The Flybook vs Starboard Suite for Guides

One of these charges a flat five hundred dollars a month. On a fifty thousand dollar guiding season that is twelve percent, which is a higher rate than any marketplace in this series.

Flat fees look cheap because they are quoted in dollars while everything else is quoted in percentages, and the translation is the whole story here. Starboard Suite bills $500 a month until you are processing $200,000 a year. The Flybook bills a percentage from the first dollar. Which is cheaper depends entirely on how big you are, and the answer for a one-boat operation is not close. Both sit alongside the rest of the field on the booking software topic page.

What does the flat fee actually cost you?

Six percent at a hundred thousand, twelve at fifty, and it does not care which.

Starboard Suite's pricing page sets $500 a month for operators processing under $200,000 a year, moving to 3 percent of processed revenue between $200,000 and a million.

Notice that those two tiers meet exactly. Six thousand dollars a year is precisely 3 percent of two hundred thousand, so the pricing is continuous at the boundary and the flat fee is simply the same 3 percent charged as a minimum.

Which means every dollar you are below $200,000 makes your effective rate worse. At $100,000 of bookings you are paying 6 percent. At $50,000 you are paying 12.

Twelve percent is more than most marketplace commissions in this whole category, and you are paying it to software that finds you nobody. Bookeo's cheapest published tier is about $39.95 a month, roughly a twelfth of the same bill, for a business doing the same thing.

None of that is hidden. It is arithmetic anybody can do from the published page, and almost nobody does because the number is quoted in dollars.

Wildwest Flyfishing, MT

Northern Water, NH

Is the flat fee ever the better deal?

Yes, above roughly three hundred thousand dollars, and that is a real business.

Run the crossover. A flat $6,000 equals 2 percent of $300,000, so an operation processing more than that would prefer the flat fee to a 2 percent charge, if the flat fee were available up there.

It is not. Starboard's flat tier stops at $200,000, above which the rate becomes 3 percent, which is worse than 2 percent at every level.

So on the published numbers alone the flat structure never actually wins, because the tier that would make it win is capped below the point where it would.

What can change that is the ticketing fee, which is the piece of Starboard's model doing most of the work and deserves its own section.

Without it, the flat fee is a minimum charge dressed as a price, and minimums are always worst for the smallest customer.

What is the ticketing fee arrangement?

The reason Starboard can describe itself as free, and it means your customer pays.

The pricing page states you are always welcome but never required to charge your customer a ticketing fee at any rate you choose, that those fees go directly to you, and that you can use them to offset the service fee or set them higher and keep the difference.

That is unusually candid and worth crediting. Most vendors that route their cost onto the customer do not explain the mechanism, and several publish no rate at all.

It also transforms the arithmetic. A guide running 100 trips a year who adds a $60 ticketing fee collects $6,000 and the software becomes genuinely free to the business.

The cost has not gone anywhere. It has moved onto a $600 trip that now checks out at $660, and whether that matters depends on whether your customer is comparing you against anybody quoting $600 flat.

The version of this that guides usually miss, where a surcharge makes your own listing the expensive way to buy you, is set out in the two-sided fee comparison.

Does The Flybook charge the customer too?

Its pricing section does not say, which is the gap in an otherwise clear rate card.

The Flybook publishes two standard options: a 4 percent online booking fee, or 2 percent on all transactions, offered based on eligibility.

What it does not state on that section is who bears either charge. A booking fee named as a percentage of online bookings is the shape of a customer-facing charge in this industry, and a fee on all transactions is the shape of an operator charge.

That ambiguity is worth resolving before anything else, because it is the difference between 4 percent coming out of your margin and 4 percent being added to your customer's total.

It is a single question to a salesperson and it changes the entire comparison, so ask it first rather than after a demo has sold you on the feature list.

Being clear about who pays is the single most useful thing to establish about any vendor in this category, and the pattern it reveals is explored in the alternatives roundup.

What is each one actually built for?

