Calendrax AI – Appointment Booking, Deposits & Scheduling

Calendrax AI lets customers book your services on your own WordPress site and pay a deposit (or the full price) through your own Stripe account before they arrive. No-shows stop costing you the slot.

It is built for any business that sells time: hair and beauty salons, barbers, spas, massage and wellness, clinics and therapists, photographers, tutors and coaches, fitness classes, tattoo studios, pet groomers, and repair or cleaning services.

Everything below is in this free plugin, with no limits on services, staff, locations or bookings, no license key and no trial: every feature in this plugin works from the start.

Take deposits before the appointment

• Per service: free, pay at the appointment, a deposit (fixed amount or percentage, with an optional minimum), or full payment online.
• Connect your own Stripe account in about two minutes: paste your API keys (your site talks to Stripe directly), or sign in with Stripe instead. Start in test mode with Stripe test cards, then switch to live. The payment form shows your business name.
• Customers pay on your own booking page: Stripe’s secure payment form opens inside the booking form (cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Link and other methods Stripe offers in your country). Prefer Stripe’s hosted page? Switch it in one click.
• A booking becomes paid only when Stripe confirms it: a signed webhook, a server-side check when the customer returns, and a 5-minute safety check. A browser redirect alone never marks anything paid.
• The time is held while the customer pays, then released automatically if they do not.
• Refund in full or part from the booking screen.
• Optional Stripe promotion codes: customers enter a code you created in your Stripe dashboard, and it is checked with Stripe before they pay.
• A built-in setup guide walks you through connecting Stripe.

A booking page customers finish

• Pick a service, then the date and time side by side, then details. Clean, minimal and fast on phones.
• Guest booking: no customer account needed.
• “Anyone available” staff option that spreads bookings across your team.
• Booking questions per service (for example “Any allergies?”).
• Group capacity for classes and workshops.
• Uses your theme’s font by default. Optional appearance settings: font, text size, corner style, light, dark or automatic mode, and accent colour.
• Works with the keyboard and screen readers.

Schedules that match how you work

• Weekly hours per staff member with breaks, days off and partial time off.
• Buffers before and after, minimum notice, and how far ahead people can book.
• Time-zone and daylight-saving aware availability, worked out on the server.
• Two customers clicking “Book” for the same time at the same moment cannot both get it.
• Automatic confirmation, or approve each booking yourself.

One or many locations

• Add as many locations as you need, each with its own name, address, timezone, phone, staff and hours.
• Customers choose the location first, or use [calendrax_booking branch="ID"] for a page per location.
• Services can be offered at every location or only some.
• Branch managers: give a team member a WordPress login that sees and manages bookings, the calendar, customers and payments for their own locations only (Settings → Branch managers).

Customers manage their own bookings

• Every email carries a private link where customers view, reschedule or cancel within your rules (per-service cut-off times). Rescheduling online can be switched off under Settings → General.
• Customers who need help see your phone number with a tap-to-call button (Settings → General).
• Choose a manage-booking page in Settings and Calendrax shows the form there, or place [calendrax_manage_booking] anywhere.

Emails that look like your business

• One modern, mobile-friendly design for confirmations, reminders, cancellations, reschedules, deposit and balance reminders, and alerts to you and your staff.
• The header uses your site’s primary colour, or any colour you pick; text stays readable on it.
• Edit every subject and message, preview before saving, and send yourself a test.

One fast admin page

• Dashboard, calendar, bookings, customers, payments, services, staff, locations and settings switch instantly without reloading, like WooCommerce settings.
• A two-minute quick setup creates your first service, hours and booking pages.
• Add phone and walk-in bookings and record in-person payments.
• Full history on every booking.

Search-engine friendly

• Service lists are real HTML that search engines can read.
• schema.org structured data (LocalBusiness with an Offer, price and currency per service) on pages that show your services or booking form, so search results can show what you offer.
• Private pages (customers’ manage-booking links) are marked noindex automatically.
• Lightweight: scripts load only on pages with a Calendrax shortcode.

