The enquiry arrives in the same shape every day, at the desk and on the phone: “How much for a massage?” Followed, before any answer is possible, by three facts the person has not thought about — how long they want, whether they want a specific technique or just a massage, and whether they are adding anything to it. A studio that answers with a single number sells a 60-minute slot to someone who wanted ninety; a studio that explains three facts on the phone has spent four minutes and will be asked again next week.
A single page answers it before anyone picks up, and the page has one property that matters more than its design: its address never changes. That is what lets one QR code be printed, taped to the desk, stuck on the door and added to the review card, and still be correct after every price change for the next five years.
Time is the price, so time is the first column
A massage is priced in minutes because a therapist's day is made of minutes. A 60-minute slot and a 90-minute slot are not the same service with a bigger tip — they are different amounts of a scarce thing, which is why every studio already quotes by duration even when its menu does not say so.
- 60 minutes — the standard booking and the one that fills a weekday. One area, or a full body at a working pace.
- 90 minutes — the tier worth printing twice. It is the usual answer to “I have a shoulder and a back”, and it is where a studio's margin is best, because the room is already paid for.
- 120 minutes — the couples booking, the post-race booking and the gift voucher. Fewer of them, and the one that most often needs a second therapist in the room.
Two things follow from that. The 90-minute column should sit next to the 60-minute column, not below it in a paragraph — the upgrade is the whole point of showing both. And the add-ons should be priced in a way that makes a 90-minute booking feel like the natural one rather than a splurge.
The table: four columns and no asterisks
Four columns is what a customer reads on a phone without pinching: the treatment, its 60-minute price, its 90-minute price and what the longer one includes. The figures below show the layout — they are an example of shape, not a market average, because there is no dated survey behind this article and a studio should set its own numbers from its own day:
| Treatment | 60 min | 90 min | What the extra half hour buys |
|---|---|---|---|
| Swedish / relaxation | $85 | $120 | Full legs and arms, not just back and shoulders |
| Deep tissue | $105 | $150 | Two problem areas instead of one, at a pace that does not rush |
| Sports / pre-race | $110 | $155 | Assessment time written into the booking |
| Couples, same room | $170 / pair | $240 / pair | Two therapists, one room, one clock |
Under the table, the add-ons as prices rather than as a sentence: hot stone $20, aromatherapy $10, scalp and neck twenty minutes $25, cupping $15. The list does two jobs at once. It stops the awkward moment at payment, and it is the only place on the page where a customer is invited to spend more while they are still deciding — which is the moment it works, not when the coat is already on.
One line worth printing under the table: “Prices are for the treatment time; the room, the linen and the consultation are included.” It answers the second question every first-time customer asks, and it costs one line.
Three clauses that keep the desk calm
Almost every awkward moment in a massage studio comes from something that was not said before the appointment. Three sentences, printed under the menu in the studio's own words, move each one to before the booking:
- Late and no-show. “A late arrival gets the time that is left, not the time that was booked. A no-show is a slot another body needed; we take a card to hold the room and we will tell you that at booking.”
- Intake and pressure. “We ask about injuries, medication and pregnancy before the first session, and we change the plan if the answer changes. If the pressure is not right, say so — the therapist is not offended and the hour is yours.”
- What a massage is not. “We do not diagnose or treat a medical condition; if something has changed under your skin, see a doctor first and we will work around it afterwards.”
None of the three is legal advice and none of them needs a lawyer to read: they are the sentences a therapist already says out loud, written down where the customer can read them twice.
Why the code goes on the wall and the prices go inside
A QR code contains a string. If that string is the studio's address, the code is a door — and everything behind the door can be changed without touching the door. If that string is a PDF of the treatment menu, the code is a photocopy of last season's prices, and the day the menu changes the sign on the door becomes a lie.
This is arithmetic rather than taste: a link to a PDF has to be re-uploaded and gets a new address each time, so a printed code cannot follow it. A page address does not change. The wrapper under this rule is the edit runbook that comes with the kit — change a price, keep the address, and nothing on the wall is reprinted.
Three pieces to print, measured
The print files this site produces are measured, not estimated, so the sizes below are the actual millimetres of the PDFs, at error correction M with a four-module margin (33 modules of code plus the margin, 41 squares across):
| Piece | Sheet | QR code | Reads at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Counter card | 93.0 × 127.5 mm | 48 mm | about 0.5 m — the person paying |
| 70 mm sticker | 70 mm round | 40 mm | about 0.4 m — the mirror in the changing room |
| A4 door poster | 210 × 297 mm | 126 mm | about 1.3 m — nose against the glass |
The distances come from the industry rule of thumb of one unit of code per ten units of distance — a rule for a clean, matte, well-lit code and an ordinary phone camera. It is not part of the QR standard (ISO/IEC 18004) and it is a floor, not a guarantee: behind glass that reflects the street, under a gloss laminate, or through a plastic sleeve that has bowed, plan for one per eight and expect the phone to need a second longer.
