Ask any Canadian salon, spa, or barbershop owner what keeps them up at night, and you'll hear the same two things over and over: money and staffing. The software bill that never seems fixed. The struggle to find a reliable stylist or barber when someone gives notice. Most of the tools built for this industry weren't built to solve either problem - they were built for a different market, with different priorities, and Canadian salons have just had to make them work.
We think that's backwards. So we built Zivly around the two things that actually move the needle for a salon's bottom line: what the software costs, and how easy it is to keep your chairs staffed. Here's what that looks like in practice.
Problem One: Software That Costs More Than It Should
Most of the well-known salon booking platforms are American companies. Their pricing is set in USD, which means every month your bill moves with the exchange rate - a $39 USD plan isn't $39 CAD, it's closer to $53-55 CAD before your bank's foreign transaction fee even gets added. Then there's the add-on creep: reminders behind a higher tier, reporting gated to a "Pro" plan, every front desk staff member counted as a paid seat even though they never take a single booking.
Zivly is priced in CAD from the start. The Team plan is a flat CA$10.99 per service provider per month, front desk staff are always free, and reminders, reporting, and payroll tools are included on every plan - not upsold later. Independent stylists, estheticians, and barbers can run their whole business on the Solo plan for free, forever, with up to 300 bookings a month and no credit card required. We cover the full breakdown in our comparison against US-based salon software.
Problem Two: Hiring Still Happens in Your DMs
Here's the part that surprised us most when we started talking to salon owners: almost none of their software touched hiring at all. Booking, payments, client records - all handled. But the moment a chair opened up, owners were back to posting a "we're hiring" story on Instagram, fielding DMs from people who never follow up, or paying to post on a general job board that floods them with applicants who've never touched a pair of shears.
So we built job postings directly into Zivly - as far as we know, the first salon and barbershop platform to do this natively. Owners can create a listing right from their dashboard: role, employment type, pay range, hours, required skills, and a deadline. Publishing it generates a public application link they can drop anywhere - Instagram bio, a Google Business post, their own website. Applicants fill out a clean, mobile-friendly form and attach their resume or CV, no account needed. Every application lands directly in the owner's Jobs inbox, organized by listing, instead of scattered across five different apps. We go deeper on exactly how it works in our post on the Jobs feature.
It's included on every plan, at no extra cost - the same rule we apply everywhere in Zivly: if it doesn't cost us anything extra to provide, it shouldn't cost you anything extra to use.
Why Solving Both Problems Together Matters
Pricing and hiring might look like separate issues, but for a salon owner they're the same fight: keeping more of what you make, and spending less time on admin that doesn't grow the business. A cheaper booking tool doesn't help much if you're still losing hours every week chasing DMs about an open chair. And a slick hiring tool doesn't matter if your core software is quietly draining your margin with exchange rates and add-on fees.
Zivly was built to remove both drags at once - one flat CAD price, one dashboard for running the day-to-day and filling your open roles, no separate subscriptions or tools bolted on to cover the gaps.
Built for the Canadian Market, Not Adapted for It
None of this happened by accident. Zivly is a Canadian company building for Canadian salons, spas, and barbershops - the pricing, the support hours, the feature roadmap, all of it is shaped around how this industry actually operates here, not retrofitted from a product built for someone else's market first. You can read more about that in our post on what "Canadian-made" actually means for salon software.
We don't think that's a small thing. It's the difference between software you make work, and software that was actually built to work for you.
What This Means If You're Running a Salon Right Now
If your current software bill fluctuates with the exchange rate, or if hiring still means digging through Instagram DMs and a notes app, those aren't things you have to keep living with. Zivly bundles affordable CAD pricing, built-in hiring, and the everyday tools - booking, reminders, payroll, reporting, a free marketplace profile - into one platform built specifically for this industry.
Start with the free Solo plan if you're working independently, or try the Team plan free for 14 days if you're running a full salon or barbershop.