bigZ vs SurfSlot: Off-Season Credits or No Subscription?

How each one charges you

bigZ: three plans and an off-season credit

bigZ's pricing page lists three plans:

• Free forever. No monthly cost, with a 5% fee per online booking. It includes booking management, gift cards, online payments, the widget in six languages, basic analytics and one team account, with bigZ branding on the widget. bigZ says bookings you create yourself in the dashboard are always free; the 5% applies to widget bookings.
• Budget. Shown as max. €79 a month, billed annually (max. €948 a year). Zero booking fees, unlimited team accounts, configurable permissions and 50 uses a month of the AI admin assistant.
• Pro. Shown as max. €249 a month, billed annually (max. €2,988 a year). Everything in Budget, plus whitelabel (no bigZ branding), AI-powered capacities and dynamic pricing, unlimited AI assistant use, advanced analytics, and priority and phone support.

The interesting part is the off-season credit on the paid plans. In bigZ's words, for every month your organisation has no online revenue, one month's credit is deducted from the next billing cycle. Payment provider fees (Stripe or Mollie) are charged separately at their standard rates, and bigZ says it does not mark them up.

Two small-print points are worth checking with bigZ before you sign. The pricing page lists the credit on both Budget and Pro, while its surf page mentions it on annual Pro plans. And the page carries two VAT notes, one saying prices exclude VAT and one saying prices for EU businesses include it.

SurfSlot: no subscription, a booking fee at checkout

SurfSlot has one model for every school. There is no subscription, no setup fee and no lock-in. A SurfSlot booking fee is added to the customer's total at checkout and collected through Stripe, so we only earn when a customer books. A month with no bookings costs you €0, with no credit to qualify for and no annual plan behind it.

The fee is shown to the customer before they pay. It is a fee for using the booking platform, not a card surcharge, and it does not change with the payment method. There is more on how it works on our no-monthly-fee pricing page.

What a season looks like on each model

Put your own season through both.

On bigZ Free, the cost tracks your online sales. On a €60 lesson booked through the widget, 5% is €3, taken from your revenue. Low volume means a low bill, which is exactly why a free tier is a sensible way to start.

On bigZ Budget or Pro, you commit to an annual plan and the booking fees disappear. The credit then softens the quiet months. A school that is genuinely shut from December to February, with no online revenue at all, would earn three months' credit.

Notice the trigger: the credit applies to months with no online revenue. If you sell a single gift voucher online in December, that month is no longer empty. For schools that sell Christmas vouchers (and you probably should, see our gift voucher guide), it is worth asking bigZ exactly how a voucher sale is counted.

On SurfSlot, there is nothing to qualify for. No subscription in any month, busy or quiet. The booking fee sits on the customer's checkout, so your customer's total is a little higher than your lesson price. If you compete purely on the visible price in a crowded market, weigh that honestly.

For a fuller look at how subscriptions, per-booking fees and commission behave across a seasonal year, read what surf school software really costs in the off-season.

Features: where each one is stronger

Where bigZ stands out

• Languages. Booking pages translate automatically into six languages, which matters if half your customers are German, French or Dutch tourists.
• Payment methods. Stripe and Mollie are both supported, with cards, PayPal, iDEAL and Sofort listed.
• A real free tier. You can start without a card, a sales call or a contract.
• General booking tools. Capacity limits and waitlists, recurring events and templates, upsells at checkout, gift cards and vouchers, and dynamic pricing on Pro.
• AI admin assistant. Plain-language requests such as moving a booking to Thursday.

Where SurfSlot stands out

SurfSlot is built around the operational side of a surf school, the work that happens after the booking:

• Condition monitoring. Wind, swell and tide are checked every two hours against the ideal conditions you set for each beach, and problem sessions are flagged up to four days ahead. See live surf condition alerts.
• Instructor assignment. Instructors are matched automatically on skills and availability, and told by SMS when anything changes. See instructor management.
• Waivers for every participant. Each person on a group booking gets their own link, and you can see who has signed. See digital waivers.
• Beach changes in one action. Move a session and notify every participant and instructor at once.
• Deposits, balances and equipment. Take a deposit, let the balance be chased automatically, and hold boards and wetsuits against each booking.
• Existing channels. Bookings from FareHarbor, Rezdy, Checkfront and iCal feeds can sync in.

As of 20 October, bigZ's pricing and surf pages do not list condition monitoring, waivers or instructor assignment. That does not mean bigZ cannot handle any of them, so ask on a call. Feature lists change, and that applies to ours too.

Which one suits which school

bigZ is likely the better fit if

• You want to try software for free, today, with no commitment
• Your customers come from all over Europe and want to book in their own language
• PayPal or iDEAL matters to your customers
• You run several activity types and mainly need clean booking, payments and upsells
• You are happy on an annual plan once you are past the free tier

SurfSlot is likely the better fit if

• Your admin time goes on the morning-of problems: wind changes, beach moves, instructor gaps
• You want waivers, deposits and balance chasing to happen without you
• You would rather have no subscription in any month than a credit for empty ones
• You want no annual commitment at any stage

How to compare them on your own numbers

1. Pull last year's bookings month by month, split into online and walk-in or phone.
2. Price the year on bigZ Free (5% of online bookings) and on the paid plan you would actually need, less any months that would earn the credit.
3. Ask us for the same calculation on SurfSlot for your market: what the customer pays, what reaches your bank, and what an empty month costs.
4. Then run the same real scenario on a demo of each: twelve people booked on a Tuesday, onshore wind forecast, the session moved to another beach at 07:30 and everyone told.

The first three steps tell you about cost. The fourth tells you how your mornings will feel in August.

The short version

bigZ is a well-priced, straightforward booking platform with a genuinely free tier, strong language and payment options, and a thoughtful answer to the off-season. SurfSlot is surf-school software with no subscription at any stage and much more of the day-to-day operation automated.

If you are deciding between them, look at where your hours go. If it is taking bookings and payments, bigZ may be all you need. If it is everything that happens after the booking, book a SurfSlot demo or click around the live demo first.