Rezdy and Checkfront don't take a commission. Say that in an ad and it's technically true. Neither platform writes itself in as an owner of your client relationship. What they write in instead is a per-transaction fee riding on top of a monthly bill you're already paying — and it's sitting right there in their own FAQ pages, one scroll past the price everyone quotes.
Worth being clear about what kind of tool this is before the math starts. Rezdy and Checkfront are booking software — a calendar, a payment page, a customer database you plug into your own site. They're not marketplaces. They don't send you a client who was never going to find you otherwise. FishingBooker does that, and that's real work worth paying for. Rezdy and Checkfront charge a percentage on trips you already closed yourself, which is a different transaction entirely.
Here's what that actually costs.
The subscription is the smaller number
Rezdy's three tiers — Foundation at $49/mo, Accelerate at $99, Expansion at $249 — all carry the same charge underneath the sticker price: 3% on every online booking, plus a flat per-booking fee on anything an agent enters offline. Upgrading buys gift cards, packages, and API access. It doesn't touch the 3%. Every plan pays it.
Checkfront collapsed its old lineup into a single plan: $99/mo, plus its own 3% online booking fee. Their FAQ frames it as flexibility — you can absorb the fee or pass it to your guests. That one sentence is doing most of the marketing.
"Absorb it or pass it on" isn't really a choice
Read it fast and it sounds like an out. Don't like the fee, hand it to the client. Read it slow, and both options land in the same place.
Absorb it, and 3% comes straight off your margin on every online booking, all season. Pass it on, and your $450 half-day trip becomes $463.50 on the booking page — a number a client comparing three captains' sites is going to notice, especially next to a listing with no fee line at all. Either way, the 3% is still coming out of the trip. The only question is which page it shows up on: yours, or the client's.
What a real season costs
Charter rates move by region, boat, and season, but sweeps across charter listings generally put a private half-day inshore trip somewhere in the $300–$600 range this year. Run the math at $450 — a fair midpoint, not a ceiling — across a season of 120 online bookings, and here's what a year actually runs on each platform.
| Platform | Annual subscription | 3% on 120 × $450 | Total for the season |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rezdy Foundation | $588 ($49/mo) | $1,620 | $2,208 |
| Checkfront | $1,188 ($99/mo) | $1,620 | $2,808 |
| Timber & Tackle | $290/yr flat | $0 — no percentage, ever | $290 |
That's not a rounding difference. It's $1,918 to $2,518 over a season, and the gap holds whether the fee gets absorbed or added to the sticker — it doesn't vanish, it just changes which budget line it hits.
Here's the part worth sitting with: Rezdy's subscription alone — before a single booking clears, before the 3% touches anything — already costs $298 more than Timber & Tackle's entire year.
The fee isn't the whole story. It's just the part that keeps growing.
Phone bookings don't get you out of it, either
Say a client calls instead of booking online — no platform involved, no lead the software found, just a captain answering his own phone. Rezdy still charges a flat per-booking fee for that trip once an agent keys it in. It's smaller than 3%, but it's still a fee on a booking the guide closed entirely on his own.
On Timber & Tackle, a phone-booked trip runs through "Booked by phone": it blocks the calendar date, files the client record, and starts the billing clock, all without a fee attached — phone or online, there's no percentage line anywhere in the product. (Worth being precise here: booking by phone doesn't send a confirmation email on its own. It records the trip and the client; a guide who wants to text or email a confirmation still does that himself.)
The off-season objection, answered before you ask it
The obvious pushback to any flat fee: what about February, when the calendar's empty and the bills aren't? A percentage-based fee at least scales down with a dead month. A flat one doesn't care.
Fair point, so Timber & Tackle's billing has an off-season pause built in — a guide sets the dates he's dark and Stripe stops collecting until he's back, no cancel-and-resignup required. It's a direct answer to the one place the flat-fee argument is actually weaker on paper, not a feature bolted on to win an argument after the fact.
One honest caveat
Rezdy and Checkfront aren't lying about what they build. Multi-location support, channel manager integrations that push inventory out to OTAs, webhooks into a bigger back office — Expansion at $249/mo buys real infrastructure a five-boat operation with agent partners might genuinely need. If that's the business, the 3% may be a fair price for tools Timber & Tackle doesn't build.
For a single boat or a two-guide outfit running its own site and its own client list, the question isn't whether the software is good. It's whether a trip you already closed — no platform, no lead, no finder — needs to pay rent just to get processed.
Run your own numbers
Swap in your real trip price and your real booking count and the shape of the math won't change much: a percentage fee grows with your season, a flat fee doesn't. A slow August costs a guide on Rezdy or Checkfront less in raw dollars and costs a guide on a flat plan the exact same $29 either way — which sounds like a wash until you remember the flat plan was already cheaper at the top of the season, not just the bottom.
If the gap above is closer to real than you expected, Timber & Tackle's pricing page lays out the flat-fee math with nothing else attached. Or skip the reading and click through the explorable fishing dashboard — same calendar, same client records, same phone-booking flow, with no per-trip line item waiting at the bottom of the invoice.