Passenger vessels on one side, multi-activity outfitters on the other, and fishing on neither list.

Starboard's own solutions pages name dinner and sightseeing cruises, private charters and group bookings, whale and dolphin watching, cycle boats and party pontoons, and banana boats and parasailing.

Every one of those is a scheduled departure with seats to sell, which is a fundamentally different product to a guided day for two anglers.

The Flybook names tours, guided activities, rentals, ticketing, adventure parks and ziplines, rafting, dude ranches and lodges. Also not fishing, though its own testimonials include a fishing guide and the company describes being founded by guides.

That absence from both taxonomies is not a disqualification, and plenty of software gets used well outside its named market. It does tell you whose problems the roadmap is solving.

For a guide the practical test is whether the system can handle a two-person trip with variable start times and a guide assignment, rather than a hundred-seat departure at ten o'clock.

Which handles guides and equipment better?

The Flybook, on the published feature set, and it is the clearer fit for an outfitter with staff.

Its named modules include guide management with schedules and availability, equipment management with assignment and tracking, pre-arrival preparation, specialised dashboards and a retail point of sale.

That combination describes an outfitter running several guides, a shed full of gear and a shop, which is a real category and a well-served one here.

Starboard's included list is broader in a different direction: unlimited employee accounts, event types, departure locations, gift certificates and promotional codes, with setup and configuration done for you.

Its emphasis is on getting a booking flow live and looking like your website, with a dedicated account representative doing the configuration, which suits an operator who does not want to build anything themselves.

Neither is obviously better. They are answering different questions, and the answer that matters is which question you actually have.

What do you get for the setup?

A configured system on one side; a longer-standing product on the other.

Starboard describes a business review with a dedicated account representative, setup and configuration performed for you, a reservations module matched to your site's appearance, and free training for you and your staff.

It also includes hosting and monitoring, an SSL certificate, and free upgrades, all of which are table stakes but worth confirming rather than assuming.

The Flybook leans on longevity and staffing instead, stating eighteen years in business, five million reservations managed, and an advisory team of whom more than seventy percent have worked as guides, operators or managers.

Those are different kinds of reassurance. One is about the onboarding you will get; the other is about who will pick up the phone in your third season.

Both matter and neither shows up in a price, which is why demos of these two are worth doing back to back rather than months apart.

What about integrations?

Starboard publishes a list; the answer decides whether your existing tools survive the switch.

Starboard names payment processing through two providers, a waiver service, three major activity marketplaces, two email marketing platforms, and the usual analytics and advertising pixels.

The marketplace integrations are the interesting ones for a guide, because they mean listings on those channels can feed the same calendar rather than becoming a second place to check.

Whether a fishing-specific marketplace connects to either system is the question nobody publishes, and it matters more than any general activity platform for this trade.

A system that cannot see your marketplace bookings is a system that will let you sell the same Saturday twice, which is the failure everything else is meant to prevent.

How that goes wrong in practice, and the one discipline that stops it, is in the calendar piece.

Does either help with licensing or waivers?

One integrates a waiver service; neither knows anything about your licence.

Starboard names an integration with a waiver platform, which is a genuine operational saving for anybody currently chasing paper at the ramp.

The Flybook's published modules cover pre-arrival preparation, which is the same territory described differently, and the specifics are worth confirming rather than inferring.

Neither system verifies anything about your credentials, and no software approval means anything about whether you are permitted to run a trip.

Requirements for guiding for hire vary by state and by water and are revised without much announcement. Confirm the current rules with your licensing authority before you take a booking through either.

What a waiver actually has to contain to be worth having is covered in the waiver piece.

How much revenue do you actually need before either makes sense?

Somewhere north of a hundred thousand, and the honest floor is higher than that.

Operations software earns its keep by removing work, and the work only exists at volume. One guide taking sixty trips a year does not have a scheduling problem that costs $6,000 to solve.

