf of clients.
Booking with payments
Full payment, deposits, refunds and cancellation terms, using providers such as Stripe or Adyen.
Booking apps
Web booking, iOS and Android apps, or a platform where customers book other providers, all on one back office.
What a booking system
usually includes.
The core every booking system needs, plus the parts that make it yours. Discovery decides which belong in the first release and which can wait.
Availability & calendar
Opening hours, staff rotas, buffers, holidays and capacity, with a live calendar that cannot be double-booked.
Booking flow & confirmations
A short booking journey on web or mobile, with confirmation and amend or cancel links by email or SMS.
Reminders & notifications
Automatic reminders to customers and alerts to staff, so fewer slots go unused.
Your prices and rules
Peak and off-peak prices, deposits, packages, minimum notice and approval steps exactly as you run them.
Back office & roles
Diary, customer records and notes for staff, with roles that decide who sees which location, resource or customer.
Reports on your numbers
Occupancy, revenue, no-shows and repeat customers, built on the figures your team actually reviews.
Custom booking vs
ready-made tools.
Short answer: use a ready-made booking tool if your bookings are simple appointments and you want to be live quickly. Build a custom booking system if a booking depends on several people, rooms or items at once, if prices follow your own rules, or if monthly plans and limits stop fitting. The table compares the two on the points buyers ask about most. Updated: 13 October 2026.
| Ready-made tools (Calendly, SimplyBook.me, Acuity) | Custom booking system (Magora) | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost structure | A monthly plan per business or per user. Examples listed on 13 October 2026: Calendly Standard $10 per seat per month billed yearly; SimplyBook.me Basic $11.9, Standard $24.9, Premium $49.9 per month billed annually; Acuity Scheduling from $16 per month. | A build cost, then hosting and optional support. Discovery from £3,000, first release from £10,000, full production £25,000–£60,000, support £2,000–£4,000 a month. No monthly plan fee. |
| Time to launch | Often live within days for a standard set-up. This is the main reason to choose one. | Free working prototype in 5–10 working days, Discovery in two weeks, then a first release in about 6–8 weeks. |
| Booking rules | Fixed menu of options: services, durations, staff, buffers and intake forms. A booking that needs several people, rooms or items at once is usually outside the model. | Set by your specification. Combined resources, tiered or seasonal prices, approval steps, capacity limits and your own cancellation terms can all be built. |
| Limits and tiers | Features and volumes depend on the plan. On SimplyBook.me the plans list included bookings from 50 (Free) to 2,000 (Premium) and 1 to 30 providers; multi-location access is listed under its Enterprise plan. Calendly Free allows one event type and one calendar connection. | No plan tiers. Limits come from the hosting you choose and the design agreed in Discovery. |
| Payments | Offered as a plan feature, from the vendor’s own list of payment methods. Calendly Standard connects Stripe and PayPal; SimplyBook.me lists payments and deposits as a plan feature. | Any provider with an API (for example Stripe or Adyen), with deposit, refund and invoice rules set to your terms. |
| Data and integrations | Your customer and booking data sits in the vendor's cloud. Integrations are limited to the ones each vendor lists. | You own the code and the data, hosted in the UK or EU in an account you control. Connected to your own systems through their APIs. See API integration. |
| Who it suits | Solo practitioners, small teams and businesses with a standard appointment diary. | Businesses whose booking process is the product, who book rooms, equipment or teams, run several locations, or sell to business customers. |
| When it is the wrong choice | When bookings depend on rules the tool cannot express, when plan limits or monthly fees grow faster than the value, or when data must sit in your own systems. | When your bookings are simple appointments, your volume is small, or you need to be live this month. Use a ready-made tool and, if needed, connect it to your systems. |
Vendor figures as listed on 13 October 2026, in US dollars, before tax. Calendly: calendly.com/pricing. SimplyBook.me: simplybook.me/en/pricing. Acuity Scheduling: acuityscheduling.com/pricing. Vendors change plans and prices; check their pages before you decide. Magora prices: UK software development pricing, checked 13 October 2026. These tools are named as examples of ready-made booking software; we are not affiliated with them.
