Most booking software works like this: you type your clients into the company's system, and the company keeps them. Your appointments, your notes, your phone numbers, your regulars, and all of it sits in a database owned by somebody else, who decides what happens to it.

Book Visit Now does not have that database. Not a locked one. Not an encrypted one. There is no server on our side at all.

Where your information actually lives

Your clients live in your Apple Contacts. The same Contacts app you already use. Book Visit Now reads from it and writes back to it, and adds the people you book to a group called My Clients so you can find them anywhere.

Your appointments live in your Apple Calendar.  In a calendar called Book Visit Now. You can see them on your watch, in Siri, on a Mac that has never had our app installed.

Everything else lives in your iCloud.  Notes, photos, pricing, history. It syncs between your iPhone, iPad and Mac through your own iCloud account, the same way your photos do.

We never receive any of it. There is nowhere for it to go.

What this means on a practical level

Nobody can advertise to your clients. We do not have their phone numbers. We could not text them if we wanted to.

Nobody shows them a competitor. There is no marketplace, no directory, no "businesses like this one" section. When your client interacts with your booking, the only business involved is yours. You control your appointments.

We cannot charge you for your own clients. Some platforms take 20% or 30% of a new client's first visit. We have no way to know who booked with you, so we have no way to bill you for it. The mechanism does not exist.

Nothing is held hostage if you leave. Your clients are in Contacts. Your appointments are in Calendar. Everything else exports to CSV or PDF. There is no migration to survive, because there is nothing of yours in our possession. If you cancel your subscription, your contacts are still there, your appointments are still on your calendar. Any notes and reports that were created in Book Visit Now are still exportable.

We cannot be sold. A company that holds a million client lists is worth a great deal to an acquirer. That is the business model behind most of the platforms you have been offered. We do not have that asset, which means we cannot one day be persuaded to monetize it. Of course, our business could be sold, but the purchaser would not get any client list from us.

The part most people miss

Exporting a spreadsheet is not the same as owning the relationship.

On a marketplace platform, your client creates an account with the *platform*. Their login belongs to the platform. Their saved card belongs to the platform. Their notification settings, their booking history, their habit of opening that app when they want an appointment, and all of it belongs to the platform.

Download your CSV on the way out and you will get names and email addresses. You will not get the channel. The next time that client wants an appointment, she opens the app she has always opened, and you are one of several businesses in it. 

Three questions to ask any booking app

Worth asking before you type a single client into anything.

1. If I leave tomorrow, how do I get my client list out, and what does it cost? Some platforms give you a button. At least one requires you to email support and ask. At least one charges a fee for a large export and closes the window 30 days after you cancel.
2. Do my clients see other businesses anywhere in the booking process? If the app has a consumer-facing directory, the answer is yes, whatever the marketing says. Ask whether you are listed in it by default.
3. Do you charge me when a client books through your app instead of my link? This is where the real money is. Ask what counts as a "new" client, who decides, and what happens when a regular of yours happens to book through the app.

What we give up to do it this way

This is not a free lunch, and you should know the cost before you commit.

There is no online booking. Your clients cannot book themselves at midnight, because that would require a server of ours sitting between you and them. You take appointments by phone, email, or text, the way you did before.

There are no card payments or deposits in the app. We do not process payments, so we cannot hold a card on file or charge a no-show fee automatically.

We will never send you a new client. Platforms with marketplaces genuinely do introduce businesses to customers. We have no marketplace, so we cannot. If you are building a book from nothing, that is a real advantage they have over us.

This is one reason we offer a FREE version of Book Visit Now. To help build your business, you can use ALL features of Book Visit Now for up to 10 clients at no charge. This helps you build your business with no monthly costs for appointments.

It is Apple only. iPhone, iPad and Mac. No Android, no web browser.

If those trade-offs do not work for you, we would rather you found that out here than after you paid us.