Savings quiz
Six questions. The answer is not the headline rate, because the headline rate is the part everybody publishes. It is the commission, the modules and the seats underneath it, plus what a higher price at checkout does to your booking count.
FareHarbor publishes no monthly subscription. It earns through an online booking fee of about 6% added to the customer's checkout total as a convenience fee, which is the same shape as the 4.5% here and a higher number.
Underneath that sits the card processing. FareHarbor runs the payments, so the rate is theirs to set and it lands on the operator rather than the guest, at roughly 3% of gross bookings. With Bodhisys you keep your own processor and pay them directly at the rate you negotiated, which is the only place that 3% is not ours to charge.
Their situational fees sit on top of both: an offline booking fee of up to 6% on manual, phone and walk-up entries where online volume falls below their threshold, and a 2% channel fee on OTA bookings on top of whatever the OTA itself takes. Whether you carry those depends on your mix, so they are their own line in the calculator rather than part of the headline.
6% on the guest and about 3% in processing on you is roughly 9% all in against 4.5% here, which is why the comparison worth running is the all-in effective take rather than the headline rate. Put your own mix of online, phone and OTA volume into the calculator.
Peek Pro also runs on a booking fee added at the customer's checkout rather than a subscription, and it runs higher than FareHarbor's at about 8%. Card processing of roughly 3% sits on the operator on top of it, because Peek Pro runs the payments too, which puts the all-in take around 11% against 4.5% here. Marketplace and OTA bookings carry their own commission again on top of that.
The number to compare is what leaves the business across a season on your own mix, which is what the calculator produces.
Bike Rental Manager publishes two models. The subscription is annual and priced by fleet size: $859 for up to 50 rental items, $1,299 for up to 100, $2,199 for up to 250 and $3,769 for up to 10,000, with annual billing about 20% cheaper than monthly. The alternative is usage-based at 4% per booking with no subscription, and their platform lets that 4% be passed to the customer.
Read the subscription tiers as a fleet-size question. At 250 units the Gold tier is $2,199 a year whatever you book against them, which is why a busy operator does better on a subscription and a quiet one does better on a percentage. The calculator names your own crossover.
The subscription is the one cost on this page that cannot be handed to the guest. Their usage-based 4% can be added to the customer's total, and so can our 4.5%, but a $2,199 annual bill has no line at checkout to sit on. It comes out of your margin whatever kind of season you have, and a quiet one costs exactly what a busy one does.
How much of our 4.5% the guest carries is your setting rather than ours. Pass on all of it, none of it, or any share in between. Pass on none and it is a 4.5% cost of sale you have chosen to absorb, and your guest sees no booking fee at all; pass on all of it and it never touches your margin. That choice is what a subscription does not give you.
Put the terms you are billed into the fields below. The guest-paid surcharge and the operator-paid commission behave differently, so they are asked for separately.
Every number above is editable. The defaults are working assumptions, not published rates · put your own contract in and the answer changes with it.
| Line | Bodhisys | FareHarbor | Difference a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Booking fee added at checkout | 4.5% | 6.0% | $10,530 |
| Booking fee you absorb | 0.0% | 0.0% | $0 |
| Card processing charged by the platform | 0.0% | 3.0% | $21,060 |
| Reseller and OTA commission | 0.0% | 0.0% | $0 |
| Paid modules, seats, SMS overage | 0.0% | 0.0% | $0 |
| Monthly software fee | 0.0% | 0.0% | $0 |
| All-in effective take | 4.5% | 9.0% | $31,590 |
You are passing the whole 4.5% to your guest, so it never touches your margin.
The share is yours to set on the slider above, anywhere from none of it to all of it. Pass on all of it and you receive your list price on every reservation. Pass on none and the 4.5% is a cost of sale you have chosen to absorb, and your guest sees no booking fee at all. A subscription platform has no line at checkout to attach a fee to, so a fixed annual bill lands on your margin whatever kind of season you have.
Your customer sees $235 at checkout instead of $239 · 1.42% cheaper. At the sensitivity you picked that moves bookings up 2.12%.
A guest comparing two operators is comparing two totals, not two take rates. The surcharge is the only part of a platform's pricing they ever see, and it lands at the exact moment they are deciding whether to book. A percentage point off that total is small, and it is not nothing.
That is what you would have to add in new gross bookings, at a 62% contribution margin, to put the same $30,299 on the bottom line. Fees are the cheaper place to find it: every dollar you stop paying is a dollar of margin, and it does not need a single extra rental.
The published rate is rarely the whole cost. FareHarbor adds about 6% to the guest's checkout total and Peek Pro about 8%, and where the platform runs the payments as well, card processing of roughly 3% lands on the operator on top of it. That is about 9% and about 11% all in against 4.5% here. Bodhisys charges a single percentage at checkout, paid by the customer, with no monthly fee and no paid modules.
Card processing is about 3% and somebody pays it on every platform. The difference is who bills it. On Bodhisys you keep your own processor and pay them directly at the rate you negotiated, which is why nothing sits beside our rate in the column on the left.
Gross bookings are reservations per month times operating months times average order value. Costs are split by who pays them: a booking fee added at checkout is paid by your guest and does not reduce your revenue, while commission, modules, seats and monthly fees do.
The conversion effect applies an own-price elasticity of demand, 0.8, 1.5 or 2.4 for low, medium and high sensitivity, applied to the difference in what your guest pays at checkout. Extra bookings are valued at your contribution margin, not at full revenue.
The defaults are assumptions chosen to be plausible for a mid-size seasonal rental operation, not quoted terms. Every platform publishes its own commercial terms, and they change. Put your real contract into the fields above and check the output against your last twelve months of statements.
It is the sum of two editable lines: a 6% booking fee added at the guest's checkout, and roughly 3% card processing charged by the platform that runs the payments and carried by the operator. Reseller and OTA commission, paid modules and seat licences are their own lines and start at zero, because they depend on your channel mix and your plan rather than on the platform alone.
A guest compares the total at checkout, not the take rate. A 4.5% surcharge instead of 6% makes the total roughly 1.42% cheaper. The calculator applies an own-price elasticity of demand of 0.8, 1.5 or 2.4 depending on the price sensitivity you select, and reports the resulting change in bookings.
Fees you stop paying are pure margin. New revenue is not. At a 62% contribution margin, a dollar saved on commission is worth about a dollar and sixty cents of additional gross bookings, which is why the calculator reports the equivalent sales figure alongside the saving.
No. They are editable starting assumptions. Compare them against each vendor's current published terms rather than against this page, and change the fields to match what you are billed.
Model and default assumptions reviewed 2026-08. Re-check each quarter; these are well-resourced companies that ship, and their commercial terms move.
Bring your last twelve months of statements to a demo and we will run this against your real numbers rather than our defaults.
