The ArtizanSquare Brief

What the company actually is

Two businesses share one platform. The first is a marketplace: customers search, compare and book real service providers near them, and every provider gets a public page carrying their services, prices, gallery and reviews. The second is the management system those providers run their day on — a calendar, a visit board, deposits, memberships, staff permissions, payouts, analytics and a unified social inbox.

The two halves are not separate products bolted together. The marketplace is what makes the management system worth paying for, and the management system is what makes the marketplace listings accurate. A salon keeps its hours current in the dashboard because that is where its diary lives; the customer searching at 9pm sees hours that are true because of it.

The wedge is a specific, unglamorous problem. A Nigerian service business today takes a booking through an Instagram DM, confirms it on WhatsApp, writes it in a paper book, and checks a bank app to see whether the customer paid. Four systems, none of which talk to each other, and the walk-in who came through the door without booking leaves no record at all. ArtizanSquare replaces the four with one, and makes the walk-in a customer record.

Nobody is short of customers. They are short of the hour a day it takes to chase, confirm, record and follow up on the ones they already have.

Two kinds of provider, one distinction that decides everything

The platform recognises exactly two kinds of seller, and the line between them is not size or sophistication. It is who travels.

Artizan

Goes to the customer

An individual professional working home-service, strictly. They have no premises a customer visits. The plumber, the electrician, the mobile hairdresser, the tailor collecting measurements at your house. The job happens at the customer's address, so the address is part of the booking.

Team size — one. A business of one pair of hands.
Booking carries— the customer's address, plus a note for the gate, the landmark, the flat number.
Never has — branches, staff rotas, a visit board, or memberships.
Dashboard — the Professional Dashboard.

Business · Shop · Venue

The customer comes to them

An owned or rented premises with a door, and usually a team behind it. The salon, the spa, the restaurant, the dental clinic, the hotel. Because there is a room, there are walk-ins, a front desk, staff who need some access but not all of it, and — eventually — a second location.

Team size — up to unlimited, with per-area permissions.
Booking carries — no address; the venue is the address.
Only they get — walk-in visits, branches, memberships, staff roles, a logo and hero gallery.
Dashboard — the Business Workspace.

This distinction is built into the foundation, not just the interface. Both kinds of provider share one booking system, and a booking belongs to a business or to an artizan — never both, never neither. Whether it is a home-service job then follows from that single fact, which is why one calendar, one payment flow and one settlement path serve both sides without either being a special case.

Who ArtizanSquare is for

Four audiences, with genuinely different reasons to open the app.

Audience one

The customer who needs something done

Wants a table on Friday, a haircut before a wedding, or a plumber today. Searches by category and location, compares real prices and real galleries, reads reviews, books a slot and secures it with a deposit. They never see a dashboard.

Audience two

The venue owner with a diary and a team

Runs a salon, spa, restaurant, studio or clinic. The core paying customer. Comes for the bookings; stays for the deposits that stop no-shows, the memberships that make next month predictable, and the staff permissions that let the front desk work the door without seeing revenue.

Audience three

The artizan working for themselves

A tradesperson or mobile professional whose marketing is currently word of mouth and an Instagram page. Comes to be found — a profile that ranks, a booking link, and an assistant that answers DMs while both hands are busy.

Audience four

The staff member on the floor

A receptionist, stylist or manager who never signed up but uses it daily. Invited by username, granted only the areas they need. The reason permissions are per-area rather than one admin switch.

Who it is not for

Anyone selling a shipped product. ArtizanSquare manages time, services and customers — it has no stock units, no cost of goods, no reorder levels and no fulfilment. A shop selling inventory over the counter is not the shape of business this was built around, and saying so is cheaper than a churned customer.

The categories we currently cover

Twelve venue categories are curated and surfaced across the site. The underlying catalogue keeps growing — importing a Google Business Profile brings its own categories with it.