Safe with money and personal data

• Card details are entered only on Stripe’s page.
• Stripe credentials are encrypted in your database and never sent to browsers.
• Every admin request checks a WordPress capability and a security nonce.
• Live data is sent with no-store headers, and common page caches (LiteSpeed, WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, SiteGround, Breeze, WP Fastest Cache, Cloudflare) are cleared automatically when services or settings change.
• Works with WordPress’s export and erase personal data tools, with an optional retention period.
• Your data is never deleted on deactivation or update.

Shortcodes

• [calendrax_booking] – the booking form. Options: service="ID", staff="ID", branch="ID" (location).
• [calendrax_services] – a list of services with Book buttons. Options: category="Name", book_url="/book/".
• [calendrax_manage_booking] – customers view, reschedule or cancel their booking.

Settings → Shortcodes lists them with your real IDs, ready to copy. They work in the block editor (Shortcode block), the Classic Editor, Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder and anywhere else that runs shortcodes. Several booking forms can share one page.

Source code

All JavaScript and CSS in this plugin are the original, hand-written source files, formatted for reading. There is no build step, bundler, transpiler or minifier: the files in assets/ are exactly the files we edit. The PHP is in includes/. No third-party libraries are bundled.

Calendrax AI Pro (separate plugin)

Calendrax AI Pro is a separate plugin, sold on our website and not included here. It adds its own features with its own code:

• AI booking assistant: a chat on every page that answers questions about your business and finds real free times (your own Google Gemini API key).
• AI phone agent: answers your phone and a “Talk to us” button, and books, moves and cancels appointments (your own Vapi account).
• Reports (revenue, no-shows, cancellations) and CSV export.
• Calendar feeds for Google, Apple and Outlook, and signed webhooks for Zapier, Make and n8n.

Learn more at https://exceatlab.com/calendrax-ai/

Privacy

Calendrax stores the customer details entered in the booking form (name, email, phone, answers to your questions, notes) and booking/payment records in your site’s database. It does not send data to Exceat Lab and contains no tracking. A suggested privacy-policy text is added under Settings → Privacy. Exports and erasure requests are handled through Tools → Export/Erase Personal Data; erasure removes personal details but keeps booking and payment records for accounting.

External services

The free plugin works without any external service. Two are used only if you choose to take online payments:

• Stripe (https://stripe.com) processes customer payments. When a customer pays online, this plugin creates a Stripe Checkout session with the amount, currency, service name, booking reference and the customer’s email. With “On my website” (the default), the booking page loads Stripe.js from https://js.stripe.com, as Stripe requires for PCI compliance, and Stripe’s payment form appears in a frame on the page; with “On Stripe’s page” the customer is sent to checkout.stripe.com. Stripe.js is loaded only on pages with a booking form and only when Stripe is connected. Your site also creates and later removes a webhook endpoint on your Stripe account. Stripe terms: https://stripe.com/legal/ssa · Privacy: https://stripe.com/privacy
• Exceat Lab connection service (https://exceatlab.com/calendrax-ai/) is optional. It is not used at all if you connect with your own Stripe API keys. It is used once, only if you choose “Sign in with Stripe” (and again on “Disconnect”). It completes Stripe’s account-connection (OAuth) step, because that step needs the platform’s secret key, which cannot be shipped inside a plugin. It receives your site address and, for a few minutes, your Stripe access token, which your site collects with a one-time code and which is then deleted from the service. It keeps only your Stripe account ID and site host so access can be revoked. No customer or booking data ever passes through it, and it takes no fees. Terms: https://exceatlab.com/calendrax-ai/terms · Privacy: https://exceatlab.com/calendrax-ai/privacy

The plugin makes no other network requests: no usage tracking, no analytics, no license or update checks. Calendrax AI Pro is a separate plugin with its own disclosures.