How to Sell Coworking Day Passes (and Monthly Plans) Online Without a Marketplace
A visitor lands on your coworking website. They want to try your space for a day. They click “Book a desk.”
Then what?
For most small coworking spaces, the answer is: they fill in a contact form, you get a notification, you send them a bank transfer reference, they pay (maybe), you manually add them to the calendar, and they show up — if they haven’t booked somewhere else by then.
That’s a lot of steps between “I want to try this” and “I’m sitting at a desk.”
Every one of those steps is a place people drop off.
The three ways operators currently handle day-pass payments — and why they all leak
Cash at the door. Works on day one. Falls apart when the visitor wanted to book in advance, when you’re not there when they arrive, or when you have no idea how many drop-ins to expect next week. You can’t plan capacity around cash you can’t see.
Bank transfer or Revolut link. Common in smaller markets, including Bulgaria. You send the details, they transfer, you confirm manually. The back-and-forth takes 15–30 minutes. About 20–30% of people who say they’ll send it, don’t. You’ve already blocked the desk for them. Now you’re chasing a €15 payment.
A marketplace like Coworker.com or Deskpass. You list your space, they bring traffic, they take 15–25% of every booking. If your day rate is €25, you net €19 after commission. Across 100 day passes a month, that’s €600/year leaving your pocket — for traffic that was probably going to find you anyway.
None of these is wrong, exactly. They’re just friction that accumulates.
What “sell passes online” actually means
It means: a visitor opens your booking page, picks a date (or a plan), fills in their name and email, pays with a card, and gets confirmed — without you touching anything.
Their card is charged before the desk is reserved. No transfer to chase. No manual calendar entry. No commission to a third party.
The money lands in your Stripe account, usually within 2 business days. You wake up in the morning and the bookings are already there.
This is how booking works in every adjacent industry — hotels, fitness studios, meeting room rentals. Coworking is just slow to adopt it at the small-space level because the platforms built for the job (Nexudus, OfficeRnD) are priced for 100+ desk operations.
The four pass types worth selling
If you’re going to put payments on your booking page, it’s worth understanding what you can actually sell — and what each type of visitor needs.
Day pass. A single desk, a single date. Someone traveling through, a remote worker testing your space, a local who doesn’t want a commitment. These buyers make decisions fast and abandon fast. The checkout has to be frictionless — name, phone, card. No email required (they’re not signing up for anything). If they had to fill in five fields and wait for a confirmation email, you’d lose half of them.
Flex day bundle. 10 days (or however many you set) that the buyer can use across any dates they choose. No reservation required after purchase — they just show up. This is the highest-value conversion from a day-pass visitor: they’ve tried your space, they like it, they want flexibility without a monthly commitment. Priced right (say, 8 days’ worth for a 10-day bundle), it converts well. You get the cash upfront; they get the freedom.
Weekly pass. A full work week — Monday to Friday — at a discounted rate. Good for traveling workers, remote employees who need a base for a specific project, or regulars who want something between day-pass chaos and a monthly commitment.
Monthly pass. A full calendar month. Your bread and butter for recurring revenue. Selling this through your booking page (instead of a verbal agreement + bank transfer) means the buyer can commit immediately when they’re in the right headspace — not three days later after they’ve cooled off.
How we built this into OhMyDesk’s public booking page
My own coworking space (Codeburg, 8 desks in Burgas) had the same problem. Visitors would find the public booking page, fill in the date and their name, then see bank transfer details. I’d check in an hour later to see if they’d paid. Usually they hadn’t.
The fix was obvious: put Stripe directly on the booking page. No commission, no marketplace, no manual step.
Here’s what the setup looks like:
1. Connect your Stripe account. In Settings → Integrations, paste your Stripe public and secret keys. These are from your own Stripe account — OhMyDesk never touches your funds. The checkout session is created server-side, the visitor pays on Stripe’s hosted page, and the money goes straight to your bank.
2. Enable the pass types you want to sell. Each of the four types (daily, flex bundle, weekly, monthly) has its own toggle. Enable only what you actually want to offer. If you don’t have enough availability to guarantee a full week reliably, keep the weekly toggle off.
3. Set your prices. Day-pass price lives in Settings → Plans. Flex bundle price and day count, weekly price, and monthly price are all configurable per space.
That’s the setup. Your public booking page now shows a “Plans” section below the calendar with cards for each enabled type. A visitor clicks a plan, fills in their details, hits “Pay & Book”, and lands on Stripe’s hosted checkout. After successful payment, they’re redirected back to a confirmation screen.
On your end: a booking appears on the calendar, and for flex/weekly/monthly buyers, a member record is created automatically. If the same email buys a flex bundle a second time, the days are added to their existing balance — no duplicate records.
What you don’t give up
No commission. Your Stripe rate (typically 1.4–2.9% + €0.25 per transaction) is all you pay. No platform cut. A €25 day pass nets you ~€24.30 after Stripe fees. Versus €19 net through a marketplace.
No lock-in. Your Stripe account is yours. The keys live in your settings and you can remove them any time. The money never passes through OhMyDesk.
No separate product for plans. Day passes, flex bundles, weekly, monthly — all live on the same public booking page. One URL to share, one link in your Instagram bio, one link in your email signature.
The conversion difference
The honest version: I don’t have a controlled experiment with thousands of data points. What I have is before-and-after from my own space.
Before: most day-pass inquiries that required a bank transfer resulted in someone saying they’d come by. About half actually showed up and paid.
After: every booking that goes through Stripe checkout is paid before the desk is reserved. Abandonment happens at the checkout screen instead of a week later when you’ve given up chasing. And a completed Stripe session feels different to the buyer — they have a confirmation, they’re committed.
The visitors who convert through a real checkout are also better visitors. They planned ahead. They’ve seen your price and paid it. They show up.
Setting it up takes about 10 minutes
- Go to your Stripe Dashboard → Developers → API keys.
- Copy your publishable key and secret key.
- Paste both into Settings → Integrations in OhMyDesk.
- Enable the pass types you want.
- Set prices in Settings → Plans.
- Open your public booking page and test with Stripe’s test card:
4242 4242 4242 4242.
If everything looks right, you’re live.
No credit card. No onboarding call. The Stripe integration is available on all plans from day one.
Alex runs Codeburg, an 8-desk coworking space in Burgas, Bulgaria, and builds OhMyDesk — the desk booking and management software he uses to run it. Every feature gets used on real bookings before it ships to anyone else.