Barber Appointment Web App Design

A few months ago, a friend of mine (a barber) asked me to build him a website where people could book appointments. Since we couldn’t really agree on the price, I had an idea—why not build it for free, not just for him, but for all barbers and hair salons (both men’s and women’s)?

Then the obvious question came up: Okay, but how do we make money?

Running Google or Meta ads would hurt the user experience, so I started thinking differently—why not solve a real problem and charge for that instead?

That’s when I came up with the idea of building a separate mobile app for service providers. An app that actually helps them during the workday:

– notifications about who’s next and when the appointment starts

– quick booking when a client walks in without an appointment

– overall better control and flow of their schedule

This would be a paid app, priced at $50/month. To put it into perspective: in my city (around 25,000 people), there are about 30 hair salons. For men’s barbershops especially, none of them make under $2,500 per month—in a country where the average salary is €600–700. So I’m confident this price makes sense for the value they’d get.

I also have another idea that I’m pretty sure doesn’t really exist yet—a kind of protection against “bad” clients who book appointments and don’t show up. To book through the app, users would need a verified account. When booking, they’d have two options: pay upfront or pay in person after the service.

If someone books an appointment and doesn’t show up, they don’t lose the right to book again—but from that point on, they would always have to pay upfront when booking.

This turned out longer than planned, but I really wanted to share it with you. Below, you’ll also find a Figma prototype I made for the web version.

Let me know what you think. If anyone is interested in getting involved, this could easily become a global product. My team already includes a React developer, so besides design, we can cover development as well. What we’d be missing is someone with experience and 💸.