The placement that fails most often in a studio is the changing room, because that is where the light is worst and the customer is holding a towel rather than a bag. A 40 mm sticker at mirror height works; the same sticker on a varnished door two metres away does not.
What this page does not do
It does not run the calendar. Software that holds therapist rotas, online booking, deposits and text reminders is a different product with a different price, and a studio that needs those should keep them. This article does not quote those vendors' prices, because their pages change every month and none was read on a dated day for this piece — a price without a date is a rumour, and the three-year calculator on this site does that comparison with the studio's own monthly figure whenever it wants one.
What the page replaces is the paper and the reply: the treatment sheet that gets reprinted when a room price rises, the PDF emailed to every enquiry, and the four minutes of “how much for ninety, and does that include hot stone?” that a therapist answers with a towel in hand.
Said plainly: if a studio already pays for booking software and a website builder, this page replaces the builder, not the software. The comparison is worth doing with real numbers, printed with the date they were read.
The cost of the paper, dated
| Option | Price | Renews? | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free page | $0 | never | one live page — treatments, prices, hours, tap-to-call, a visit count |
| Turnkey kit, no tables | $49 once | never | live page + 8 files: delivery note, A4 poster, QR image, print price list, Business Profile kit, edit runbook, review cards, bring-a-friend cards — built by hand, within 24 hours |
| Turnkey kit, with tables | $89 / $149 once | never | the same files plus the six table pieces, two revisions and, at $149, ten social cards |
| Booking software | its own monthly price | monthly | calendar, deposits, reminders — not the treatment menu on the wall |
No subscription, no account needed to order, and the price does not depend on how large the studio is — only on how many tables there are to print for. A massage studio usually has none, so it takes the eight-file version at the same price as the fifteen-file one.
An afternoon, in five steps
- Write the menu on paper first. Three durations, three or four treatments, the add-ons underneath as a short list. If a row needs a sentence of explanation, it is a clause, not a row.
- Type the studio once. Name, address or Maps link, hours, the treatments and the six to twelve lines the page holds. The page takes the same lines the printed menu uses, so there is one source of truth.
- Publish and scan it at the real distance. Counter card at half a metre, door poster at a metre and a half, with the phone you actually carry and the light you actually get.
- Print one piece before the batch. A code that fails on one door fails on fifty. Print the counter card, put it where it will live, and scan it twice — once standing, once leaning.
- Put the code where the question is asked. By the desk for the person paying, in the changing room for the person who has just decided they want ninety minutes next time.
One page, one code, printed once
The page is free and takes about thirty seconds: the studio name, a Maps link and the treatment menu. The printed kit is one payment — $49 for the eight-file version a studio with no tables needs — written by hand and delivered within 24 hours, with no subscription behind it.
Related notes
- A hair salon price list that stops the phone calls — the same table logic with a length surcharge instead of duration tiers.
- A nail salon price list without a monthly fee — the one-chair version of the same decision.
- How big the QR code has to be, in millimetres — the printing floor, the quiet zone and the 1:10 rule explained.
- The three-year cost calculator — put a monthly builder or software figure in and see the total.
Sources
Read on 14 November 2026. This site's prices — $0 free page, $49 / $89 / $149 one-off kit — are the published figures on /showcase/order. Print geometry — the 93.0 × 127.5 mm card with a 48 mm code, the 70 mm sticker with a 40 mm code, the A4 poster's 126 mm code, the four-module quiet zone and the module counts — was measured in the PDFs generated by this site's print kit (work/tools/en_print_kit.py, error correction M, four-module margin), not estimated. The printer floor of about 0.17 mm per module, the four-printer-dots-per-module recommendation (0.33 mm at 300 dpi) and the four-module margin are from Denso Wave's QR FAQ; the quiet zone as four times the X-dimension also appears in GS1's 2D Barcodes at Retail Point-of-Sale Implementation Guideline. The 1:10 code-size-to-scan-distance figure is an industry rule of thumb, not part of ISO/IEC 18004. Booking software is described as a category; no vendor price is quoted, because no vendor pricing page was read on a dated day for this article. Spa practice — duration tiers, the 90-minute upsell, add-on pricing, late and intake clauses — is described as practice: no survey is being quoted, and the example prices in the table are a layout example rather than an average, so a studio should print its own numbers.