Booking · deposits · POS · texting — for tattoo & piercing shops
Built in atattoo shop.Not a boardroom.
Deposits, calendar, counter and texting in one system — so the front desk stops being the thing you do between clients. Built by a working tattoo artist, not for nail salons.
14-day free trial · cancel any time
Month to month, no contract. Card payments land in your own Stripe account — we add no platform fee.
A deposit clears before a slot is held.
No unpaid holds to chase. Core plan.
Age and guardian attestation, on the booking.
Taken before the slot, kept on the client record.
Money lands in your own Stripe account.
You are the merchant of record. We add no platform fee.
Watch it work
Fifty seconds of your day, on screen.
Real recordings of the running product — not a mockup, not sped up. Pick a tab, or let it run.
Public booking page. Demo studio, fictional data.
The deposit clears before the chair is held.
Your booking page walks a client through service, artist, and an open slot, then takes the deposit through hosted checkout. The appointment is created when the payment succeeds — not before. There are no unpaid holds to chase on a Monday morning.
- Deposit applies in full to the appointment total
- Confirmation text goes out on its own, once your number is live
- The thread lands in your inbox, not a personal phone
- Your own booking link, on your own studio page
Every clip and screenshot on this page is a real recording of Needlebase running against Ironclad Tattoo Collective — the fictional studio the demo data ships with. Nothing is a mockup, nothing is sped up, and no real studio’s data appears anywhere.
Or open the demo shop and click around it yourself — no signup.
The reason this exists
Put a year’s number on the empty chair.
Move the dials to your shop. The math is yours; we are only doing the multiplication.
Chair time that walked, a year of it
$37,440
Collected up front at 25%
$9,360
$37,440 of chair time a year, of which $9,360 would be collected up front at 25 percent.
A deposit does not stop someone cancelling. It means the empty chair already paid for part of itself, and the client had to mean it before the slot was held.
Arithmetic on the numbers you set above. Nothing here is a projection of what Needlebase would earn you.
We will not promise you get that back — nobody honestly can. What Needlebase does is put the deposit you decided to charge in your own Stripe account before the chair is held, instead of in a text you send on a Sunday night.
What else is in the box
The parts nobody demos, that you use every day.
A shop is not four screens. Here is what is in Core, what sits in an add-on, and what is still being built — labelled, so you find out here and not at checkout.
Reports that answer the artist’s question
What did I make, what am I owed, what did the shop take. Commission payouts and reporting are in the core plan — never an upsell.
A booking page that looks like your shop
Your own page, your own services and deposits, your own artists. Clients never see a marketplace with someone else’s work on it.
- 01Studio
Consent, waivers and aftercare
Digital forms with guardian name, relationship and minor date of birth, stored exactly as signed. Aftercare goes out without anyone remembering to send it.
- 02Core
Clients who are actually a record
History, balances, notes, opt-out state and every message in one place — not a name in a calendar cell.
- 03Studio add-on
Retail at the counter
Jewellery and aftercare ring up on the POS against the client and the artist. Full stock control — vendors, purchase orders and counts — is being built and is not in the product yet.
- 04Core
Built multi-artist from the floor up
Per-artist availability, attribution and payouts. Front-desk accounts that take no bookings are free and unlimited.
- 05Core
Your clients are yours
Revenue and payout reports download as CSV from the dashboard, and your tenant data is isolated at the database itself — not by a filter someone remembered to write. A one-click export of the whole account is on the roadmap, not shipped.
- 06With the AI front desk
Bring your own agent
The same scoped, audited API our concierge runs on is open to your own tools — per-key scopes, a kill switch, and every call in the audit log.
Coming from somewhere else
Vagaro, Square, a GHL build, a paper book.
Switching costs are the real reason shops stay on software they complain about weekly. So the import is a wizard, not a support ticket.
- Export a CSV, map the columns, see exactly what will be created
- Appointment history comes across with the clients
- Duplicates are skipped — run it twice, nothing doubles
- Nothing is posted to your clients during an import
Why this exists
I tattoo. I also spent years running a shop on software that was clearly written for a salon — where nobody takes a deposit, nobody tattoos a sixteen-year-old with a parent in the room, and nobody needs to know what an artist is owed on Friday.
