LeioPay

The problem

Service professionals, barbers, lash artists, nail technicians, massage therapists, personal trainers, tattoo artists, operate one chair or a small team and run on a tangle of tools. The payment processor is one company. The booking system is another. The client database is a third. The marketing tools, the accounting, the SMS reminders are all separate. Each one takes a cut, a monthly fee, or both. The hardware costs hundreds upfront. The integrations rarely work. Owner-operators end up paying more in software stacks than they pay in rent, and most of the tools do not talk to each other.

What we built

LeioPay is a payments platform built specifically for the service professional. Free terminal shipped to the door, no upfront hardware cost. A flat 2.5% transaction rate. No monthly fees. No contract. Tap to pay, card on file, manual entry, all in one app. Scheduling, client management, SMS reminders, and deposit collection built in. Five-minute setup. One-click import from Square, Acuity, Vagaro, or Mindbody, so a service business that already has a clientele can switch without losing their book.

LeioPay is operated inside the Relay 1 portfolio, based in Killeen, Texas. The wedge is the cost line. A small shop pays nothing for the hardware, pays one flat rate on transactions, and runs the whole business on one app instead of four. The Leio AI assistant handles the parts of running a small business that an owner-operator should not be doing themselves. The next appointment, the week summary, the client who has not booked in two months. The assistant has read every interaction with every client. The owner-operator gets to stay in the chair.

What we are learning

The bet behind LeioPay is that the small service business does not need a Salesforce. It needs a terminal that thinks. The stack a barber actually needs is one app, one transaction rate, one piece of hardware, and an assistant that has read every interaction with their clients. The build is testing whether owner-operators will switch from a four-tool stack to a one-app stack when the math is obviously better and the migration takes five minutes.

The pattern emerging is the one the studio carries into every build: price for the chair, not for the enterprise. The operator in the chair is the customer. Everything in the product has to earn its place against that operator's time and that operator's margin.