The tipping point is not really revenue anyway. It is the first employee. The moment somebody other than you is running trips, the calendar stops living in your head and starts needing to be somewhere both of you can see it.

The second trigger is equipment. A shed of rental gear that has to be assigned to trips is a genuine inventory problem, and it is the thing a scheduling app cannot do. What that inventory costs to run in the first place is set out in the wader fleet piece.

The third is departure points. One ramp needs no system; three ramps with different meeting times and different guides is a coordination problem worth paying for.

If none of those three describes you, the money is better spent almost anywhere else, and the calendar you already have is fine.

Where the crossover actually lands, with the arithmetic behind it, is in the saltwater booking software piece.

What should you ask in a demo?

Four questions, none of which are about features.

First, who bears the fee. A percentage that comes out of your payout and a percentage added to your customer's total are completely different products at the same headline rate.

Second, what qualifies you for the published rate. One of these two attaches an eligibility condition to its standard pricing without defining it anywhere public, and finding out afterwards is expensive.

Third, what happens on a cancellation. If a trip is called off for weather, does the fee come back with the refund? At 4 percent of a $600 trip that is $24 a time, and across a blown-out fortnight it adds up, as the piece on salvaging cancelled days works through.

Fourth, what the exit looks like. Getting customer records and booking history out of a system you are leaving is the thing nobody asks about at signup and everybody discovers at the worst possible moment.

Write the answers down during the call. Published pricing pages in this category change without announcement, and a saved reply from a named person is the only version that stays true.

The general habit of getting terms in writing before committing is worth more than any comparison table, including this one.

What does neither of them do?

Find you a single customer.

Both of these are operations software. They take a booking that was already coming, process it cleanly, stop it colliding with another one, and keep the records straight.

Neither puts your name in front of somebody planning a trip to your water, which is worth stating plainly because the marketing on both sites talks about growing revenue.

That growth is real but narrow: better conversion on traffic you already have, fewer bookings lost to a slow reply, more add-ons sold at the point of purchase. It is not new demand.

A guide with a quiet calendar who buys either one will have a quiet calendar managed more tidily, and will have spent between $1,000 and $6,000 discovering that.

The demand problem is a different budget line entirely, and which channel deserves it is worked through in the direct-booking arithmetic.

How does a percentage feel different to a subscription?

It fails safely, and that is worth more than the rate difference in a bad season.

A percentage charges nothing in a month with no bookings. A flat fee arrives in February whether the boat left the dock or not.

For a seasonal business that asymmetry is the whole point. Six thousand dollars spread evenly across twelve months is a bill in every month where the calendar is empty, and guiding calendars are empty for several of them in most fisheries.

The counter is predictability. A flat fee is a known number you can budget against, and a percentage in a strong season can exceed what you would have paid flat.

But the risk is not symmetrical. A percentage overcharging you in a good year is a cost you can afford by definition, because the revenue that produced it already arrived. A flat fee in a bad year is a cost you cannot.

Which is why, at equal expected cost, a small seasonal operation should generally prefer the percentage, and only move to a flat fee once the volume makes it plainly cheaper.

That principle is not about these two vendors. It applies to every recurring cost a guiding business takes on, and it is the reason a slow spring ends more of them than a bad rate ever has.

Which would you choose?

The Flybook on published price, and neither if you are a one-boat guide.

On the numbers each company prints, The Flybook is cheaper at every revenue level tested, and dramatically cheaper below $200,000, which is where nearly every guiding business sits.

The eligibility qualifier on that rate is the one thing that could reverse it, so the first question in any demo is whether you qualify for the standard pricing and what happens if you do not.

Starboard's counter is the ticketing fee, which can genuinely take your cost to zero, at the price of a surcharge your customer sees and your own website does not have.

The larger honest answer is that both are built for operations bigger than a single guide with a single boat, and a solo guide is better served by something simpler and cheaper than either.

What that looks like, and where the crossover into real operations software actually happens, is in the scheduling app comparison.