Frequently Asked Questions

Starter covers a single venue with the booking widget, admin dashboard, and email confirmations. Pro adds front-desk staff invites, role gating, themed event rates, party-size brackets, and season-based pricing. Scale unlocks Stripe Connect payments, refunds, multi-currency, full white-label branding, up to 3 venues per owner, and 3 retainer hours/month of support.

All plans are billed in USD. Pay annually and you save 20% versus the monthly rate. You can switch between monthly and annual at any renewal — we'll prorate the difference cleanly.

14 days, full access to every feature on the tier you pick. We collect a card up front so your venue stays live the moment the trial ends — nothing is charged until day 15, we’ll email you before any charge, and there’s no contract or notice period if you cancel.

Yes. We can flip your account to manual invoicing — quarterly or annual — and skip the Stripe billing flow entirely. Useful for venues with finance approval workflows or purchase orders.

Anytime, both directions. Upgrades take effect immediately and you only pay the prorated difference; downgrades apply at your next renewal so you keep what you paid for.

Up to 3 venues per owner on Scale, each with its own branding, pricing, and Stripe account. You sign in to each venue separately today; a single combined view across venues is on the roadmap. Need more than 3? Talk to us — we can quote a custom plan.

You paste one line of HTML on your site. The widget loads inline, customers pick activity, date, time, and party size, then check out — all on your domain, no redirect to a third-party site.

It's mobile-first. Most of your bookings will come from phones, and the widget is built and tested on phone-sized viewports before anything else.

Atomic conflict prevention. Every booking is written inside a single database transaction with overlap checks — if two customers race for the same slot, exactly one wins and the other sees an instant "just taken, pick another" message.

We re-check availability immediately before charging the card. If the slot was grabbed in the seconds between selection and payment, we cancel the charge before it goes through and prompt the customer to pick a new time.

Yes. Every booking has a customer notes field — birthdays, allergies, mobility needs, "we want lane 1 by the windows." Notes show up on the staff dashboard and on the new-booking email.

No. Bookings are anonymous — name, email, phone, pay, done. We still build a customer profile in the background so repeat visitors get tracked, but no password to remember.

You connect your own Stripe account in one click. Bookings collect payment up front and settle directly to your bank — we never touch the money. Stripe's standard fees (2.9% + $0.30) apply; we don't mark them up.

One-click full refund from the booking detail page, on the Scale plan. The booking flips to refunded, the lane is freed, and Stripe pushes the money back to the customer’s card automatically. Partial refunds aren’t supported yet — they’re on the roadmap.

Yes. From any cancelled booking there's a "Rebook" button — it pre-fills the customer info so your front desk can drop them into a new slot in seconds.

CAD, USD, GBP, and EUR out of the box. Each tenant picks one currency at setup; all pricing, refunds, and reports use it consistently.

No platform skim. Funds settle straight from Stripe to your bank account. You pay your monthly LaneBooker subscription and Stripe's processing fees — that's it.

Handled automatically by Stripe. If a card requires 3DS, the customer gets the bank challenge inside checkout and the booking only confirms after authentication succeeds.

Today's bookings, calendar view, customers, resources, pricing rules, add-ons, packages, reports, settings, and an audit log — all on a single staff portal at admin.lanebooker.ca.

Yes — lanes, golf sim bays, escape rooms, courts, party rooms, axe-throwing pits. Anything bookable. Each resource has its own capacity, schedule, and pricing rules.

Pick "Other" when you create the activity, give it a name, and we'll treat it like any first-class activity — pricing, availability, packages, the lot.

Yes. The lane reassign flow re-checks for conflicts at the moment you save — if someone else booked the destination lane in the last few seconds, the move is rejected with a clear error rather than silently double-booking.

Manual booking and walk-in flows are first-class. Front-desk staff can create bookings without payment, mark them paid in person, and the lane reservation behaves identically to an online booking.

Not yet. Staff mark a booking completed or no-show from the booking detail screen, which is what feeds the reports. A dedicated arrival check-in with timestamps is on the roadmap.

On Pro and Scale, yes. Invite by email, set a role (owner, admin or staff), and they get scoped access — staff can manage bookings but not change pricing or refund payments.

Every sensitive action — refunds, branding, plan changes, Stripe keys, staff invites — is gated by role at the API layer, not just hidden in the UI. Staff-level users physically cannot trigger owner-only operations.

All three. Set a per-lane hourly rate, a per-person rate, or a flat fee for the whole session. Mix and match across activities — bowling per lane/hour, laser tag per person, escape room flat per booking. Per-round pricing is on the roadmap.

Yes. Set tiered pricing where 1 hour is full price, 2 hours is discounted, 3 hours is even cheaper. Encourages longer bookings and bigger spend.

Built for it. Define a window (e.g. Saturdays 9pm–close), pick the activity, set a different rate or theme name, and the widget shows the right price automatically when the customer's slot falls inside it.

Yes — season-based pricing on Pro and Scale. Set summer, holiday, off-season, March break — each with its own rates and date range.

Themed events are special pricing layers (Birthday Special, Glow Night, League Tuesday) that override the base rate during their window and show as a labelled pill in the widget.

Party-size brackets do exactly this. e.g. $20/person for 1–3, drops to $15/person for 4+. Define as many brackets as you want, applied automatically.

Configure add-ons in the dashboard — shoe rental, bumpers, drink package, party host. Each has a name, price, and optional image. Customers tick them at checkout.

Yes. Mark an add-on as auto-add per person — every guest in the party automatically gets one (and pays for one). Great for shoe rental, food platters, branded swag.

