October 2, 2026
Type "Checkfront pricing" into Google and the first thing you'll hit is Checkfront's own page, promising "simple pricing, no hidden fees." It's clean and it's confident. What it doesn't do is show you the number that actually lands on your statement once you stack a seasonal booking calendar, payment processing, and a flat monthly fee that keeps charging whether you ran a single tour that month or not.
So let's do the math Checkfront's marketing page skips. Here's what the platform really costs at different booking volumes, where the extra fees hide, why the price changed in the first place, and the point where a flat monthly subscription stops making sense for a six-month-a-year tour or charter business.
Checkfront's live pricing page advertises one plan for everyone: a $99/month subscription fee plus a 3% online booking fee charged at the time of booking, with "no setup fees, no hidden charges." You choose whether to absorb that 3% or pass it to the guest at checkout.
This isn't a limited-time promo. Checkfront's own FAQ page repeats the mechanic almost word for word — "$99 monthly subscription fee to the operator, plus a 3% online booking fee that you can absorb or pass onto the customer" — so it's the current standard offer, not a flash sale that resets next quarter.
Two numbers, then. A fixed $99 every month, and 3% of everything you sell online. Simple to say. The part that matters is how those two numbers behave once real volume runs through them — and what else quietly attaches on top.
This is where Checkfront's own messaging gets muddy. The live pricing page lists exactly two things: the $99 + 3% plan and a paid "Managed" tier. No free plan anywhere. Yet Checkfront's FAQ page separately mentions "our free plan" coming with email support. Both pages are Checkfront's. They don't agree with each other.
The free trial story is just as tangled. Capterra's listing says a 21-day free trial is available, and Checkfront's own X/Twitter bio invites you to "Start your free 21-day trial today." Meanwhile G2's pricing page flatly states that "A free trial of Checkfront is not available" (its pricing info was last updated October 2024). Three sources, two opposite answers.
The honest takeaway: don't count on a free plan or a free trial until you've confirmed it live on your own account. When a vendor's own pages contradict each other, the terms you see at signup are the only ones that bind. If you're weighing "free" as a starting point at all, it's worth reading what 'free' booking software actually costs you before you build your season around it.
Here's the teardown Checkfront's page won't build for you. Take the $99 base, add 3% of your online booking revenue, and watch the effective rate move:
| Monthly online bookings | 3% booking fee | Flat base | Total / month | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $3,000 | $90 | $99 | $189 | ~6.3% |
| $10,000 | $300 | $99 | $399 | ~4.0% |
| $25,000 | $750 | $99 | $849 | ~3.4% |
| $50,000 | $1,500 | $99 | $1,599 | ~3.2% |
The pattern is the whole story. At high volume the $99 barely registers and your blended rate drifts toward the raw 3%. At low volume that same $99 is a tax on a slow month — a shoulder-season week doing $3,000 online is really paying an effective 6.3%, more than double the headline rate. The flat fee doesn't shrink when your bookings do. That's fine in July. It stings in January.
None of the numbers above include the cost of actually moving the money. Checkfront Payments, the built-in processor, runs on Stripe, and here's the detail operators miss: Checkfront confirms it charges its processing fee on the full booking amount — the 3% booking fee included — "because we are charged network costs and fees on the total amount." The booking fee is not processing-fee-exempt.
Work a quick example. A guest books a $200 tour. The 3% booking fee adds $6, so the full $206 goes through the processor. Stripe's standard published rate is 2.9% + $0.30 per successful domestic-card transaction, which on $206 is about $6.27. Checkfront doesn't publish its own markup over Stripe, so treat 2.9% + $0.30 as the floor, not the ceiling.
And tourism rarely runs on domestic cards alone. Stripe's published surcharges stack: +0.5% for manually entered cards (think a phone booking you key in at the dock), +1.5% for international cards, and +1% when a currency conversion is required. For a Caribbean operator selling to visitors from the US, Canada, and Europe, those line items aren't edge cases — they're most of the book.
Credit where it's due, because this is a genuine point in Checkfront's favor. Checkfront says it does not charge extra fees on OTA bookings routed through Viator, GetYourGuide, Google Things to Do, or its 20,000+ reseller network, and it doesn't charge on API-generated bookings either. It explicitly contrasts this with unnamed "competitors" who add "up to 2% fee on top of OTA commissions" or on API bookings.
If a big slice of your sales already comes through Viator and GetYourGuide, that matters. You're paying the OTA's commission once; Checkfront isn't double-dipping on top of it. For an operator with a heavy channel mix, that restraint can be worth more than the 3% on your direct sales.
If you've been with Checkfront a while, you may not be on the $99 + 3% plan at all. The current lineup — Growth (Subscription), Growth (Online Booking Fee), and Managed — replaced a set of legacy plans named Soho, Pro, Plus, Enterprise, and Flex. Checkfront says legacy customers are not auto-upgraded, and there's currently no set timeline for retiring the old plans, though it would give notice before changing that.
