Frequently asked questions

Product

What exactly is Placeful? A hosted booking platform for venues: reservations, floor plan, ordering and staff management in one product. See What is Placeful.

Who is it for? Venues that take reservations — restaurants, bars, tours, event spaces — and the teams that run them.

Can customers book without an account? Yes. A guest can book from a company's public page or embedded widget without registering. Creating an account lets them manage and cancel bookings later.

Is there a free plan? Yes — a free package exists. Paid packages add ordering, stock, staff tools and support levels. See /pricing.

Are there commissions on bookings? Placeful does not take a per-booking commission on the free package. Paid packages may carry a flat + percentage platform fee, charged through Stripe application fees — the venue's own Stripe account receives the payout directly.

Can I embed booking on my own website? Yes — a copy-paste widget (button + script) renders your bookable calendar on any site. See Embed the booking widget.

Can I try it before paying? Paid packages start with a trial period; no card is charged until the trial ends and a subscription starts.

Data & privacy

Where is customer data stored? On the hosted platform under GDPR-compliant processing; a DPA is available at /dpa and data-deletion rights are documented at /data-deletion.

Can I export my data? Yes — members can export personal data from their profile; owners can export bookings and financials from the dashboard.

Technical

Is there an API? Yes — a versioned REST API at /api/v1 authenticated by personal access tokens. See API tokens and API versioning.

Is there an AI/agent interface? Yes — an MCP server is exposed at POST /mcp/bookings for Sanctum-authenticated tools, and public pages ship markdown mirrors plus llms.txt/llms-full.txt indexes for AI agents.

Is Placeful open source or self-hosted? No — it is a hosted SaaS product only.

Which languages does it support? English and Italian for the product UI and public pages; the widget and booking flow are localized the same way.