Free Tour Booking Software: What Free Actually Costs

Most tour booking software calls itself free somewhere on the pricing page. In this category, "free" almost never means you pay nothing. It means there's no monthly subscription, and the vendor gets paid another way: a cap that pushes you onto a paid plan, a percentage of every booking, a fee added to your traveler's price at checkout, or add-ons billed separately.

None of that is a trick. They're business models, and each one costs a different operator a different amount. The useful question isn't "is it free?" It's "who pays, how much, and on which bookings?" Here's how to answer that for your own business, with the math shown.

What "free" usually means in tour booking software

Four models cover almost everything you'll run into. Plenty of vendors combine two of them.

1. A free plan with limits

The software is free up to a cap: bookings per month, team members, experiences, or features. Past the cap, you upgrade. That's a fair way to test a tool. The thing to check is where the cap sits against your busy season, because a limit that's comfortable in February can force an upgrade in July.

2. No subscription, a fee per booking

You pay nothing monthly and the vendor takes a percentage of each booking. Your cost follows your revenue: quiet months cost little, busy months cost more. The details matter here. Ask what the percentage applies to: direct bookings, OTA bookings, deposits, refunds, payments you collect offline.

3. A booking fee added to the traveler's price

A variation on the per-booking fee, except the fee is added on top of your price at checkout. Your invoice from the vendor says $0, so it feels free. Your traveler pays more than the price you listed, and that's the price they compare against everyone else's.

FareHarbor is a well-known example of this model. According to FareHarbor's help center, there's no subscription for its booking system, and a 6% booking fee on direct bookings (online, dashboard and payment links) is added to the traveler's price by default for businesses that have been live 12 months or more and processed under $35,000 in online direct bookings in the previous 12 months. It also charges operators a 2% API fee on OTA bookings that come in over its API. Its provider terms list further fees it may charge operators, including for private events, staff-mode bookings, its distribution network, hosted websites and performance marketing, plus an optional commission model where the operator pays instead of the traveler. Rates for accounts outside the 6% rule aren't published.

4. A free core with paid add-ons

The booking engine is free, but the parts that make it useful cost extra: OTA or API connectivity, a website, extra team seats, or features held back for a higher tier. The headline is free. The setup you actually need may not be.

How Samba's pricing works

We're in model 2, with a free allowance up front. Here's the whole thing:

• $0 a month. One plan, everything included. No setup fees, no contracts, cancel anytime.
• Your first $10,000 in bookings is free. That's lifetime, not per month. When you pass it, the fee applies to bookings after the threshold, never retroactively.
• Then a flat 2% per booking, direct or OTA.
• You decide who pays it. Absorb it in your margin, or pass it to guests as a service fee at checkout. You set it once for the workspace.
• Charged once on the full booking value, even when the traveler pays in installments.
• No fee on payments you collect yourself. Cash or a bank transfer you take directly and log in Samba costs nothing.
• Refunds include our fee. If you refund a booking, our 2% on it is refunded too.
• The money is yours from the start. You connect your own Stripe account, payouts go straight to you, and we never hold the money. Stripe's processing fees are separate and go to Stripe.

There are no caps to outgrow: unlimited bookings, experiences and team members. Booking widgets for your website, checkout with deposits and installments, payment links, a traveler portal, OTA channel sync, invoices and receipts, a customer CRM, promo codes, a REST API for your workspace data, and email and chat support are all on the same plan. The full list is on our pricing page.

Why free? Because we only make money when you take bookings. We'd rather earn 2% of a business that's working than a subscription from one that isn't.

What free costs in practice: two worked examples

The inputs below are hypothetical. The rates are Samba's published 2% and the 6% traveler-paid fee from the model above. Card processing is left out because you pay it under every model.

A day-tour operator doing $5,000 a month

Say you sell 100 tickets a month at $50 each. That's 100 × $50 = $5,000 a month, or $60,000 a year.

