Mahi Time is a Kiwi-built scheduling platform for the salons, barbers, beauty studios and service businesses that have spent too long propping up someone else's marketplace.
Three things we got right
01 · Pricing
20% commission on every new client the marketplace sends you.
Per-chair pricing that punishes you for hiring weekend staff.
Quote-only pricing that changes depending on who you spoke to.
NZ$129/mo. First three team members included. $19 each after that. That is the entire price list.
02 · Openness
Walled-garden booking platforms with no public API.
"Integrations" that are CSV exports you have to email yourself.
Data lock-in dressed up as data security.
Every screen in our admin panel calls the same public REST endpoints you can. Build your own front end, push to Xero, integrate your POS.
03 · AI
A NZ$249/mo "AI Concierge" add-on that books outside your conflict rules.
One feature wrappers on top of a 2018 product.
Voice agents that hallucinate your service menu.
Mahi Time was designed with voice and LLM in mind from the schema up. The agent runs the same scheduling engine as the admin panel.
Why we built it
Mahi Time was started by a small team of NZ engineers who spent years building software for hospitality and service businesses. Every salon owner we sat across the table from said some version of the same thing: "This software is expensive, I can't get my data out, and there is no way to plug it into anything else."
We could see why. The market is dominated by three platforms. Two of them are private equity owned. One has been pivoting itself into a marketplace business and the salons did not get a vote. None of them compete with the others on price because the lock-in cost is too high once a year of customer data is inside.
So we built the booking SaaS we wished we could send those owners to. Made in Auckland. Built on Laravel. Hosted in Sydney. Cheap to run, cheap to use, AI on by default.
Bookings without the booking fees. We meant it as a tagline. It is also the entire business model.
Founded
Auckland, 2026
Stack
Laravel 12 · Filament 5 · Livewire 4 · MySQL · AWS Sydney
Where the money goes
Engineering, support and infrastructure. Not into bidding on your business name on Google.
How we operate
We will never DM, email, or upsell to a customer who walked in through your door. Their data is yours, in your account, exportable whenever you want.
Every plan, every add-on, every overage rate is published. If we change it, it will not be by emailing you at midnight.
There is no Bronze, Silver, or Gold support. The team that answers a $129/mo customer is the team that answers a 20-location chain.
Documented API, exportable data, no per-integration fees. If you want to leave, you take everything with you.
Our voice agent uses the same conflict checks as the admin panel. It cannot double-book. It cannot make up a service.
NZ team, NZ business hours, NZ data hosted in Sydney. No call centre, no 12-hour reply delay.