So the deposits lived in one app, the consent forms in a folder, the texting on my personal phone, and the payouts in a spreadsheet I rebuilt every month. Every one of those was a place the shop could lose money quietly.
This is that pile, rebuilt as one system, by someone who has actually had to chase a no-show at 11pm.
— the founder, a working tattoo artist
Whose clients are they
We are not a marketplace.
Your booking page has your shop on it and nothing else.
- We will never show your client another artist or another shop.
- We will never email or text your client list on our own behalf.
- We will never sell you access to customers who are already yours.
- Your records are yours: report and payout CSVs download today, and a full account export is on the roadmap.
Pricing
One bill. No per-calendar fees.
Start on any plan, change it whenever. Every plan includes the whole day-to-day: booking, calendar, POS, inbox, payouts.
Core
$99/mo
2 bookable artists included, then $19/mo each
Run your whole day. Nothing you need is an upsell.
- 2 bookable artist seats included
- Unlimited free front-desk accounts
- Unlimited appointment & reminder texts
- Calendar + full appointment lifecycle
- Deposit-first online booking site
- POS with card-present Terminal payments
- Two-way SMS & email inbox
- Commission payouts & reports
Studio
Most shops$157/mo
2 bookable artists included, then $19/mo each
Everything in Core, plus the paperwork and the back room.
- Everything in Core
- Digital consent forms — guardian & minor flows
- Aftercare instructions & waitlist
- Jewellery & aftercare retail on the POS
Studio + AI
$246/mo
2 bookable artists included, then $19/mo each
Your AI front desk answers, books, and hands off to a human.
- Everything in Studio
- AI front desk over SMS — 300 conversations/mo included
- Human-in-the-loop: staff approve or take over any thread
- Agent API access included
2 bookable artist seats included, then $19/mo each. Front-desk accounts that take no bookings are free. The AI front desk (AI Concierge) is $89/mo and is included in Studio + AI. One-time $49 SMS activation covers carrier registration for your studio’s dedicated number.
Straight answers
The things shops actually ask.
I am on Vagaro, Square, or a GHL build. Can I bring my clients?
Yes. Export a client CSV from your current system and the import wizard maps the columns, shows you exactly what it is about to create, and skips duplicates. Appointment history comes across the same way. It is idempotent, so running it twice does not double anyone.
What does card processing cost?
Whatever Stripe charges you. Your studio connects its own Stripe account and every payment settles directly into it — deposits and counter sales alike. You are the merchant of record, so payouts, disputes and tax reporting are yours. Needlebase adds no platform fee on top of Stripe’s rates today, and we would tell you well in advance if that ever changed.
When can I start texting clients?
Carrier registration is reviewed by The Campaign Registry and the US carriers, not by us — approval typically takes a few business days but can take several weeks. We start registration at signup so vetting is usually finished before you go live. You can receive texts right away; full branded sending unlocks once the campaign is approved.
Do you handle minors properly?
The consent form carries dedicated fields for the guardian’s name, their relationship to the client, and the minor’s date of birth — and it stores the waiver text exactly as it was signed, so editing your policy later never rewrites an old record. Digital consent forms are part of Compliance + Waitlist, which is bundled into the Studio plans (or $29/mo added to Core).
Will my artists actually use it?
They open their own book on a phone: their week, their clients’ notes, and what they are owed. They do not touch studio settings and they do not see the shop’s books. Front-desk accounts that take no bookings are free and unlimited, so nobody ends up sharing one login.
How long until I am taking bookings?
Setup is 4 short steps — studio identity, hours, how you take money, and your waiver template — and your booking page is live at the end of it. Loading your services and deposits is the part that takes real thought; importing a client list takes about ten minutes.
How do seats work?
The plan includes 2 bookable artist seats. Each extra bookable artist is $19 a month. Front-desk accounts that take no bookings are free and unlimited. A manager who takes bookings uses a seat like any other artist.
What if it is not for me?
Cancel from the billing screen in your own dashboard. Your data is yours, and nothing about the trial requires a conversation with a salesperson, because there isn’t one.
Try it on your own shop.
Set up your services, put your booking page live, and take a real deposit — inside the trial, before you have paid anything.
14-day free trial · cancel any time