Schedopia is a free appointment booking plugin for WordPress: a booking calendar and scheduling system for service businesses, with a built-in MCP server. Businesses take appointments online, manage staff availability, prevent double-booking and send automated reminders. They can also run all of it from the AI assistant they already use, through 51 MCP tools with a switch for each.

Customers choose a service, a staff member, a date and a free time from a mobile-friendly booking form. Schedopia also handles event booking and seat reservations. Venues, classes, workshops and small theatres can create dated events, and customers pick their own seats from a visual seat map.

Everything is self-hosted on your WordPress site. There are no per-booking fees or seat commissions, and your booking and customer data stays on your own server. Why we built it that way

Run your bookings from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor

“What’s on today, and is anyone free at four?” “Book Sam with Maya tomorrow at eleven.” “Add a 45-minute Hair spa service under a new Hair category.” “Block next Monday.” Ask the assistant you already use, and it happens on your site.

Schedopia ships the most extensive MCP server of any WordPress booking plugin we know of: 51 tools covering bookings, services, add-ons, staff and hours, customers, payments, venues, events, seat layouts, form design and settings.

Off by default, one switch per tool: reading on, changes and deletes off until you allow them.
Held to the WordPress account that connected it; it cannot widen its own access.
Every call is written to the activity log, with customer details masked.
The plugin itself contacts no AI service.

One button creates the credential and fills it into your client’s command, and three Site Health checks show if your host blocks the connection.

MCP is the open standard that lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex, Claude Code and Claude Desktop use tools on your site. It needs WordPress 6.9 or newer, where the Abilities API is available, and other plugins can add their own tools to the same connection. Docs: set it up · what it can do · watching and fixing.

Why choose Schedopia?

AI-ready: connect Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor through the built-in MCP server and run bookings by talking to them. See “Run your bookings from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor” above.
A mobile-friendly booking form takes reservations 24/7, including the hours you’re closed.
Every appointment is checked against real staff availability, and every seat against what’s already reserved, so two people can never take the same time slot or the same seat.
It is fully self-hosted, with no CDNs and no per-booking commission. Nothing is sent to a third party unless you turn on reCAPTCHA spam protection yourself.
A setup wizard asks what you take bookings for, then walks you through your services, staff and hours, or your venue and first event. It takes a few minutes.
One plugin and one form handle both timed appointments with a staff member and seat reservations for dated events.
A live design customizer sets the booking form’s colours, fonts, shapes, buttons and wording, with a preview that updates as you type.

Who is Schedopia for?

Appointment-based businesses

Salons and barbershops: haircuts, colour, nails and grooming, each with its own duration and price, booked with the stylist the customer wants.
Spas, massage and beauty studios: treatments with prep and clean-up time built in, so back-to-back bookings never overlap.
Clinics, dentists and therapists: consultations and follow-ups against each practitioner’s own hours and days off, with a minimum notice so nobody books ten minutes before opening.
Tutors, coaches and consultants: one-to-one sessions with each tutor’s own hours, and add-ons for longer lessons.
Repair, home and automotive services: service calls and workshop slots with a capacity per slot, so a garage with two bays can take two cars at once.
Photographers and studios: sittings and studio hire, with buffers for setup and turnaround.

Events with seats

Yoga, fitness and dance classes: dated sessions where each mat or spot is a seat on the map.
Cookery, craft and art workshops: small-group classes with a fixed number of places, where the tutor can see who is coming.
Talks, seminars and community meetings: halls with rows and aisles, and tiered seating for members and guests.
Theatres, concerts and shows: seat maps with VIP, standard and balcony tiers at different prices, and events that open more than one hall.

More examples on the use cases page.

The booking form

One mobile-first form handles both flows. Customers pick a service, the staff member they want and a time, or pick an event and choose seats on the map, then confirm in a few taps. The form only offers times that are actually free. Add it to any page with the [schedopia_booking] shortcode, or use [schedopia_booking mode="event"] to place the seat flow on its own.

To show your services as a catalog, add [schedopia_services]. Each service card has a Book button that opens the form with that service already chosen. To list your upcoming events, add [schedopia_events]. Each event card has a Select seats button that opens the seat map for that event. Customers also get their own account page, [schedopia_account], with a sign-in page, [schedopia_signin]; both are made for you and can be turned off under Settings Customer portal. Signed in with their account on your site, they see their upcoming and past bookings in your timezone, cancel within your cut-off, book the same service again and keep their details up to date. Docs: add the form to your site.