Venue categories — the curated set

Restaurant food

Hair Salon beauty

Barbershop beauty

Nail Studio beauty

Makeup Studio beauty

Spa wellness

Physiotherapy health

Dental Clinic health

Hotel hospitality

Fashion Design Studio craft

Photo Studio craft

Workhub space

Artizan trades — home service

Plumber home

Electrician home

AC repair home

Tiler home

Tailor craft

Cobbler craft

Hairdresser mobile beauty

Barber mobile beauty

Delivery rider logistics

One catalogue serves both sides of the marketplace: a category carries the name a customer browses by andthe skill an artizan claims, so “Hair Salon” and the person who does hair are the same entry seen from two directions. If your trade is not listed, it is usually a matter of adding it rather than building anything.

The full feature set

Grouped as an owner encounters them. Where a capability belongs to only one kind of provider, it says so.

Getting found

Public provider page — services, prices, gallery, hours and reviews, bookable directly.
Category and location search — down to Nigerian state, LGA and ward.
Connected Profile — builds the whole profile from Google Business, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp in about a minute, reconciles what they disagree on, and publishes corrections back to Google and WhatsApp.
Google review sync and Instagram-to-Google post forwarding, captions tidied for Google's format.
Custom booking link, and a custom domain on the top tier.
Verified badge via free KYC.
Profile boost — paid placement within search.

The diary

One calendar in month, week and day view, carrying online bookings and walk-ins together.
Drag to reschedule, with a confirmation step and an optional customer notification — an appointment is never moved silently.
Booking states — pending, accepted, completed, verified, cancelled.
Visit board (venues) — who is checked in right now, what they are having, what it comes to.
Check-out closes the visit, credits the wallet and fires the review request in one action.
Offline queue — bookings taken with no signal sync when it returns.
Live updates over websocket, with polling as fallback.

Money

Per-service deposits — percentage or fixed, showing the exact naira figure the customer will be charged before you save.
No-show settlement — states every amount before it moves money.
Payment methods — in-app transfer, payment link, or pay at the venue.
Provider wallet credited at checkout.
Payout records and a dispute route.
Memberships (venues) — recurring tiers whose entitlements are deducted automatically at check-in.
Escrow — deposits are held, then split on a defined settlement path.

Customers and communication

One inbox for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp messages and post comments.
AI assistant answering from an editable business brief, with every claim traceable to its source.
AI booking — the assistant can take the slot, within limits you set and can see before switching it on.
Qualified leads — what a customer wants, their budget and timing, kept separate from what was merely inferred, and surviving the 14-day deletion of imported social messages.
Automations — trigger, conditions, action; the after-visit review request ships as an editable one, authored once and delivered as both email and WhatsApp.
WhatsApp Business templates with per-account submission and approval.
Campaigns and metered email, WhatsApp and AI allowances.

The team and the estate

Per-area staff permissions (venues) — analytics, staff, services, memberships, subscription, visit log, granted individually.
Invitations by username, accepted or declined by the person.
Branches (venues) — a venue network where each location keeps its own address and public page.
Owner-only surfaces — payouts and branches, whatever else is granted.
Passkeys, authenticator apps and recovery codes, shared across both dashboards because security is an account concern.

Knowing what happened

Analytics — visits, revenue from completed visits, unique customers, tracked bookings and payment mix over any range.
Advanced analytics and API access on the top tier.
Setup checklist — what is still missing from the venue.
Reviews collected automatically after every visit.
In-app feedback — a direct channel to us carrying platform, build and screen, so a bug report is reproducible.
Content safety checks on every uploaded image.

What each one actually fixes

Features are only interesting as answers. Left: the thing that costs a Nigerian service business money this week. Right: the mechanism that addresses it.

“They booked and never showed up.”

A deposit on the service turns an intention into a commitment. If they still do not come, the no-show settlement pays the business 80% of the forfeited deposit — the slot is still lost, but it is no longer free to lose.

“I have no idea who came in last month.”

Every walk-in checked in at the front desk creates a customer record. The venue stops being a place where revenue happens and starts being a place where revenue is recorded — which is what makes analytics, review requests and repeat marketing possible at all.

