Custom Booking System or HotDoc, Cliniko or Halaxy? A Clinic's Guide
We build booking systems for a living, so you might expect this article to tell you to build one. It won't. For a lot of clinics, HotDoc, Cliniko, Halaxy or Power Diary is the right answer, and we say so in the coffee chat.
This is the guide to working out which side of the line you're on.
When off-the-shelf is the right call
Stay on a platform if most of these are true:
- Your booking flow is standard. One practitioner or a few, standard appointment types, a calendar, reminders. The platforms do this well.
- The monthly fee is small next to your revenue. If you're paying under a hundred dollars a month and it just works, leave it alone.
- You need the clinical side too. Cliniko and Halaxy are practice-management systems first. Notes, invoicing, Medicare claiming. A booking system doesn't replace those, and we'd never suggest it should.
- Nobody at the front desk is complaining. Genuinely the best signal.
In that situation we'll build you a great website and embed the platform's booking widget in it, styled as well as the widget allows.
The four signs you've outgrown it
1. Per-booking or per-member fees are eating margin. Some platforms charge per online booking, per SMS, or per active client. Pilates Republic was paying a monthly fee for every member on their booking app. When the maths tipped, they built their own class booking and timetable and now 92% of classes book online with no per-member cost.
2. There's a flow the platform can't do. New-patient intake that branches by condition. Family bookings across two practitioners in one go. A waitlist that fills a cancelled slot automatically. Practitioner-specific deposits. Platforms are built for the average clinic, and every clinic has something that isn't average.
3. The booking experience is part of your brand. A premium skin clinic or a boutique studio loses something when the last step looks like every other clinic's widget. Lumière Skin's traffic came almost entirely from Instagram on phones. A widget that pinched and zoomed was costing them bookings; a flow designed for thumbs fixed it.
4. You want the data to be yours. Booking history, no-show patterns, busiest hours, which practitioner fills first. On a platform, you get whatever reports they offer. On your own system, you get whatever you ask for.
If two or more of those are true, keep reading.
What a custom system costs and includes
Our clinic booking systems start at $6,000 with a fixed written quote. That includes:
- Live availability across practitioners, rooms and appointment types
- New-patient intake forms completed before arrival
- SMS and email reminders with one-tap confirm or reschedule
- Optional deposits and payments
- Integration with your practice software where it has an API
- Reporting on no-shows, fill rate and busy hours
There's no platform fee afterwards. You pay hosting, which is a few dollars a month, and a care plan if you want us on call. Most clinics find the build pays for itself somewhere between a few weeks and six months, depending on how much they were paying in fees and how many bookings they were losing to friction.
A worked example
Bright Smile Dental in Brisbane had three dentists, one very busy front desk, and forty-plus phone calls a day just to book, move or cancel. Their old site was a brochure from 2016.
We built a website around one job: getting patients booked without a phone call. Live availability for all three dentists, forms filled in before arrival, reminders 48 hours out.
Within three months, most new bookings arrived online, booking calls dropped 41%, and the practice stopped paying a booking platform's monthly fee. The full case study has the numbers.
Questions to ask either vendor
Whether you're talking to a platform's sales team or to us, ask:
- What does it cost per booking, per SMS and per practitioner, and how does that scale?
- Can it do the one thing that's specific to our clinic? (Name it. Watch the answer.)
- Who owns the booking data, and can we export it?
- What happens to bookings if the service goes down?
- Does it integrate with our practice-management software, and how?
Honest answers to those five will tell you which side of the line you're on. If you'd like a second opinion, the coffee chat is free and we'll tell you if you don't need us.