The legacy plans work on a different and easy-to-misjudge model: an annual booking volume allowance equal to your plan number plus 100 for testing. Legacy Soho allows 1,300 bookings a year, Pro 3,100, Plus 6,100. The catch is what counts as a "booking" — every unique invoice does, regardless of status. Voided, cancelled, and test bookings all burn through the allowance. If your season is full of tentative holds and weather cancellations, you can eat into that cap faster than your actual paid rides suggest. Know your number before you assume you're safely under it.
Here's the background that doesn't show up on a vendor pricing page or a review-aggregator listing — and it explains a lot.
Before mid-2023, Checkfront let you choose how to pay: either a flat subscription fee or a 3% booking fee on online reservations. An either/or. Not the stacked "subscription + fee" model you see today. Then the structure shifted, and the timing isn't a coincidence.
In July 2023, Victoria, BC–based Checkfront merged with the Australian booking platform Rezdy; European platform Regiondo joined the combined group shortly after, according to industry outlet Arival. That created a single reservation-technology rollup spanning North America, Oceania, and Europe. PhocusWire reports the private-equity firm behind it is Vertica Capital Partners, which invested roughly $150 million to acquire and merge the three companies. Following a 2024 leadership shakeup, FareHarbor co-founder and former CEO Lawrence Hester — himself a limited partner at Vertica — became CEO of the combined group (operating as Expedition Software Holding), per Arival.
So the platform you're pricing today isn't the independent Canadian company it was a few years ago. It's one brand inside a PE-funded, FareHarbor-led rollup. When pricing models change after a deal like that, it's usually the deal talking.
This is the part the star ratings don't tell you up front. Multiple verified Capterra reviewers report unannounced or steep recent increases. One operator of 2+ years wrote: "I just received an invoice for next year, 2026... There's no way those price increases are justified - the booking software is still exactly the same as 7 years ago." Checkfront's official reply doesn't deny it — it confirms the company has "adjust[ed] some legacy plan pricing due to increased operational costs and economic conditions," and says it emails customers 30 days before a pricing change.
The aggregate sentiment is split, and the split is telling. GetApp's analysis of 318 reviews found users praising "reasonable monthly fees without extra per-booking or per-user charges," while in the same breath noting that "some reviewers feel pricing tiers can be confusing" and flagging "recent price increases and limited customization" as drawbacks. People like the model in principle and distrust where it's heading.
The ratings gap says the rest. A buyer's guide from TrekkSoft found Checkfront averaging 4.5/5 across 316 Capterra reviews but only 2.5/5 on Trustpilot — the largest Capterra-to-Trustpilot gap of any platform it reviewed. The Trustpilot sample is tiny (four reviews), so don't over-read it, but TrekkSoft attributes the divergence to Trustpilot reviews skewing toward more recent, post-merger experiences: slower support, platform-stability complaints. In other words, the glowing average is partly older reviews, and the newer ones are grumpier.
Strip away the subscription and Checkfront's 3% booking fee is mid-pack, not high. A competitor comparison (published by Bókun, so read it with that in mind — vendor-published, not independently verified) calls Checkfront's 3% "pretty moderate" next to FareHarbor and Peek Pro, which it says charge somewhere between 4% and 8%, while naming Bókun's own fee of 1% to 1.5% as lower still.
Take those ranges as directional, not gospel. The honest read is that Checkfront's booking fee sits in the reasonable middle — it's the $99/month stacked on top that becomes the real variable in your total cost. A high-fee competitor with no monthly minimum can actually beat Checkfront in a slow month, and lose to it in a busy one. If you want to see how one of those higher-fee platforms pencils out, we broke down how Peek Pro's pricing stacks up using the same method.
Here's the breakeven most operators never run. A flat $99/month doesn't pause in the off-season. If you run a boat charter or a tour that genuinely operates six months a year, you've got two options, and both cost you.
Keep the subscription live year-round and you pay $99 × 12 = $1,188 for a business that only earns half the calendar. Spread across your six real operating months, that's an effective ~$198/month in fixed cost before a single booking fee or processing charge — roughly double the headline rate, charged against the months that actually pay your bills. Cancel in the off-season instead and you're re-onboarding, re-syncing channels, and reconfiguring every spring.
None of that makes Checkfront a bad platform. It makes it a year-round-shaped platform — priced for an operator who books steadily in every month. The further your calendar is from that shape, the worse the flat fee treats you. If you're already doing this math, it's worth lining Checkfront up against the field in a full Checkfront alternatives comparison built for seasonal Caribbean operators.
We build Junglebee, so take this as the plain pitch it is — not a hard sell, just the natural next read if the numbers above gave you pause.
Junglebee was built by a family from the tour industry, out of St. Maarten, for small tour and charter operators. There's no monthly fee and no setup fee — you paste a booking widget on your site, take card payments, and pay only a small per-transaction booking fee. For a seasonal business, that structure is the whole point: nothing accrues in the months you're closed, and your cost scales with the bookings you actually take instead of a flat line on the calendar. You can see Junglebee's pricing and run it against your own season the same way we ran Checkfront's here.
Whichever platform you land on, do the full math before you sign: base fee, booking fee, processing on the full amount, and the shape of your real operating year. The headline number is never the number you pay.