“My Google listing says I close at 6. I have closed at 8 for a year.”

Connected Profile reads Google, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, shows you every place they disagree, and publishes your answer back to Google and WhatsApp. Wrong opening hours are the single most common complaint customers leave about small businesses.

“DMs come in at 11pm and I answer at 9am. By then they have booked elsewhere.”

The assistant answers from a brief you wrote and can book the slot outright. You see exactly which times it would give away, and the precise list of situations where it stops and hands the conversation back.

“December was excellent. February was frightening.”

Membership tiers convert a seasonal business into a subscription one. Entitlements deduct automatically at check-in, so the front desk is never doing mental arithmetic over who has sessions left.

“I cannot let my receptionist see the takings.”

Per-area permissions, not one admin switch. She runs check-ins all day with analytics off. Payouts and branches stay owner-only regardless of what else is granted.

“I meant to ask them to leave a review.”

Check-out sends it automatically, as email and WhatsApp from one authored message. Reviews are what decide the next customer's booking, and this is the step owners reliably never get round to.

“I opened a second branch and lost control of both.”

A venue network: each branch keeps its own address and public page while the whole estate stays visible from one workspace. Staff at one location do not get the keys to the rest.

How a business actually scales on it

This is a genuine sequence — each phase depends on the data the previous one produced — so it is numbered. Most venues move through it over months, not days.

Day one

Exist properly, for free

Activate the venue and import the Google Business Profile — hours, address, phone, categories and photos arrive in under a minute. Add the service menu with real prices. Get verified, which costs nothing on any plan. The business now has a page that ranks and takes bookings, at zero cost and zero risk.

Free plan
KYC verification
Public page live

Week one

Stop the leak

Put a deposit on the services that hurt to lose — the two-hour treatment, the Saturday chair. Set up payouts and decide whether to accept payment at the venue. Start checking walk-ins in, so the customer who came through the door without booking finally leaves a record.

Deposits on
Payouts configured
Visit board in use

Month one

Let the follow-up run itself

Turn on the after-visit review request and the DM auto-reply. The work that happens after a customer leaves stops depending on the owner remembering. Reviews accumulate, which improves ranking, which brings the next customer — the first compounding loop in the system.

Review automation
Unified inbox
Assistant answering

The upgrade moment

Do the arithmetic and move to Growth

This is where the model does its own selling. At Free, the platform keeps 6% of every deposit it moves. On Growth at ₦5,000 a month, that drops to 3%. A venue moving roughly ₦167,000 of deposits a month is already paying the subscription in saved fees alone — and Growth also brings memberships, social automation, campaigns and ten team seats. The upgrade is arithmetic a business can do for itself, which is precisely the point.

Deposit fee 6% → 3%
Memberships unlocked
10 staff seats

Quarter two

Make next month predictable

Launch membership tiers. Money now arrives whether or not the week was busy, and members visit more often because they have already paid. The first ₦100,000 of membership revenue carries no platform share at all, so the experiment itself is free. Staff get their own logins with the right access, and the owner stops being the bottleneck.

Recurring revenue
Staff permissions
Campaigns

Year one and beyond

Open the second location

Scale at ₦15,000 a month gives unlimited branches, staff and services, the lowest deposit fee at 1.5%, a custom domain, API access and advanced analytics. Each branch keeps its own page and address; the group is managed from one workspace. The business that arrived as a single chair is now an estate — and the platform's revenue grew with it rather than ahead of it.

Deposit fee 1.5%
Unlimited branches
Custom domain & API

How we make money

Eight revenue lines across two families: recurring subscription, and a share of money the platform actually moves. Written out in full, with the rates, because a business that can see what it will be charged before it signs up is a business that does not get a surprise later.

Line one — subscriptions

Plan	Monthly	Deposit fee	Staff	Branches	AI replies / mo
Company · Free	₦0	6%	1	1	50
Company · Growth	₦5,000	3%	10	1	2,000
Company · Scale	₦15,000	1.5%	Unlimited	Unlimited	10,000
Artizan · Free	₦0	6%	1	1	50
Artizan · Pro	₦2,500	3%	1	1	1,000

Annual billing charges ten months for twelve — two months free, and one payment instead of a decision every month.

