The Genuinely Free Booking App for UK Driving Instructors

No monthly fee. No setup cost. No contract. The pupil adds a small booking fee when they book online, and you receive your full lesson price. Here's how it works and why we built it this way.

Why every other booking system charges you monthly

If you've ever looked for a booking system as a driving instructor, you'll have noticed they all want £10-40 a month from you. Sign up, enter your card details, start paying whether you get a single booking or not.

That model works well for the software company. Not always for you. If you're just starting out, or you're part-time, or you're trying to decide whether online booking is even worth it — paying £19 a month to find out is a barrier. A small one, but a barrier.

We built PassReady differently. You never pay us at all — the pupil adds a small booking fee when they book online, and you receive your full price.

How the pricing works

PassReady has no monthly fee. No annual subscription. No setup cost. No minimum term.

When a student books a lesson through your PassReady booking page and pays online, a small booking fee (4.2% plus a round-up to the whole pound) is added on top of your price and paid by them. On a £40 lesson the pupil pays £43; you receive £40.23. That's it. That's the entire pricing model.

On a £38 lesson, the pupil pays £41 and you receive £38.28. The fee always sits on top of your price, never inside it.

The fee is paid by the pupil, never by you. It's added on top of your lesson price at checkout, so you receive slightly more than your asking price on every online booking. There's nothing to configure and nothing to absorb — that's the whole model.

If nobody books through the platform this month, nobody pays anything. If ten people book, each adds a small fee to their own payment. Your cost is £0 in both cases.

"If it's free, what's the catch?"

Fair question. Here's the honest answer.

The catch is the pupil-paid booking fee. We make money only when your pupils book online. If you get no bookings through PassReady, we get nothing. That means we're incentivised to make the platform genuinely useful — because if instructors don't get bookings, we don't eat.

There are no hidden fees. No premium tier you'll need to upgrade to. No features locked behind a paywall. Every instructor gets every feature. We don't sell your data. We don't show ads. We don't upsell insurance or referral schemes.

The fee is a straightforward booking fee, the kind pupils already pay on tickets and takeaways — except this one funds a booking system, a calendar, progress tracking, a professional booking page, and the free app the pupil revises theory on.

What you get

Everything. There's one plan, and it includes:

• Your own booking page — a shareable link (passready.co.uk/i/yourname) where students can see your availability and book directly
• Smart calendar — set your working hours, lesson types, break times, and travel gaps. The system only shows students slots that actually work for you
• Online payments via Stripe — students pay when they book. No more chasing. No more "I'll pay next week." Every lesson in your diary is a paid lesson
• Student progress tracking — record what you covered, track which skills each student is working on, and share progress with parents
• Fleet and vehicle management — if you have more than one car or work with other instructors
• Automatic cancellation policy — you set the rules, the system enforces them. No awkward conversations

There are no feature gates. You don't need to upgrade to "Pro" to get payments or progress tracking. It's all included from the start.

How it compares to the old way

Most driving instructors still manage bookings through a combination of text messages, WhatsApp, phone calls, and a paper diary or a Google Calendar. Payments happen in cash through the car window or via bank transfer ("I'll send it tonight").

It works. Millions of lessons get booked and paid for this way every year. But it also means:

• You're answering texts at 10pm about availability
• You're checking your bank to see who actually paid
• You're dealing with no-shows from students who had nothing to lose by cancelling
• You can't easily show a parent what their child has been working on
• Your "marketing" is a Facebook post saying "slots available this week"

PassReady replaces all of that with a single link you share. Students see your real availability, pick a slot, pay, and it shows up in your diary. Done.

You still teach the lessons. You still decide your hours, your prices, your cancellation policy. The platform just handles the admin that eats into your evenings.

Who this is for

PassReady is built for solo ADIs. If you're one instructor with one car and 15-30 students, this is designed around exactly how you work.

It's particularly useful if you're:

• Just starting out and don't want to pay £19/month before you've got a full diary
• Part-time and can't justify a monthly subscription for 10 lessons a week
• Fed up with no-shows and want prepaid booking without building your own system
• Tired of the admin and want students to book themselves instead of texting you

It's designed around the solo instructor's working week — if that's you, it's worth a look.

Try it

You can see exactly how the booking page works without signing up. Have a look at the demo and decide for yourself whether it's useful.

If it is, setup takes about 10 minutes. If it isn't, you haven't spent anything finding out.