How much does pilates studio scheduling software cost?

Published entry prices across the main platforms start around $69, and upper tiers run to about $700. That range is close to meaningless on its own, because the entry plan and the plan that runs a real timetable are rarely the same product.

Here is what each band buys in practice.

One thing worth knowing before you start comparing. Of the eight platforms a pilates studio would realistically shortlist, three publish no price at all. Each sends you to a form and then a sales call, so the first figure you see arrives after someone has asked about your studio size and revenue. Two more publish only an entry price and quote everything above it.

That is why comparing headline numbers rarely gets you anywhere. We wrote about which vendors publish their pricing separately.

Three things move the number between the pricing page and your bank statement.

1. The tier you actually need

Entry plans are built to look cheap. The features a reformer studio depends on tend to sit higher up: room and equipment capacity, automatic no-show fees, a branded app, marketing automation. It is common to see an advertised price under $100 and a real invoice above $250 once a studio has what it needs. That is not a trick, it is just how tiered pricing works, and it means the headline figure tells you very little.

2. Card processing

Every platform takes a percentage of every payment you collect. Rates range from about 2.9% to 3.9%, and half the platforms a pilates studio would shortlist do not publish theirs at all. On real volume this is usually the second biggest line after the plan itself.

3. Add-ons

The branded app is the most common one, and it is priced three different ways across the category: bundled into a top tier, sold as a monthly add-on at around $150 to $250, or charged as a monthly fee plus a one-off build cost that can run into the hundreds. SMS credits, extra locations, onboarding and migration fees sit in the same category.

Card processing is the line most owners miss when comparing platforms, and it is the one that scales with your success. Here is what a one percentage point difference costs a studio taking $10,000 a month on card.

Ask one more thing while you are at it: whether payments run through your own Stripe account or the vendor's merchant arrangement. Some platforms route every card payment through processors you cannot see, negotiate or move away from. That makes the largest variable cost in your budget one you have no control over.

Studio owners usually ask which platform is cheapest. That is the wrong question, because the cheapest plan that cannot cap a reformer class costs you more than the expensive one that can. The better question is what you should be spending.

Card processing sits outside that 2% to 3%, because it is a cost of taking money rather than a cost of software. Count it separately or you will talk yourself out of the tier you need.

We run the demos here ourselves and migrate every studio by hand, so we see what people were paying before they moved and what made them move. Four patterns come up constantly.

Almost nobody leaves purely over price

They leave over an event. A renewal that went up without warning. A billing run that charged the wrong members. Support that stopped answering after an acquisition. Price is what makes them start looking, but something specific is what makes them start looking that week.

The tier they bought is not the tier they are on

Studios almost always sign up on the entry plan, then discover within a few months that capacity limits or no-show fees sit a level higher. The number they compared during their search was never the number they ended up paying.

The processing line is the surprise, not the subscription

Owners can recite their monthly plan price to the dollar. Very few can tell you what they paid in card fees last month, and it is usually the larger figure. On $15,000 a month, a one point difference in rate is $1,800 a year.

Nobody budgets for the switch itself

Moving platforms costs time, and on some platforms it costs money too. Ask what migration costs before you sign, not when you leave. We do it free and by hand, on every plan, which is a deliberate choice rather than a promotion.

We publish all three plan prices and our processing rate, so you can work out your total before you speak to anyone.

• We take nothing from your payments. Card processing is Stripe's standard rate with no platform fee on top. Some platforms charge a full point more than Stripe's standard rate. On $10,000 a month that is $100 leaving your account every month for nothing.
• The branded app is included on every plan. Client app and staff app both, not held back for a top tier. Your clients see your studio's name and branding. A listing under your own studio name on the App Store and Google Play is a further $150 a month.
• Late cancel and no-show fees are on Bloom. Most reformer studios start there for exactly that reason. On a class capped at eight, recovered fees usually cover the difference between the two plans inside a month.
• Migration is free on every plan. We move your clients, bookings and payment history across by hand.
• Seed is a 12 month plan. Bloom and Harvest are month to month. We put that here rather than leaving you to find it in a contract.

Your total is the plan price plus Stripe's published rate. Nothing else. You can work it out from our pricing page in about a minute, without booking a call, which most of this category cannot say. If you are weighing cost against what you actually get for it, we go deeper on value per member per month.

Run that on two or three platforms and the ranking usually changes from the one you had after reading the pricing pages. More answers on the Pilates studio FAQ hub.