Leaving Booksy: why this UK clinic built her own site

A good clinic that was hard to find

Roniya Aesthetic Clinic sits on Wolverhampton Road in Oldbury. It is consultation-led, which in practice means nobody is sold a treatment before somebody has actually looked at their face and listened to what they want. Dr Mari, the founder and lead practitioner, sees every consultation herself.

The work speaks for itself. The clinic holds a five-star average on Google, and the reviews say the same thing over and over: careful, unhurried, natural-looking results. That is a genuinely hard reputation to build in aesthetics, where the loud end of the market is doing the opposite.

So this is not a story about a business in trouble. The treatments were good and the clients who found the clinic were happy. The problem was the last four words of that sentence.

The problem was not the clinic, it was the address

Bookings ran through a marketplace app. That is a normal way for a clinic to start, and it does one useful thing: it gives you a booking system on day one without building anything.

But it also meant the clinic had no website. Someone searching for aesthetic treatments in Oldbury had nothing of Roniya's to land on. There was a profile inside somebody else's app, and profiles inside apps do not turn up the way a business's own pages do.

In the clinic's own experience, the marketplace was not bringing new clients either. That is their account of it rather than a claim we can make about the product in general, and other businesses genuinely do get discovery out of these apps. But it left an uncomfortable position: paying every month for a booking system, while the people searching in Oldbury still could not find them.

What renting actually costs you

The monthly fee is the part everyone looks at. It is not the expensive part.

When your booking page lives inside a marketplace, every month you pay is a month you spend building somebody else's asset. The domain is theirs. The pages Google learns to trust are theirs. The reviews sit in their app. Whatever authority accumulates, accumulates to them.

Which means the day you leave, you leave with nothing. Not a reduced version of what you had. Nothing. No domain to redirect, no pages to keep ranking, no search history to carry over. You start from zero, and the months you paid bought you exactly no ground.

That is the real cost, and it is invisible while you are paying it. It only shows up at the exit.

The part nobody mentions yet

There is a newer version of this problem that has crept up on everyone in the last couple of years.

People increasingly ask an AI assistant instead of scrolling a results page. "Where can I get skin treatments near Oldbury?" is now a question put to ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity as often as it is typed into a search box.

Those systems answer from pages they can read: your website, your Google Business Profile, directories, articles that mention you. A profile buried inside a booking app is not really a page in that sense. It is a record in a database that happens to have a URL, and it is not the sort of thing an assistant reaches for when it is putting together an answer about local clinics.

So a business with no site of its own is not just harder to find on Google. It is close to invisible to the layer that is quietly becoming how people search. And unlike search rankings, there is no version of this you can buy your way into. You need something of your own for them to read.

What the clinic has now

Roniya Aesthetic Clinic now runs on its own domain, with its own booking address. Not a profile on a shared platform, a site.

In practice that means around forty pages Google can actually index: a page for each treatment with its own description and price, an about page, opening hours, contact details. Booking lives at the clinic's own address rather than someone else's app, and clients have their own account area and can buy gift cards without leaving the site.

Worth being straight about the timing: the site is new. Local search takes months rather than weeks, and nobody should promise otherwise. What changed is not that the clinic is suddenly at the top of Google. What changed is that there is now something that can get there, and it belongs to the clinic rather than to a platform.

The clinic also stopped paying for the marketplace, which is a saving, but that is the least interesting part of the change.

Where a marketplace genuinely wins

It would be easy to finish here by saying marketplaces are a bad deal. They are not, and pretending otherwise would not help anyone deciding.

If you are brand new, in a new area, with no client list and no following, a marketplace can put you in front of people who have never heard of you. That is genuinely hard to replicate on your own, and it is worth paying for while it is what you need. The booking tools in the mature apps are also good, refined over years, and plenty of salons run happily on them for a long time.

The question is not which is better. It is which problem you have. If you need strangers to discover you, a marketplace solves that. If the people who want you already know your name and simply cannot find you online, a marketplace does not solve it, and the monthly fee buys you nothing you keep.

Roniya had the second problem. Plenty of businesses have the first.

If you want that trade laid out properly, with what Booksy costs in the UK and where each option is the better fit, we keep a side-by-side on our Solovi and Booksy comparison.

If you are weighing up the same move

Work out where your clients actually come from. Not where you think, where they say. Ask the next ten people how they found you. If most say Instagram, a friend, or walking past, the marketplace is not doing the job you are paying it for.

Export your client list before you cancel anything. It is yours, and you will want it whatever you decide.

Do not switch off the old thing on day one. Run both for a few weeks and watch where bookings land. If the marketplace is carrying you, you will see it, and you will have learned something worth knowing.

Get the domain in your own name. Whatever you build and whoever builds it, the domain should be registered to you. That single detail is the difference between an asset and a rental.

Frequently asked

Related reading: Solovi and Booksy, side by side · Is Booksy worth it for a UK salon? · Websites and booking for beauty salons