On Samba:

• Months 1 and 2: $5,000 + $5,000 = $10,000, fully covered by the free allowance. You pay $0.
• Month 3 onward: 2% × $5,000 = $100 a month.
• First 12 months: $60,000 − $10,000 free = $50,000. 2% × $50,000 = $1,000.
• Every year after that: 2% × $60,000 = $1,200.
• Passed on to travelers instead: 2% × $50 = $1, so a $50 ticket shows as $51 at checkout.

With a 6% fee added to the traveler's price:

• 6% × $50 = $3, so the same ticket shows as $53.
• 6% × $5,000 = $300 a month. Over a year, 12 × $300 = $3,600.

Your invoice from the vendor says $0. Your travelers paid $3,600 on top of your prices. Compared with passing on 2% in a full year ($1,200), that's $3,600 − $1,200 = $2,400 more coming out of your customers' pockets.

A multi-day operator selling $3,000 trips

Say one departure has 12 travelers at $3,000 each. That's 12 × $3,000 = $36,000.

• 6% traveler-paid fee: 6% × $3,000 = $180 per traveler, so each one sees $3,180 at checkout. Across the departure, 12 × $180 = $2,160.
• 2% passed on: 2% × $3,000 = $60 per traveler, so each one sees $3,060. Across the departure, 12 × $60 = $720.
• The gap: $180 − $60 = $120 per traveler, or $2,160 − $720 = $1,440 per departure.
• If it's your first departure on Samba: $36,000 − $10,000 free = $26,000. 2% × $26,000 = $520 for the whole departure.
• Installments: a traveler who pays $3,000 in three payments of $1,000 still generates one fee: 2% × $3,000 = $60, collected across those payments. It isn't charged again on each installment.

On a $3,000 trip, a fee added at checkout is a real number, and the traveler sees it right before they click pay.

Run your own numbers

Your volumes, ticket prices and channel mix will be different. Our fee calculator adds up the booking fee, software, OTA commissions and card processing so you can compare the total, not the headline. If you're weighing a flat monthly subscription against a per-booking fee, The Real Cost of Small Tour Operator Software walks through the crossover math. And card fees are their own layer, covered in our guide to payment processing fees.

What to check before you pick a free plan

The fee is one line. These are the others that decide what free costs you:

• Who holds the money, and when you get paid. Some platforms collect your payments into their own account and pay you out on their schedule. Others connect to your own payment provider. Ask where the money sits between booking and payout, and who controls refunds.
• Deposits and installment plans. Multi-day operators live on these, and day-tour operators taking private or group bookings need them too. Check that they're on the free tier, and whether the fee is charged once or on every payment.
• OTA connections and their fees. Is channel connectivity included, and is there a separate fee on OTA bookings? Ask which channels are live today and which are on the roadmap.
• Whether the fee is shown to travelers. If a fee is added at checkout, see how it's labeled, whether you can switch it off, and whether it also applies to payment links and bookings you take by phone.
• Caps. Bookings per month, team members, experiences, and features held back for a higher tier.
• Support. Can you reach a person by email or chat on the free tier, or is that reserved for paid plans?
• Contract and cancel terms. Minimum term, setup fee, notice period. "Free" with a minimum term is a commitment, not a trial.
• Data export. Can you get your bookings, customers and payment records out, and in what format? You'll want that the day you switch, whichever direction you're going.
• $0 bookings. If you run tip-based free walking tours, check whether the system takes a $0 reservation cleanly and whether any fee applies to it.

If you're comparing specific platforms rather than models, we've reviewed 12 booking platforms for tour operators, and our alternatives pages compare Samba with the main vendors one by one.

When free isn't the right call

If you need your own domain on hosted booking pages, a full white-label without the small "Powered by Samba" badge, multi-currency selling, custom commission rates or an SLA, that's our Enterprise tier. It's a conversation, not a checkbox on the free plan. The same logic applies anywhere: once you're doing serious volume, a negotiated rate can beat any free plan's published percentage, so ask.

For everyone else, free should mean you can run the whole business on it without hitting a wall, and the price should be one number you can say out loud. Ours is 2% after your first $10,000.

Get started free and run your first $10,000 in bookings on us, or read the details on our pricing page.