Pricing

Wink has no subscriptions, no seats and no setup fees. The vast majority of the platform is free, and there are only two things you’ll ever pay for:

1. A platform fee per booking, plus card processing at cost — only when a booking is made.
2. Pay-as-you-go usage fees — on a few premium features that cost us money every time they run, each with a free monthly allowance.

What’s free

These cost nothing, forever, with no allowance and no metering:

• The booking engine — on your own site, in your WinkLinks page, or anywhere else you embed it.
• Property management — content, photos, rates, rate plans, availability, promotions and policies.
• Affiliate tools — shareable links, curated lists, grids, maps, cards and embeddable widgets.
• Travel agent tools — search, bespoke rates and booking on behalf of your clients.
• WinkLinks — claim your vanity URL, build your page and publish to it as often as you like.
• Manual social posts — anything you write yourself, on any connected network.
• Analytics, leaderboards, claims, settings and account management.
• The Consumer and Booking Engine APIs, including their lookup and autocomplete endpoints. On the Partner API, Lookup and Content calls are metered at one unit each (see Usage below).

Bookings

Wink supports two models: Wink collecting the payment for the hotel, and a licensed travel agent acting as the merchant of record.

Model 1 — Wink collects for the hotel

Wink collects the guest’s payment as the hotel’s limited payment collection agent. The hotel is the merchant of record, and the hotel’s name appears on the guest’s card statement. This model applies to 95% of all bookings.

Breakdown

Platform fee

Wink charges a 1.5% platform fee / booking. This covers platform maintenance and is what lets us give away everything listed above. It is not charged on a cancelled booking.

Card processing

The payment processing fee charged to collect the guest’s payment is passed through to the hotel at cost, with no margin. It varies with the guest’s card and payment method, and the exact amount appears in the Accounting section of each booking. If a booking is cancelled or refunded, any fee the processor keeps is still charged; if it charges nothing, neither do we.

Funds disbursement

There are fees associated with sending funds to your account. This depends on the disbursement method you choose. We currently support:

• Bank transfer — Cost depends on the country you are located in, where the funds are sent from, and any currency conversion applied on the way. The payout fee and any conversion cost are paid by the payee, at cost. We include a quote calculator you can use when you have available funds in your account.

If you want us to support another pay-out method, send us an e-mail.

Model 2 — Travel agent as merchant of record

This model is only available to travel agencies who hold a travel agency license in their region and who desire to be the merchant of record. It is available to API partners only, booking through the Partner API, and needs Wink’s prior written approval. Some of our registered travel agents want to be responsible for handling the payment and disbursing of funds to hotels. Under this model, they are responsible for the funds and carry the necessary licenses to operate in their country.

Breakdown

Platform fee

Wink charges a 1.5% platform fee / booking. This covers platform maintenance and is what lets us give away everything listed above.

Using this model, travel agents pay Wink’s 1.5% fee plus any Partner API usage above the free allowance, invoiced monthly.

What partners pay

For partners who send bookings: creators, affiliates, platforms, developers and travel agents. Partnerships are non-exclusive, with no territories.

	Payment collected for the hotel (most partners)	You are merchant of record (API partners only)
Licence or territory fee	None	None
Setup fee	None	None
Subscription or monthly fee	None	None
Minimum commitment or term	None	None. A credit limit applies.
Partner API access	10,000 hotel-nights a month free, then $0.0001 per hotel-night. Pay-as-you-go is off by default; at the free allowance, calls return 429.	Same
Transaction fee	None. You earn commission (10% default).	1.5% Booking Fee on booking value, invoiced monthly in USD, due within 15 days. With pay-as-you-go on, Partner API usage comes on a second monthly invoice.
Support fee	None	None
Other charges	Payout transfer fees, at cost	Possible prepayment or deposit at approval. Interest of 1.5% a month on overdue invoices only.
When fees change	30 days’ notice; applies only to bookings made after the change	Same. Wink may also vary your credit limit on notice.

The merchant-of-record route needs Wink’s prior written approval. See Model 2 above and the Partner API page.

Usage (pay-as-you-go)

A few features cost us money every single time they run — generative AI, third-party social APIs, and serving live pricing at scale. Rather than bundle those into a monthly plan you may not use, you pay only for what you actually consume, and only after you’ve used up a free monthly allowance.

Feature	Free per month	Then	Billed unit
Social post — image	1	$1.50	One published post
Social post — AI-generated image	0	$2.50	One published post
Social post — AI-enhanced video	0	$4.00	One published post
Social post — AI-generated video	0	$14.00	One published post
AI reply to a comment or DM	5	$0.05	One reply
Chatbot answer	5	$0.05	One answer
Partner API	10,000	$0.0001	One hotel-night

Prices are in USD. The free allowance is granted per account, not per user, and resets on the 1st of every month (UTC).

How posts are priced

Posts are priced by what’s in them, because that’s what they cost us to make. A still image is cheap; a video is not; anything we generate with AI costs materially more than a photo you supplied yourself.

• The free allowance covers standard image posts only. You get one of those per account per month. Video posts and AI-generated media are billed from the very first post — there is no free allowance on those tiers, so a property that posts video should expect a charge in its first month.
• Video wins. If a post contains any video at all, the whole post is billed at the video rate. A post mixing an image and a video is a video post.
• AI provenance sets the tier. Media you supply — your own photos and video, or anything from your Wink content library — bills at the standard rate. Media we generate for you bills at the AI rate.

What is and isn’t metered

• Only a generated post published to a third-party network (Facebook, Instagram) is billable. A post you wrote yourself is free, wherever it goes.
• Publishing to WinkLinks is always free, generated or not.
• You’re charged on publish, not per attempt. Regenerating a draft until you’re happy with it doesn’t add to your bill — you pay once for the post you actually ship. Attempts aren’t unlimited, though: each post allows around 10 regenerations for images and 3 for video, which reflects what it costs us to produce them. You’ll see how many you have left as you work.
• On the Partner API, a hotel-night is one hotel priced for one night of stay — not one API call. A search that returns 20 hotels for a 3-night stay is 60 hotel-nights from a single request. Content and Lookup (destination search and autocomplete) calls cost one unit each, whatever they return. Account endpoints are free.

Turning it on

Pay-as-you-go is off by default. Everyone gets the free allowance without doing anything.

To go beyond the allowance, the owner of an account enables pay-as-you-go and picks which of their accounts are metered. Usage from all of your enabled accounts rolls up into a single monthly invoice, which you can settle automatically by card or receive as an invoice to pay yourself.

Once enabled, your usage is metered but never throttled — you won’t hit a rate limit for spending money with us.

If you don’t enable it

Nothing breaks and nothing is charged. You simply stop at the free allowance for that month: generated posts won’t publish and Partner API calls return a 429 until the allowance resets.

Billing status

Status	What it means
Good standing	Everything works normally.
Past due	A payment failed and is being retried. Your features keep working during this window.
Suspended	An invoice went unpaid to the end. Billable actions are blocked until it’s settled; free features carry on as normal.

Live prices

Unit prices and free allowances are always shown in Portal, straight from our billing system, so you can check them before you commit to anything. See Billing to enable pay-as-you-go, pick your accounts, and track month-to-date usage and invoices. See Social for how post volume affects what you spend.

Platform effect

Finally, as we continue to grow in both size and bookings, we want to be able to share some of the platform effects with you. More bookings bring opportunities for volume discounts from our payment processor. Because card processing is passed through at cost, any saving we negotiate goes straight to hotels.

Join Wink today and discover a new, lucrative, way to do business in the hospitality industry!