Who this is for: studio operators (admin panel) · Product: Podyx V2

Base services are the main thing clients book, usually the rental of the space itself. Think of how an airline works: the base service is the ticket from A to B. It is deliberately simple and often priced lean to look attractive, because the real margin and flexibility come from the add-ons stacked on top.

Watch the Base Services walkthrough

Admin Panel → Base Services. Services appear in a list with name, base price and status.

Before you build anything, take your production process apart and look for every piece that can be separated and priced on its own: editing, clips, producer time, extra cameras, distribution, behind-the-scenes photos. Keep the base service clean and simple, and turn the rest into add-ons. That is how you compete on headline price without giving away margin.

⚠️ Worth checking once. The "Offer additional services" switch did not save correctly until recently, so every service currently shows it as on. If you deliberately turned it off for a service in the past, it did not take — turn it off again.

An hourly service can carry day rates: named flat prices that apply from a set length upwards. A "Half day" from 4 hours at $450, a "Full day" from 8 hours at $800. You add them in the Day rates section of the service form.

This is how you sell the long booking you actually want without discounting the short one. An hourly rate that makes a one-hour session worth running makes an eight-hour session look punitive; a day rate fixes that at the point the client is choosing, rather than through a quote by email.

The rule is worth reading twice, because it is the thing clients will query:

A session that reaches a rate's length costs that rate, plus any extra time at the hourly price — and never more than the next rate up.

So with a Half day at 4h for $450, an hourly price of $120, and a Full day at 8h for $800:

💡 That cap is the part people miss. A client can never be charged more by booking a longer session, which means you never have to field the "it was cheaper if I booked more hours" conversation.

⚠️ The CMS warns you when a rate costs more than the same number of hours would at your hourly price — but it still saves it. The warning is there because such a rate is almost always a typo. If you meant it, nothing stops you.

To keep the rates off the service card, clear "Show day rates on the service card" on that service. They still work at the time step — you are only deciding whether the card advertises them.

Checkout shows a day-rate session in hours where the rate divides evenly, so a $450 Half day reads 4 × 112.50. The client sees what the hour is effectively costing them, which is usually the most persuasive number on the page.

The rate is named wherever the booking appears afterwards: checkout, emails, My Bookings, New Booking and the CMS session page. Session edits keep it.

ℹ️ Services without day rates book and price exactly as before. This is something you add where it helps, not a change to how everything else works.

A description is built from sections, and you now have two kinds to work with. Alongside the list sections you already know, you can add a free-text section: a headline plus a paragraph of ordinary prose. Each section header has arrows to move it up or down, so you decide the order.

The practical shape for most studios: open with a paragraph that sells the room, then follow it with a list of what is included and what is not. But nothing forces that order — arrange the sections however your service reads best.

The editor states the limits as you type: 2,000 characters for a section paragraph, and 200 characters for headlines and for each list row.

⚠️ Copy you saved before these limits existed is safe. If a piece of text is already over its limit, you can keep it as it is or shorten it, but you cannot make it longer. So a long legacy description will not be destroyed — you just have to trim it before you can add to it.

💡 Only the first three lines of a description show on the booking page and the home-page carousel before "Read more." Your opening paragraph is what most clients actually read, so put the reason to book there rather than in a list further down.

Browse templates lets you create a service from a ready-made starting point instead of an empty form. It now also creates the additional services the template includes, so you end up with a working service that already has its add-ons attached. Previously you got the base service alone and had to build its add-ons yourself.

💡 Open the created add-ons and check their prices before you go live. Template defaults are generic and will not match your studio's pricing.

⚠️ If your studio's currency has no exchange rate yet, a service or additional service created from a template starts inactive, with a notice telling you to set its price. Nothing is broken — Podyx will not guess a price it cannot convert. Set your own price and make it active.

A service can be priced differently depending on the room or the setup it is booked in — a premium room can carry a higher rate than the catalog price on the service itself. Saving a service now keeps those room and setup prices exactly as you entered them. They survive a save.

⚠️ Check your prices now. This fix stops the problem happening again, but it does not undo what already happened. A save made before the fix could quietly replace your per-room and per-setup prices with the catalog price, and those prices need entering once more. If you price any service differently per room or per setup, go through them today — an under-charged room does not announce itself, and you will not spot it until you reconcile.

💡 Work through it room by room rather than service by service. It is faster to open one room and confirm every service priced in it than to chase the same room across a dozen services.

The same family of problem shows up with the add-ons themselves. Saving a service now keeps its add-ons even when an add-on is inactive. The inactive ones appear in the list marked "(Inactive)", so you can see exactly what is attached, and you can still untick one if you want it gone for good.

⚠️ The same carve-out applies here as to your room and setup prices: links an earlier save already removed are not restored. If you have made an add-on inactive at some point — a seasonal upgrade, a piece of kit out for repair — open the services that use it and check the link is still there.

The case worth checking first is promo codes: a code restricted to inactive items could previously lose its restriction and end up valid for everything. See the Promo Codes article.

Base services display as cards, and you can choose the layout, for example three or four cards per row. Those same cards can be embedded on your own website, so people can start a booking without ever leaving your site.

A base service must be tied to at least one setup to appear on your booking page. If it is not linked, it will not show up whatever its price or availability. You link services to setups from the setup editor, not from the service itself.

⚠️ If a service is not showing to clients, a missing setup link is almost always the reason, or it is set to inactive.

Editing a service creates a new version rather than overwriting the old one. Existing bookings and invoices stay tied to the version that was live when they were made, so a price change never rewrites the past. An old invoice always shows what the client actually paid. A service's add-ons are now saved together with the version, so the upgrades attached to a service travel with it instead of drifting out of step.

Base services are the ticket clients buy first. Break your production into parts, keep the base clean and attractively priced, start from a template when one fits and check the add-ons it creates, write descriptions that make comparison easy, open with a paragraph that sells the room and order the sections with the arrows, mind the character limits when editing older copy, re-check any per-room or per-setup prices that an earlier save may have flattened to the catalog price — and while you are there, any service whose add-ons went inactive, since an earlier save could have dropped those links too — link each service to a setup, and let add-ons carry the margin. Add day rates where a longer booking deserves a better number: a session that reaches a rate costs that rate plus any extra time at the hourly price, and never more than the next rate up. Start with one or two and expand as you grow.

Related: Additional Services · Setups · Rooms · Embed Booking on Your Site · How a Booking Works