A salon owner in Chiang Mai logged into her Fresha account last week and got a message she didn't expect: the free plan was gone. That's the theme running through this week's SEA SaaS updates — a pricing shakeup at Fresha, a five-year-old acquisition finally closing at Xendit, and a batch of quieter feature releases from Airwallex.
Fresha
Fresha killed its free tier. Checked directly on fresha.com/pricing on 2026-07-13, the platform now runs three paid tiers after a 7-day trial. Independent costs $19.95 a month for one team member, Team costs $14.95 per bookable team member with no cap on headcount, and Enterprise is quoted case-by-case for shops with 20 or more staff. That Independent tier works out to roughly THB 730 a month at today's rate — not a lot for a solo stylist, but it's a real bill where there wasn't one before.
This replaces the freemium setup from Fresha's earlier profile, where the core subscription cost nothing and only the add-ons were paid. Run a two-chair barbershop that was on the free plan, and you're now paying around SGD 20 a month just to keep the software running, before a single add-on gets switched on. Multiply that across a chain with five branches and the free-to-paid switch stops being a rounding error on someone's monthly P&L.
I'd argue this was overdue. A booking platform that handles payments, marketplace leads, and now an AI receptionist was never going to stay free forever — the surprise is that it took this long.
A few other numbers worth flagging:
- Marketplace commission is confirmed at 20%, with a $6 minimum, charged once per new client acquired through Fresha's marketplace. Returning clients stay commission-free.
- Payment processing lands at 2.79% + $0.20 online, 2.29% + $0.20 + $0.10 tap-to-pay in person, and 3.30% + $0.20 for manual card entry.
- The AI Concierge add-on runs $99.95 per location per month, bundling 200 minutes and 500 messages before overage kicks in at $0.60/minute and $0.04/message.
None of this hurts a busy salon pulling in steady bookings. It's a different story for a one-chair operator who signed up specifically because Fresha used to be free.
Source: fresha.com/pricing
Xendit
Xendit closed the loop on something it started five years ago. The company fully absorbed Dragonpay — one of the Philippines' original alternative payment providers — on 2026-07-08, half a decade after first investing in it back in August 2021. Dragonpay's 905 merchants and 44 banking and e-wallet partners now onboard straight onto Xendit's platform instead of running on separate rails.
That gives those merchants Xendit's full stack: 100+ payment methods, payouts, financing, and cross-border transfers. Merchants who built their checkout around Dragonpay's online banking, e-wallet, and over-the-counter options keep those channels. They just inherit a bigger platform behind them, plus a support team that's presumably bigger than Dragonpay's ever was.
For a Manila-based merchant who's been reconciling two separate settlement reports for years, this is the boring kind of good news — one dashboard instead of two, no new integration work required on their end.
Both companies are registered Payment System Operators under the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, so the regulatory footing was already lined up before the deal closed. Xendit now runs directly across Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, and Hong Kong, following the 2025 Payex acquisition in Malaysia and the 2024 Thailand expansion. The pattern is hard to miss: Xendit is buying up regional payment plumbing one country at a time instead of building each rail from scratch.
Source: Xendit newsroom, Fintech News Philippines, 2026-07-08
Airwallex
Airwallex shipped a handful of updates that matter more to operators than to headline writers.
Vietnam Global Accounts can now collect VND directly from Shopee and TikTok Shop sales, a feature that went live 2026-06-09. The setup isn't automatic. Merchants open a Vietnam Global Account, connect their marketplace store to raise deposit limits, then bind the account to Shopee or TikTok Shop before dong actually lands locally.
Airwallex Billing also launched in June, and it's a bigger release than the name suggests. It covers invoicing in 130+ currencies, 160+ local payment methods for customer payments, subscription management, and usage-based billing. It also handles automated global sales tax with compliant local invoices for cross-border sellers, which is the part most billing tools bolt on as an afterthought.
Two smaller updates round things out. Airwallex POS in Hong Kong now takes Octopus in-store, joining Octopus online, PayMe, Alipay HK, and FPS in one integration. Airwallex Spend, still in early access, now syncs with Microsoft Business Central across chart of accounts, dimensions, tax rates, vendors, and multi-entity setups.
None of these four updates is flashy on its own. Taken together, they read like a company filling in the gaps between "we move money" and "we run your finance stack," one release note at a time.
Worth watching if you sell into Vietnam through the marketplaces: the settlement mechanics only work once the account-linking step is done correctly, and that's the part most merchants skip. Get the linking order wrong — store first, deposit limit second, instead of the reverse — and support tickets pile up fast.
Source: Airwallex Release Notes, June Edition, published 2026-06-09