Trial registration fee

₦100

Paid by the business

Every paid plan opens with a 14-day trial that takes a one-off, non-refundable ₦100 and saves the card, so the plan continues without interruption when the trial ends. Cancel before then and nothing further is charged. The amount is deliberately nominal — it exists to make the transition automatic, not to be a revenue line.

Deposit remittance fee

6% / 3% / 1.5%

Deducted from the business

The transactional core. A share of each deposit the platform holds and remits, and the rate is what a subscription really buys: a business on Free keeps 94% of every deposit; on Scale it keeps 98.5%. Taking bookings is free. Verification is free. No-show protection is free. What costs money is money we move.

Discovery fee

15%

Deducted from the business

A one-off share of the firstbooking from a customer the platform introduced — floored at ₦500, capped at ₦5,000, and never more than 25% of the job's value so the floor cannot become punitive on small work.

Both conditions are required and neither is guessed: the customer must have come from ArtizanSquare and be new to that business. On a relationship the business built itself, this is zero, and the receipt says so. It is charged exactly once per customer relationship, never on a returning customer.

Convenience fee

₦150

Paid by the customer

A flat charge to the customer for the guaranteed slot a deposit secures. Never deducted from the business's money — it sits on top. High-volume and low-friction, and the one line that grows purely with booking count rather than with basket size.

No-show forfeit share

20%

From the forfeited deposit

When a customer does not turn up and the deposit is forfeited, the business keeps 80% and the platform takes 20%. Earned only in the moment the deposit prevented a total loss — which is the entire justification for taking any of it, and why the settlement screen states every figure before the money moves.

Membership revenue share

Deducted from the business

A share of each membership renewal collected on the business's behalf, capped at ₦2,500 per charge. The first ₦100,000 of membership revenue carries no share at all, so a shop trying memberships for the first time is not billed for the experiment. Charged only on money that actually landed.

Credit bundles

Variable

Paid by the business

Plans include monthly allowances for email, WhatsApp and AI replies. Beyond them, businesses buy top-up bundles — single channel or combo. There is a real cost behind this one: Meta bills per WhatsApp conversation and model usage is metered, so it is closer to resale than margin, but it scales directly with engagement.

Profile boost

Placement

Paid by the business

Paid prominence in search and category listings, available from Growth upward. The classic marketplace advertising line, and the one with the most headroom as listing density grows — it only becomes valuable when there are enough businesses in a category for position to matter.

The four rules our pricing cannot break

These are enforced by the billing system itself rather than left to good intentions. They are what make the fee stack defensible to an owner reading a receipt.

Every percentage has a naira cap

No fee is ever an uncapped percentage. The ceiling is part of the calculation itself, so it cannot be forgotten on one code path and applied on another.

Never charged twice for one transaction

When a booking carries a discovery fee, the deposit remittance fee is zero — and the waiver is printed on the receipt rather than silently omitted.

The business keeps at least half of every deposit

Whatever else applies, our total share is capped at 50%. Any fee that cannot be collected inside that ceiling is simply not collected — never carried forward, never deducted later, never pursued.

The free tier is never charged more than a paid one

Checked across the whole plan catalogue automatically. A pricing change that broke this rule would be rejected before it could ever reach a customer.

One thing is deliberately absent from every plan and every price list: verification. It is not sold, at any tier, to either kind of provider. Keeping customers safe from bad actors is our own obligation rather than a feature with a price — and in a market where trust is the binding constraint on booking a stranger, that is a positioning decision as much as an ethical one.

Taking bookings is free. Verification is free. No-show protection is free. What costs money is money we move.

Start on the free tier

Set your venue up, put your services on it, and let the diary, the deposits and the follow-ups run themselves. The free tier does not expire, and verification costs nothing on it.

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