What your booking platform really costs
The monthly licence on a club booking platform is a rounding error. The real cost is the percentage taken from every payment, which is charged on top of card processing and rises with your turnover while the software stays the same. On published 2026 rates, a swim school putting £300,000 a year through a platform charging 3.1% pays around £15,200 a year all in, against roughly £5,500 processing the same payments directly. Owning the system starts to pay for itself somewhere above £500,000 of annual payment volume, and below that renting is usually the right answer.
The licence fee is not the bill
Ask a club owner what their booking software costs and most will quote the number from the pricing page. Thirty-five pounds a month, near enough, across every platform aimed at UK clubs. It sounds like a phone contract, and it gets filed in the mind next to one.
That figure is under three per cent of what most clubs actually pay. The rest arrives as a percentage of every payment a parent makes, deducted before the money reaches you, itemised on a statement nobody reads monthly. It never appears as an annual number anywhere, which is the only form in which it is shocking.
Work it out once. A club taking £300,000 a year in lesson fees is handing over somewhere between £6,000 and £15,000 of it, depending on which platform it signed up to. Same registers, same parent portal, same software. The gap is the fee, and the fee is the decision.
Two fees, and only one of them is obvious
Every payment through a booking platform is charged twice. Card processing is the first fee and it is unavoidable: Stripe, which sits behind most of these platforms, publishes 1.5% plus 20p for a UK card, 2.5% plus 20p inside the EEA and 3.15% plus 20p elsewhere.
The second fee is the platform's own cut, charged on top for handling the booking. This is the one that varies, and it varies enormously:
- ClassForKids lists a licence from £34.99 a month and quotes its transaction rate per account. One UK club published 3.1% in its own parent-facing FAQ in January 2024, with Stripe's 1.5% plus 20p shown separately alongside it.
- LoveAdmin publishes a subscription from £35 a month plus a setup fee, 3% of each transaction, and Stripe's fees on top. It states plainly that organisations processing under £20,000 a year are not commercially viable for it.
- Pembee publishes from £30 a month with a transaction fee of 0.59% plus Stripe's fees.
Read those again as a spread. On the same £300,000, the platform's own cut is £9,300 in the first case and £1,770 in the last. Nothing about the software explains a difference of £7,500 a year. These are published rates as at September 2026 and every one of them is quoted individually in practice, so the only number that matters is the one on your own contract. If you cannot find it, that is the thing to ask for in writing this week.
The same club, four ways
Take a swim school with around 500 children on the register, turning over £300,000 a year across roughly 5,000 payments, so an average transaction of £60. That is a mid-sized UK learn-to-swim operation. Every figure below is the published rate multiplied by that volume, and you can redo it with yours.
| Route | Platform fee | Card processing | Licence | Total a year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform at 3.1% | £9,300 | £5,500 | £420 | £15,220 |
| Platform at 3% | £9,000 | £5,500 | £420 plus setup | £14,920 plus setup |
| Platform at 0.59% | £1,770 | £5,500 | £360 | £7,630 |
| Your own system, cards direct | None | £5,500 | Hosting and support | £5,500 plus running costs |
Direct Debit changes the arithmetic again
Almost every club in this market bills on a repeating cycle: a term of lessons, a monthly subscription, a block of ten sessions. That is exactly what Bacs Direct Debit is for, and it is priced completely differently. Stripe charges 1% for Bacs, with a minimum of 20p and a cap of £4 per transaction.
On a £60 termly payment that is 60p rather than the £1.10 a card costs, and the saving widens as the payment gets larger because of the £4 ceiling. A club billing £400 a term per child pays £4 by Direct Debit and £6.20 by card. Put the whole £300,000 through Bacs and processing falls from £5,500 to £3,000.
Direct Debit is not a straight replacement. It takes days to clear rather than seconds, so it is wrong for a one-off holiday club place booked the night before, and setting up a mandate is more friction than tapping a card. The clubs that save most run both: Direct Debit for the recurring term fees that make up the bulk of the money, cards for casual and last-minute bookings. Whether your platform will let you do that is worth checking before anything else in this article, because some will not.
