Problem

Booko addresses the core revenue problem of businesses that sell bookable time: an unsold appointment, class, treatment, consultation, or event slot expires permanently and produces zero revenue. Demand is uneven, yet many service businesses still use static prices that give customers no reason to choose slower periods. The pain is especially acute for high-fixed-cost operators, where the marginal cost of filling an otherwise empty slot is low but the lost revenue cannot be recovered later.

The main use case is filling off-peak capacity without adding hours, staff, or blanket discounts. A fitness studio could reduce the price of a low-demand class, a salon could incentivize a quiet appointment window, or a tutor could attract bookings during an otherwise empty hour, while preserving full-price demand during busy periods.

Product / Service

Booko is a software platform that adds dynamic pricing and incentives to a provider's existing booking workflow. It connects through an API to systems such as Mindbody, Mariana Tek, or another booking platform, synchronizes schedules, booking history, and availability, and uses AI to predict which slots are unlikely to fill. When it identifies an at-risk slot, Booko automatically surfaces a targeted offer through the existing customer flow rather than requiring customers to adopt a new app.

Providers retain control over their services, schedules, pricing rules, and minimum or maximum thresholds. Booko can use discounts, credits, points, membership cashback, and other incentives, with the stated benefit of converting otherwise empty capacity into incremental revenue. The company says early businesses have seen roughly 15–25% revenue uplift, while its terms describe a transaction-based platform fee of 2.8% plus $0.25 per booking; Stripe processing fees may apply separately.

Market

Booko competes in vertical SaaS, revenue management, and dynamic-pricing infrastructure for the appointment-based service economy. Its target market includes fitness studios, med-spas, tutors, consultants, personal trainers, movie theaters, event venues, hair salons, accounting firms, and other businesses whose inventory is time rather than physical goods. The company positions the model as bringing the capacity-pricing logic used by airlines and Uber into service businesses that have historically relied on static rates.

The available company materials do not name a direct competitor. Instead, they frame the competitive alternative as static pricing, manual discounting, and incumbent booking systems; Mindbody and Mariana Tek are identified as integration targets rather than replacements. Booko was founded in 2025, joined Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch, launched on YC's platform in February 2026, and announced its official dynamic-pricing-engine launch in March 2026. It reports early customer traction of approximately 20% revenue uplift, but the available evidence does not disclose revenue, booking volume, or customer count, so the company is best characterized as an early commercial-stage startup with traction but unreported scale.