Three honest
starting points.
Use a ready-made tool
One person or one room per booking, standard rules and a small team. Cheaper and live the same day.
Keep the tool, extend it
The tool works but must talk to your accounting, CRM or app. We build the integration through its API; a paid integration discovery starts from £1,000.
Build your own
The booking process is core to the business, or limits and fees keep growing. Start with the free prototype and Discovery.
Use our cost calculator for a quick figure, or read how a fixed price is set after Discovery. Discovery ends with a written recommendation, including “buy, don't build” when that is the right answer.
Connected to what
you already run.
A booking system is rarely stand-alone. We connect it through the other system's API, so nobody types the same booking twice.
Cards, wallets & deposits
Stripe and Adyen for card payments, with Apple Pay and Google Pay on mobile. Deposits, refunds and receipts follow your terms.
Calendars, email & SMS
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace calendars, plus email and SMS confirmations and reminders.
CRM, accounting & more
HubSpot or Salesforce for customers, Xero, Sage or QuickBooks for invoices, and your own databases, e-commerce or point-of-sale systems.
A well-documented API, such as a payment provider or a mainstream CRM, usually takes 3–5 weeks to integrate and starts at £5,000. See API integration services. Third-party fees, such as payment processing and SMS, are billed by the provider.
From first call
to live bookings.
A booking system succeeds when staff and customers both find it quicker than what it replaced, so both are in the room from the first workshop.
Discovery
2 weeksWorkshops with the people who take and manage bookings; your rules mapped as they really run; data model, integrations and a costed roadmap with a fixed-price quote.
Prototype & UX
Within discoveryThe booking journey and the staff diary, clicked through by real users before the build starts.
Build in sprints
6–8 weeksTwo-week sprints with a working release at the end of each, on a staging system your team can book on.
Migrate & launch
Cut-overExisting bookings and customers imported and checked, then live data moved at cut-over, with training for staff.
Support & grow
OngoingNew locations, booking types and integrations added on a retainer by the team that built it.
What it
costs.
Our 2026 prices in GBP, published on our pricing page. The prototype is free; it takes 5–10 working days. Our rates start from £49/hour per developer, and £65–£70/hour for a full team with QA and product ownership. We do not publish a booking-only price: the figures below apply to all our projects. For a quick figure, try the cost calculator.
A coded prototype of your core booking journey in 5–10 working days, before any paid work.
Two weeks: your booking rules mapped, data model, integrations, estimate and roadmap.
A first release customers can book on, in 6–8 weeks, covering your most valuable booking type.
A production web or mobile booking platform: several booking types, payments, roles and integrations.
Hosting, monitoring, security updates and a steady roadmap of new features.
The build price is fixed once the scope is written down line by line. You can take that scope to another agency.
The price becomes fixed after Discovery, once the scope is written down line by line. See fixed-price software development. Sources: uk-software-development-pricing and fixed-price-software-development-uk, checked 13 October 2026.
Booking and scheduling
we've built.
Three products where customers book classes, lessons or sessions inside a larger platform. Each card gives the problem, what we built and how it is used. None is a stand-alone booking engine for one business, so we describe each for what it is.
GAIN
- Problem
- Trainees had to compare sports academies, gyms and coaches across several platforms to find schedules, reviews and availability.
- Built
- A mobile app that lists academies and coaches with profiles, lets trainees book classes, training sessions and appointments, and adds reviews, ratings and messaging.
- Outcome
- Trainees find an academy and book in one app, and academies gain visibility and manage their reputation through reviews.
Eurekly
- Problem
- Students and tutors needed one place to find a teacher, book a lesson and pay, instead of arranging classes by hand.
- Built
- A web platform to plan, book and attend one-to-one and group lessons, with video conferencing and a payment gateway built in.