Where owning starts to make sense
The saving from owning the system is the platform fee, because you still pay card processing either way. That makes the crossover a question of payment volume, not of how many children are on the register.
At £300,000 a year the platform fee at 3.1% is £9,300. A bespoke booking system in this market is a matter of tens of thousands of pounds to build and a few thousand a year to host, support and keep current. Against a £9,300 saving, that takes the better part of a decade to repay. At £300,000 you should stay on a platform, and if you are paying 3% you should be negotiating or moving to a cheaper one rather than commissioning anything.
At £600,000 the same fee is £18,600 a year. At £1,000,000 it is £31,000. The build costs the same either way, because a booking system for 500 children and one for 2,000 are close to the same piece of software. That is what makes the volume the deciding number: the fee scales and the build does not.
On those figures the line sits somewhere above £500,000 of annual payment volume, and it moves depending on what you are quoted to build and what you are paying now. Below it, renting wins on money alone. Above it, the fee starts buying you nothing you could not own outright.
What a build does not save you
The fee is not pure profit for the platform and it is dishonest to present the saving as free money. What you stop paying for is real:
- Someone to ring when a payment run fails on a Sunday night before term.
- Card industry compliance, fraud handling, chargebacks and refunds, kept current by people who do only that.
- A product team adding things you did not ask for and occasionally need.
- No build cost, no build risk, and no dependence on one supplier's continued interest in you.
Owning the system means owning those jobs, either in a support arrangement you pay for or in your own time. Budget for it honestly and the crossover moves further out. Ignore it and the business case you build will be wrong, which you will discover in year two.
There is also a middle answer that gets overlooked. Moving from a 3% platform to a 0.59% one is a few weeks of migration work rather than a build, and on £300,000 it recovers around £7,500 a year. For most clubs reading this, that is the whole opportunity, and it does not need us or anyone like us.
Work out your own number in ten minutes
You need four figures, and three of them are already in your accounts.
- Total payments taken through the platform last year, not your turnover.
- The number of separate payments, which gives you your average transaction.
- Your platform's percentage, in writing, separated from card processing. If the two are quoted as one blended number, ask for the split.
- What proportion of your money arrives on a repeating cycle rather than as one-off bookings.
Multiply the first by the third and you have the annual figure nobody ever shows you. Compare it against the published rates above. If the answer is under about £10,000 a year, your project is a better contract or a cheaper platform. If it is over £25,000 and rising, it is worth pricing a build properly, because at that point you are paying for a system every year and not owning one at the end of it.
Common questions
Not for most clubs. Below roughly £500,000 of annual payment volume the platform fee you would save does not repay the cost of building and running your own system. Above it, the arithmetic turns quickly, because the fee grows with your turnover while the software costs the same to build whether you have 500 children or 2,000.
Published rates in September 2026 run from 0.59% to around 3%, charged on top of card processing rather than instead of it. Stripe, which sits behind most of these platforms, charges 1.5% plus 20p for a UK card. A blended 4.5% is common and a blended 2.1% is available, on the same features.
Because it is deducted from each payment before the money reaches you, so it never arrives as an invoice. Multiply your annual processed volume by your percentage and you have the figure. Most club owners are surprised by it, which is a reasonable argument for calculating it yourself once a year.
Sometimes, and the two are independent. Bacs Direct Debit costs 1% with a £4 cap against 1.5% plus 20p for a card, so the saving is largest on higher-value termly payments. It suits recurring fees and not last-minute bookings. Check whether your current platform supports it before doing anything else.
Get your actual contracted rate in writing and calculate the annual figure, then use it as a negotiating position with your existing supplier before you price a build. A platform facing the loss of a large account will often move. If it does not, you now have a real number to put against a build, which is the only sound way to make that decision.
Where to go next
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Tell us what you are running now and what is going wrong with it. We will say what we would do, including when the answer is that you do not need us.