The first thing an operator asks is rarely what a system costs per month. It is what it will cost by the end of the year, once every booking has been taken. Those are different questions with different answers, and the gap between them is the most useful thing to understand when comparing booking systems. A cheap subscription that takes a few percent of every booking becomes the expensive option the moment the venue starts doing well. Below is what Digilist costs, how the subscription is built, what is included, and why we decided not to charge per booking.
The short answer: a subscription, and no share of your revenue
Digilist is a subscription. You pay to use the platform and the administration panel, and the price depends on how many venues you have, how many people need to use the system, and which integrations you need.
What we do not do is take a share of what you charge for rentals. No transaction fee, no percentage of revenue, no cost per booking. If you rent the hall out for the equivalent of a few hundred euros, that money is yours. If you rent the same hall fifty times a year instead of twenty, Digilist does not cost more for it.
That is a deliberate choice, and it is worth explaining why.
Why we do not charge per booking
A percentage model sounds reasonable the first time you read it. The supplier earns when the customer earns, and the barrier to starting is low. The problem is what it does to incentives over time.
A system that takes a share of every booking earns more the more you rent out. Which means the part of the work you do yourself — the marketing, the maintenance, the relationship with your local community, the evening someone calls to ask whether the room is free on a public holiday — also makes your supplier richer. You do the work, and the bill grows.
It also has an uncomfortable effect in the other direction. A percentage-based system punishes precisely the operator who succeeds. A community hall going from twenty rentals a year to sixty is exactly the moment you least want a supplier cost that triples alongside.
We would rather the price tracked how much system you actually use, not how well things are going for you. Growing from one venue to five changes your subscription. Going from twenty to sixty bookings in the same venue does not.
How the subscription is built
Digilist has several tiers. Which one you are on is set by three things:
- Number of venues. One function room is a different problem from fourteen public buildings, each with its own rules for capacity, pricing and user groups.
- How many people use the system. An operator who administers everything themselves has different needs from an organisation where facility managers, case handlers and local clubs are all in the system with different permissions.
- Which integrations you need. The standard ones are included. Custom work against your own systems is priced separately by scope.
We do not publish a price list with fixed numbers, and honestly that is because a number on a website would be wrong for most people reading it. The span between a community hall with one room and a county authority with twenty-two schools is wide enough that a single figure is either too high for one or meaningless to the other. What you get instead is a concrete quote for your setup, after a short conversation.
What is included
The subscription covers use of the platform and the administration panel: calendars, booking, payment, contracts and reporting. Standard integrations are part of the price rather than priced as modules — payment providers, national digital identity for secure sign-in, electronic invoicing to the European standard, and the common accounting systems.
No hidden charges. No per-booking cost. No share of your revenue.
That last point is worth repeating for a simple reason: it is the question that most often comes last in a sales conversation, once everything else is settled, and it is then that the answer matters most.
Smaller operators do not pay what large organisations pay
The most common question we get from small operators is not what it costs. It is whether they are too small to be relevant at all.
The answer is no, and the price should reflect that. Clubs, associations, community halls, parish halls, scout huts, boat clubs and private operators with a single venue get their own tailored pricing. It should not resemble what a large public body with many buildings pays, for the simple reason that the need does not resemble it either.
A single venue is not a problem. It is often precisely with one active venue that you notice manual booking disappearing fastest, because there is one person who today holds the calendar, the keys and the inbox, and who feels the difference in the first week.
The first 100 customers get 6 months free
We are giving the first 100 customers six months of Digilist free. No lock-in during the trial.
The reason is not that we need a campaign. It is that a booking system is impossible to evaluate properly from a demo. A demo shows you what the system looks like. What you actually want to know is how it behaves in the busy month, when three groups want the same hall, when someone cancels two days before, when the accountant needs the numbers, and when you are away and somebody else has to take over. That takes longer than an hour to find out, and it should not cost anything to find out.
After the trial you choose a tier based on what you actually ended up using.
What about payment provider fees?
Digilist takes nothing itself from your booking revenue. The payment providers — the card processor, the mobile payment app — have their own terms for processing payments, and that is a relationship between you and them. We go through how it looks for your setup in the conversation, rather than quoting numbers here that can change.
That is the one part of the calculation we do not control, and we would rather say so plainly than leave it as a small addition somebody discovers later.
How to find out what it costs for you
The shortest route to a number is telling us three things: how many venues it covers, what they are used for, and roughly how many rentals a year. With that, an adviser can place you in the right tier straight away and give a concrete quote instead of a range.
In short
Digilist is a subscription, not a commission. You pay for the system, not for succeeding at renting your space out. Standard integrations are included, there are no hidden charges, smaller operators get their own tailored pricing, and the first 100 customers get six months free with no lock-in.
What decides the price is how much system you need. What does not decide it is how much you earn.