bookaby.co.uk

What It Is

Bookaby is an online scheduling, booking, and customer management system provided by the UK-based Bookaby Ltd, aimed at small businesses running classes and activities. Typical use cases include children’s activity classes, holiday camps, fitness and wellness sessions, performing arts, martial arts, workshops, and similar offerings. The product is delivered as a PWA/Web App, usable in a desktop browser and installable on phones or tablets.

Core Capabilities

Bookaby’s features are built around “selling and delivering classes”: it supports terms/courses, individual sessions, drop-ins, trial classes, ticketed events, waitlists, class passes, discounts, online payments, deferred payments, check-in/check-out, and attendance records. For child-focused businesses, it provides fields for child profiles, medical and emotional notes, emergency contacts, collection passwords, and authorized pick-up persons, making it more suited to children’s training and childcare scenarios than generic booking tools. On the team side, it supports staff logins, different access levels, and Lockdown Mode. For data, it supports exporting reports to Google Drive and can connect with Mailchimp.

Pricing

Pricing is relatively clear: Free is free and has no usage limits; Lite is £10/month and adds online payments, discounts, basic website embedding, and branding; Standard is £25/month and adds custom fields, deeper embedding, trial classes, single-session bookings, attendee messaging, and product sales; Pro is £35/month and includes waitlists, class passes, reports, staff logins, ticketing, Mailchimp, Google Drive, and priority support. New accounts can try Pro for 14 days without a credit card.

Pros and Cons

The advantages are its low-barrier free plan, detailed class-business model, website-friendly embedding, and compliance awareness around GDPR, privacy policies, and marketing consent records. The drawbacks are that many operationally important features are only available on Pro; no API/Webhook was found in public materials; payments depend on Stripe; and the product is more oriented toward the UK market.

Who It’s For

It is suitable for small training, parent-child, fitness, camp, performance, and workshop organizations looking to reduce manual work around registrations, payments, rosters, and notifications.

Access from China

The source text does not provide information on access from mainland China, ICP filing, server nodes, or local payment methods, so this is unknown. Chinese teams should test access speed and Stripe availability before adoption.