Live design customizer

The booking form can match the look of your site. From Design in the dashboard you can:

set the form’s colours, fonts, corner radius and button style globally, from a set of typefaces and shapes;
rewrite every label the customer sees, such as step titles, button text and field hints, so the wording matches your business;
check it all in a live preview that updates as you type, before anything is published.

Appointment and event flows keep separate wording, so a site that runs both can word each one for its own customers. The services and events lists have their own design too: grid or list layout, the number of columns, card shadow and border, which details each card shows, and their own button and price wording. Everything is under Design in the dashboard, with a live preview of each. Docs: form appearance.

Appointment scheduling: services, staff and availability

Service catalogue: organise services into categories, each with its own price and duration.
Service add-ons: offer extras alongside a service. Each add-on has its own price and duration, so choosing one extends both the appointment’s total and the time blocked on the calendar.
Staff and hours: set each team member’s weekly working hours and days off. A member with no schedule of their own follows the business hours, and any member can override them.
Buffers, capacity, slot interval and minimum notice: set them once for the whole business. Buffers and capacity can be overridden per service where a treatment needs more prep time or a class takes more people; slot interval and minimum notice apply to every service. Slot interval controls how finely start times are offered, so a 60-minute service can start at 9:00, 9:15 or 9:30.
Dated appointments: every booking has its own date, time and timezone, and a transactional guard makes a double-booking impossible.

Docs: services and categories · add-ons · staff · scheduling.

Events, venues and seat maps

Venues and halls: build your venue once, with as many halls as it has.
Visual seat planner: lay out rows, aisles and seat numbering to match the room. Customers pick from the same map.
Seat tiers: VIP, Standard, Balcony or whatever you call them, each with its own colour and price. Any individual seat can override its tier’s price.
Dated events: create a session, open one hall or several, and add a cover photo. Customers browse upcoming events with live seat availability, and a seat can never be reserved twice for the same event.

Docs: venues, halls and seats · events · booking seats. See it in action: Sell seats for events, classes and shows.

Notifications and customer self-service

Automated emails: booking confirmations, cancellations, new-booking alerts for your team, and reminders before the appointment.
Approval: confirm bookings automatically, or hold each one as a request until you approve it.
Self-service cancellation: customers cancel from a secure link in their email, with no account needed. You decide whether it’s allowed and how close to the start time it stays open.
Add to calendar: customers save an appointment to Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar from their confirmation email.

Docs: email notifications · customer cancellations · calendar feed.

Your dashboard

Admin screens: a dashboard, a filterable bookings list, a team calendar, the service catalogue, scheduling, customers, staff, payments and an activity log.
Customer records: every customer with their full booking history.
Calendar feed: subscribe Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar to a read-only feed of your bookings, so your team sees them in the calendar they already use.
CSV export: download your bookings as a spreadsheet. The export follows the list’s current filters and covers the whole filtered set.
Manual and offline payments: record cash, bank transfer and mark-as-paid payments against a booking.
Spam protection: a built-in honeypot and timing check on the public form, with optional reCAPTCHA v3.

Docs: bookings · calendar · customers · payments · spam protection · activity log.

Works with your page builder

Five lists come as Gutenberg blocks and Elementor widgets: services, events, categories, staff and venues. Add one and pick what it shows in the sidebar. A category, staff or venue card opens the booking form with only what it covers, and a staff card picks that person for the visitor. The [schedopia_booking] form and the [schedopia_services], [schedopia_events], [schedopia_categories], [schedopia_staff] and [schedopia_venues] lists also work in any editor as shortcodes, including the Gutenberg shortcode block and the Elementor Shortcode widget.

Schedopia Pro (coming soon)

Take your booking experience further with Schedopia Pro!

Schedopia Pro brings even more value to your booking system with online payments, two-way calendar sync, and more flexible booking options for your customers. All existing Schedopia features will remain completely free and fully functional.

Join the waitlist for early access.

External Services

Schedopia loads nothing from third-party services by default. One optional feature connects to an external service when you explicitly enable it:

Google reCAPTCHA v3 (optional spam protection for the public booking form). Only when you enable reCAPTCHA in Settings Booking rules and provide your own site and secret keys, the booking form loads Google’s reCAPTCHA script, and each form submission sends the reCAPTCHA response token and the visitor’s IP address to Google’s siteverify endpoint to obtain a spam score. No booking or customer data is sent. This service is provided by Google: terms of service, privacy policy. If you never enable the feature, no request to Google is ever made. The built-in honeypot and timing checks work without any external service.

Schedopia – Appointment Booking Calendar, Scheduling, Events & Seat Reservations