The booking fee the parent pays, and you never see

The arrangement is straightforward once you look for it. The software is free or nearly free to you. At checkout, a service fee of a few per cent is added to what the customer pays. You receive your price; they pay more than your price.

Nothing about this is hidden, exactly. It is in the terms. It simply never appears on anything you look at, so a year can pass without it crossing your mind.

Why it matters more for lessons than for most things

Two features of this trade make a customer-side fee bite harder than it would elsewhere.

Your customer is comparing. A parent choosing a driving school has three tabs open and is looking at a number. If your $75 lesson arrives at checkout as $79.50 and the school across town arrives at $75, you have lost on price without ever having been more expensive.

They buy repeatedly. This is not a one-off holiday purchase. A student takes ten, twenty, thirty lessons. A fee that looks trivial once is not trivial by the end, and the parent notices somewhere around the fourth time.

The awkward second-order effect

There is a subtler cost. If booking online carries a fee and phoning does not, you have built a small financial incentive for parents to phone you — and phoning is precisely the thing you were trying to reduce. The system charges your customer for using the feature you bought it for.

Card processing is not the same thing

Worth separating clearly, because the two get conflated. Card processing — roughly 2.9 % plus 30 cents in the US — is charged by the payment processor, comes out of your side, and is unavoidable on any card payment anywhere. That is a real cost of accepting cards, and it is the same whoever built your website.

A booking fee is a different thing: a platform's own margin, added on top, paid by your customer. One is the price of taking a card. The other is the price of the software, moved somewhere you will not see it.

How to check in two minutes

Book a lesson on your own website with a real card, as a stranger would. Look at the amount that leaves the card, and compare it with your price. If they differ by more than the tax you set, you have your answer — and you now know something about your own checkout that you did not know this morning.