- Outcome
- Students choose from over 60 teachers and book online lessons in one platform.
ChinesePod
- Problem
- A language-learning service wanted live lessons with Mandarin instructors alongside its recorded lessons and exercises.
- Built
- A web platform with a virtual classroom that includes lesson scheduling, video conferencing and an interactive whiteboard, next to the lesson library and exercises.
- Outcome
- Learners study with lessons, exercises and live Mandarin instructors on one platform.
Booking and PMS integrations in hotels and venues: hospitality app development. All projects →
What clients
say.
Verified reviews from our Clutch profile — 4.9 out of 5 across 71 client reviews.
“They didn't simply take our requirements and run with them; they truly made an effort to understand everything.”
“They came through as more of a tech partner rather than just developers for hire.”
“They're accessible, and it doesn't feel like I'm working with a faceless team.”
Booking system
questions.
It is building a booking system around your own rules instead of adapting your business to a packaged tool. The system shows what can be booked and when, takes the booking and any payment, sends confirmations and reminders, and gives your team a back office to manage the diary. It connects to the tools you already use, such as payments, calendars, CRM and accounting. It can be a website, a mobile app or both.
We have not published a price list for booking systems alone, so we give the ranges that apply to all our projects. Discovery, the two-week step that produces a fixed quote, starts from £3,000. A focused first release (MVP) starts from £10,000 and takes 6–8 weeks. A full production web or mobile platform is typically £25,000–£60,000. Support after launch is £2,000–£4,000 a month. The size of your booking rules, the number of user roles and the integrations move the figure most. See our pricing and the cost calculator.
If your bookings are simple appointments with one person or one resource, use a ready-made tool: it is cheaper and live the same day, and we will tell you so in Discovery. A custom system makes sense when a booking depends on several people, rooms or equipment at once, when prices follow your own rules, when you need several locations or business customers in one system, or when per-plan limits and monthly fees no longer fit. See the side-by-side comparison.
A free working prototype takes 5–10 working days and Discovery takes two weeks. A first release that real customers can book on typically takes 6–8 weeks after that. More locations, user roles and integrations follow in phases. If a ready-made tool covers most of what you need, the faster route may be to connect it to your own systems through its API instead; see API integration.
Yes. We integrate payment providers such as Stripe and Adyen, and Apple Pay and Google Pay are part of our standard payment stack. A booking can take full payment, a deposit or no payment, with refund and cancellation rules set to your terms. Payment processing fees are charged by the provider and are separate from the build cost.
Anything with an API. In practice that means payment providers, calendars (Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace), email and SMS, a CRM such as HubSpot or Salesforce, accounting packages such as Xero, Sage and QuickBooks, and your own databases. A well-documented API usually takes 3–5 weeks to integrate and starts at £5,000; a paid integration discovery starts from £1,000. See API integration services.
Yes. We build web booking systems, native or cross-platform mobile apps, and combinations of the two with one back office behind them. Two of our case studies below, GAIN and Eurekly, take bookings through an app or a web platform. Starting with the web version and adding the app once the booking rules are proven is often the cheaper order. See mobile app development in London.
Yes, after Discovery. At Magora the price is fixed once the scope is written down line by line, not before. The free prototype and the two-week Discovery turn your brief into a priced feature list, and you can take that output to another agency for a comparable quote. See fixed-price software development.
You do. We sign an NDA on day one, the code lives in your repository as it is written, and source code, designs and IP transfer to you on payment. Customer and booking data sits in hosting you control in the UK or EU, with access control agreed up front, which makes UK GDPR obligations such as access, retention and deletion easier to meet. Your own data protection adviser signs off the compliance position for your business.
Alexander leads product at Magora. He reviews the scope, product approach and user experience advice on this page.
Thinking about
a booking system?
30-minute call with a senior Solution Architect. Bring your current booking tool and the rule it cannot handle — we will tell you honestly whether to build, buy or connect.