Comparison

bindro vs Peek for craft workshops

Reviewed: 2026-08-09

bindro vs Peek for craft workshops: the short answer

Distribution, and a decade of practice with activity operators. Peek publicly runs a consumer marketplace and distributes operators' inventory to travel and booking channels, which is a genuinely different business from ours: a studio whose workshops are bought by visitors to the city may fill seats through them that no amount of good checkout software would fill. Their product also comes from the world of guides, equipment and resource scheduling, which is closer to a workshop than a concert is.

When your makers already know you and the job is the mechanics. bindro is booking software with no channel and no commission-funded marketplace behind it: timed sessions with per-session places, a waiver refused if unsigned, prepaid class packs and gift cards, kits as add-ons, a door sale on the ordinary money path, and a flat 2.5% + $0.99 per order with no monthly fee — which is a very different cost shape from a platform that also sells you demand.

• We do not publish Peek's pricing, commission rates or contract terms. Check their current pricing with them, and ask specifically how a booking that comes through their marketplace is charged compared with one from your own website.
• Peek's heritage is tours and activities rather than craft studios. That is a statement about which industry the product grew up in, not a claim about what it can be configured to do — ask for a walkthrough of a six-week evening course if that is what you run.
• Everything in the bindro column is a capability this vertical resolves and a gate checks. Everything in theirs is either public positioning or an explicit "ask them".

Reviewed: 2026-08-09

• A refunded place does not go back on sale, and the waiting list never sees it. Refunding a booking returns the money and leaves the place counted as sold, so the session still reads fully booked and the queue stays asleep — it wakes only when an abandoned checkout hold lapses, or when the maker cancels under published terms that keep a share, which does end the booking and does free the place. After a plain refund: raise that session's capacity by one by hand.
• No-show protection goes exactly as far as your published terms. You can set the hours before the session at which self-service refunds stop, and the share you keep on a cancellation inside that window — bindro applies both itself, ends the booking and returns the rest. What you cannot do is take a deposit, hold a card against a no-show, or charge anybody who simply does not arrive. The reminder email exists but is off until you turn it on, one workshop at a time: tick "Send a reminder for this workshop" on that workshop's Reminders page and every booking on it is emailed once, a set number of hours before it starts (24 is the lead we suggest for an evening class). Nothing is sent for a workshop where nobody has ticked it.
• No transfers and no date changes. A maker who cannot come on Saturday cannot hand their place to a friend and cannot move it to next week — this vertical resolves neither ticket transfer nor deferral, and there is no credit note. The only lever is a refund, after which they book again at whatever is still on sale.
• A gift card is a balance, not a voucher for a named workshop: $5 to $500, valid 24 months, spendable on anything your studio has on sale. You cannot sell "one place at the Saturday wheel class" as a gift or restrict a card to one class, and there is no send date and nothing printable — the code is emailed to the recipient, with the name and the message you typed, as soon as it is paid for, so a card bought on 3 December lands on 3 December.
• Class-pack credits are studio-wide and cannot be aimed at one class. There is no pack that covers the six-week wheel course and nothing else, and no way to exclude a masterclass. A credit buys one place: a dearer class takes a credit plus the difference in cash, and a class cheaper than a credit punches nothing at all and is paid in full.
• Nothing counts an answer for you. What a maker told you is readable in three places — the register, stacked under their name, for anyone you have given the grant to read makers; that date's allergen sheet, maker by maker, for the dietary answers only, behind a fresh verification and an audit line; and the maker CSV, which carries a column for every question you asked, access needs and "Have you done this before?" included — but nothing totals them. No analytics screen breaks a date down by what people answered, and a dietary or access answer is kept out of the assistant absolutely and leaves bindro in the maker CSV alone: not in answers.csv, not in contacts.csv, not in the one-file JSON archive. Counting how many beginners are booked on Saturday is reading, not a report.
• One signature covers the whole booking, not each maker on it. The waiver is typed by the person paying, and the acceptance record names that one signer however many places the order covers. There is also no age rule until you write one: the vertical sets no minimum, so a booking for a fifteen-year-old at a woodworking bench is refused only on a date where you have set a lowest age under "Who this date suits" — and what that checks is a date of birth typed on the form, refused before payment but not proof of anybody's age.
• No shop till and no cash. A walk-up place sold at the door is a real card sale on the ordinary checkout, but there is no way to record a place paid for in cash and no counter-sales page for mugs, glazes or fired pieces. Kits and firing fees can be sold as add-ons ON a booking; anything sold separately at your counter stays outside bindro.

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