Absolutely. Bundle a package like "Birthday Bash — 2 hours of bowling, shoe rental for 8, pizza, soft drinks" as one fixed price, with the included add-ons surfaced to the customer.

One flat price for the whole package, regardless of how the underlying lane/add-ons sum up. Lets you run promotional bundles without the math fighting your hourly rates.

Yes. Every booking attaches to a customer record (matched by email/phone), so you can see lifetime bookings, lifetime value, last visit, notes, and tags.

Yes — free-form tags like "league," "birthday-host," "VIP," "warned." Use tags to segment for campaigns or operational flags.

Yes. Filter by tag, hit export, get a CSV with name, email, phone, total bookings, lifetime value. Drop straight into your email tool.

Yes — every booking rolls into the customer’s total spend and visit count. Sort and filter your customer list by spend to find your most valuable regulars and target retention spend at them.

Your customers book on your domain — the widget mounts inline on any page you paste it into, with no redirect. Your staff portal lives at admin.lanebooker.ca under your venue’s own path. Vanity subdomains are on the roadmap.

Every widget request is HMAC-signed with a 256-bit secret unique to your tenant. Anyone trying to spoof requests against your tenant gets rejected at the API edge.

Per-tenant CORS allowlist. You list the exact domains your widget runs on; the API rejects requests from anywhere else. Stops random sites embedding your booking flow.

Each tenant has its own timezone. All times stored in UTC under the hood and rendered in your local time everywhere — admin dashboard, customer emails, reports.

No. Strict per-tenant isolation at the database query layer — every read and write is scoped to your tenant ID. Even our internal admin tools can't accidentally cross venues.

Yes on Scale. Upload your logo and it shows in the widget header, admin sidebar, and customer emails.

On Scale, yes. Set your brand colors, pick fonts, upload activity tile images. The widget inherits your look so it feels like part of your site, not a bolted-on third-party tool.

Yes — Scale hides the "Powered by LaneBooker" footer on customer-facing emails. Your branding, your domain, your voice.

Booking confirmation immediately after checkout, with date, time, lane, party size, add-ons, total paid, and your venue contact info. Refunds also trigger a confirmation email.

New-booking alerts go to whichever staff emails you configure. Includes customer name, party size, lane, add-ons, and any notes — everything the front desk needs.

Yes — comma-separate the addresses in settings. Owner, manager, front-desk shared inbox, whatever you need.

Resend. Reliable deliverability, real bounce handling, and we route through your venue domain so confirmations don't land in customer spam folders.

Booking heatmap (when are you actually busy?), revenue summaries by day/week/month, add-on ranking, package ranking, and activity breakdown — all live, no overnight refresh.

CSV export for bookings, customers, and payments. Open in Excel, Google Sheets, or pipe into your accounting tool.

Yes — admin changes (refunds, cancellations, pricing changes, staff invites, settings tweaks, customer edits) are logged with user, timestamp, and before/after values. Visible to owners and admins.

Typical onboarding is 2–5 days. Sign up, we spin up your tenant, you upload resources and pricing (or hand them to us), test bookings, paste the widget on your site. Done.

Yes. Hand us your existing pricing sheet, lane layout, and a CSV of past customers — we import your data, set up activities, pricing rules, and add-ons, and walk you through a launch call.

For now, send us a CSV of customers, bookings, and pricing rules and we import them as part of onboarding. A self-serve CSV import tool is on the roadmap.

Internal platform-admin wizard that spins up a new tenant in minutes — tenant basics, plan, owner, seed defaults, then live. You'll never see it; it's how we provision your account.

Scale includes 3 retainer hours/month for support, training, and small build asks with same-day response. Pro gets 1 hr/month. Starter is email-only with same-business-day response. We're a small team and we actually pick up.

Defense at the edge — Cloudflare WAF, rate limiting, and bot management on every public endpoint. Hit the API with a scraper or a brute-force attempt and you'll bounce off the edge before our app ever sees it.

Versioned migrations — every schema change is a numbered, reviewed file. Production migrations run as part of deploys with rollback paths. No "someone ran a query in prod" surprises.

All amounts stored in cents as integers. No floating-point rounding bugs, no "where did the half-cent go" reconciliation headaches.

Cloudflare D1 Time Travel — we can roll the database back to any point in the last 30 days, and we’ve run a restore drill end to end to prove it works. Scheduled off-site backups on top of that are on the roadmap.

No. The widget calls are HMAC-signed with your tenant's secret. Without that secret, requests fail signature validation and get rejected at the edge.

There is no lane limit on any plan. Pricing is per venue, not per lane — run six lanes or thirty-six on the same subscription. No overage charges, no bookings blocked mid-weekend.

Not yet. Outgoing webhooks (booking.created, booking.cancelled, etc.) are on the roadmap. For now we handle the Stripe-side webhooks internally.

Not yet — confirmations only today. SMS and email reminders 24 hours before booking are on the roadmap.

Not as a single recurring rule yet. Today you can create themed events with weekly recurrence and let your league captains book through them, or front-desk staff can stamp out the season's bookings in one go. Recurring league templates are on the roadmap.

You do. Export customers, bookings, payments, and pricing rules as CSV any time from the admin portal. If you ever leave, you walk out with everything.

Always. Full CSV export at any time, and we'll happily hand you a final dump on the way out. Your data is yours — we'll never hold it hostage.

No. We give you one line of HTML to paste into your website. If you can edit a page on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or plain HTML, you can install LaneBooker. We'll walk you through it on a 15-minute call if you'd like.