Pricing your courts properly: pricing rules, peak times, holidays
In short
- There is a clear order of precedence: a price you have locked always beats a calculated rule, and a calculated rule always beats your base price.
- Pricing rules (percentage or fixed amount, with a priority and a time window) cover peak hours, weekends and holidays. Holidays you import with one tap instead of typing them in one by one.
- The Pricing rules screen is a Growth feature. Your base price is capped at €5,000 an hour, which is typo protection rather than a real limit.
The price hierarchy: what actually counts
Every slot follows the same order: locked price before calculated price before base price. A locked price appears once a slot has been held or booked: the price the player saw when they tapped is frozen for that slot, whatever you change in your rules afterwards. With no locked price, what counts is the price your pricing rules calculate for that moment. If no rule matches, your plain base price per hour applies. That way nobody can complain about a price that changed after the fact, and you do not have to step in by hand for every special case.
Pricing rules: percentage or fixed, by priority
A pricing rule is either a percentage rule ("+20% on the base price", say) or a fixed rule (a specific amount that replaces the base price entirely). You also set a priority: where several rules match, the one with the higher number wins. Rule types: peak (peak), off-peak (off_peak), happy hour, weekend, a single weekday with a time window, and holiday (holiday) with a fixed date. A peak rule for "Saturday 18:00 to 22:00" applies only on Saturdays inside that window; a holiday rule applies only on that exact date, whatever the day of the week.
Importing holidays in one tap
Instead of entering Christmas, Easter and seven more dates one at a time, one tap imports all 9 German national public holidays for a year as pre-filled pricing rules: New Year's Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Labour Day, Ascension Day, Whit Monday, German Unity Day, Christmas Day, Boxing Day. The moveable dates (Good Friday, Easter Monday and company) are calculated by openmatch using the recognised Gauss-Meeus Easter algorithm, checked against the official dates rather than guessed. Imported rules get a high priority automatically so they reliably beat a peak rule on the same day, and you can edit or delete any imported rule afterwards. Regional holidays for individual federal states (All Saints' Day, for instance) are not included, only the 9 national ones.
Worked example: base price, peak time, holiday
| Rule | Type | Value | Price at the slot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base price | Base | €25.00 | €25.00 on an ordinary weekday |
| Saturday peak | Percentage rule | +20% | €30.00 on an ordinary Saturday |
| New Year's Day (imported, then edited) | Fixed rule, holiday | €35.00 | €35.00 on 1 January, even when it falls on a Saturday |
The Pricing rules screen is available from the Growth plan up. On Starter, your base price stays the only price. Your base price itself is capped at €5,000 per hour; that is not a realistic limit for any venue, only protection against a mistyped zero.