Posts tagged with: apptonly,entrepreneurship
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The Booking Software for Solo Massage Therapists That I Wish Existed (So I Built It)
A solo developer's story of ditching marketplace booking fees and building ApptOnly - booking software for massage therapists, nail techs, and solo pros.
Well, hello again. It's been a minute since I wrote anything here that wasn't about Cursor, Claude, or some shiny new coding agent. But I'd rather build things than write about building things, so it takes an actual story to drag me back here, and this time I've got one. This time I pointed the AI tooling I usually write about at something of my own and shipped a real product with it.
The short version: I got annoyed. The longer version is about marketplace fees, 20+ years of building software, and a question I can't stop chewing on about which other industries might be sitting ducks as software development keeps changing.
The marketplace fee that broke me
My fiancée runs a small wellness practice, and like most practices, we used a booking platform to handle scheduling and payments. We started out on a service called MassageBook, which is a dominant player in the massage niche and, to be fair, does a LOT right.
But the model has a catch I couldn't unsee once I saw it: the marketplace. Your booking page lives inside theirdirectory, alongside every other therapist in your zip code. When a...