Ask a guide why he moved off a marketplace onto subscription booking software, and you'll hear some version of the same line: "I don't want to pay a percentage on my own clients anymore." Fair instinct. With AnyCreek, it's the wrong assumption.
AnyCreek markets itself as relief from marketplace math — no commission, just a flat plan. Read the actual fee schedule and a chunk of that percentage followed you anyway. It just changed its name.
What AnyCreek actually charges
Per AnyCreek's own pricing page, plans run $49 to $199 a month, plus a one-time $199 setup fee. Straightforward enough. The part worth reading twice is what rides on top of every booking, regardless of who found the client:
- A 5% service fee added to the client's bill — on every trip, including the ones the guide brought in himself.
- A 3% card processing fee charged to the guide, also on every trip.
- A 15% one-time commission when AnyCreek's own marketing actually lands the client. To their credit, that same client reverts to the standard 5%/3% rate on repeat bookings — a one-time charge, not a perpetual one. That's a fairer design than platforms that keep clipping the same client every season, and it deserves saying plainly.
Notice what's missing from that list: a carve-out for the regular who's booked every June for six years, or the guy who typed the guide's name into Google. AnyCreek didn't source either of them. The guide did. He still pays for them.
This isn't a fishing-only quirk, either. Outfitters running guided hunts pay the same 5/3/15 structure — the fee schedule doesn't change by species.
The month that makes the math real
Take a guide running $500 half-days, twelve trips this month. A $6,000 month, nothing exotic. Nine of those bookings are regulars, referrals, people who searched his own name. Three came from AnyCreek's marketing — first-timers he wouldn't have had otherwise.
Run the numbers:
- Subscription, mid tier: $99
- 3% card fee on all twelve trips ($6,000 × 3%): $180
- 15% one-time commission on the three sourced trips ($1,500 × 15%): $225
Total out of the guide's pocket for the month: $504. Meanwhile his nine self-sourced clients each saw a 5% surcharge tacked onto their invoice — $25 on a $500 trip, money AnyCreek keeps, not him, but money that makes his price look higher at the exact moment someone's deciding whether to book.
That's roughly 8% of gross revenue on a month where three-quarters of the bookings needed no help finding him. Not nothing. A car payment, most months.
Where that leaves the fee math
| Line item | AnyCreek | Timber & Tackle |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly plan | $49–$199/mo + $199 one-time setup | $29/mo (or $290/yr) — free until your first booking |
| Client you already had (regular, referral, phone call) | 5% added to their bill + 3% card fee to you | $0 — no cut, ever |
| First-time client the platform's marketing found | 15% one-time commission | Not applicable — we don't source leads |
| That same client, next season | Reverts to 5%/3% — still not free | $0 |
AnyCreek isn't the only one doing this
The pattern isn't unique to one platform. Rezdy's three tiers — $49, $99, and $249 a month — each carry a 3% fee per online booking, a cost the operator can absorb or pass to the guest, but it's charged either way, plan or no plan. Checkfront runs one plan at $99 a month plus its own 3% online booking fee. Same structure, different logo. Neither one ties that percentage to where the client came from. Book it online, it costs a percentage.
None of that makes those platforms bad tools for the right operation. It makes "I switched to subscription software, so I don't pay commission anymore" a claim worth checking against the actual fee schedule, not assuming true because the homepage says "no commission."
The dividing line "subscription vs. commission" misses
Most comparisons of booking software stop at the number on the pricing page. Wrong place to anchor. The question that actually decides your cost is narrower: does the fee structure know the difference between a client the software found and a client you already had?
FareHarbor doesn't draw that line at all — every trip carries a booking fee added at checkout, commonly reported around 6% in the US (FareHarbor doesn't publish the exact rate). AnyCreek draws it partway: the 15% is at least tied to a lead they actually sourced. But the 5%/3% on everything else means "commission-free" isn't quite honest. It's a smaller commission with a nicer name, charged on trips the software had nothing to do with.
The software you switch to should get paid on the clients it finds you. Not the ones you already had before you signed up.
Timber & Tackle draws the line all the way: flat $29 a month (or $290 a year — two months free), free until you accept your first booking, and zero cut on any trip. Not the regular. Not the referral. Not the stranger who found your Google Business Profile on his own. We don't source your clients, so we don't get paid on them. We will never take a cut of a client you brought us.
To be clear about what we don't do: we're not a marketplace, and we're not claiming to replace one. If FishingBooker or a similar platform is where strangers find you, keep that listing running — that's real work, and it's not ours to take credit for. This is about what happens after someone already knows your name.
Run your own numbers before you decide
The math above uses one guide's month. Yours has a different split of regulars to first-timers, a different day rate, maybe a different subscription tier. Pull your last twelve months of bookings, sort self-sourced from platform-sourced, and apply whatever schedule you're actually on — the arithmetic holds regardless of the guide.
If you'd rather see the difference than calculate it, the fishing dashboard demo and the hunting outfit version run the real booking flow — calendar, deposits, client records — with no numbers to fake. And when you're ready for the flat-fee math in writing, the pricing page has it, no fine print to go dig up later.