What Studio Software Actually Costs — and What the Cut Buys (2026)

The published entry price is rarely what you pay. Two things move the real number: how a vendor charges for more locations, and whether it takes a cut of your revenue on top of the subscription. Understanding what that cut buys is the difference between software that pays for itself and a fee that quietly drains your margin.

This piece pairs with the feature comparison: features and price are two different questions, and we keep them separate on purpose. Here we use publicly visible pricing only, linked to the source so you can check it yourself.

The honest caveat on every number here

Most of these vendors gate their real "studio" pricing behind a demo, stack add-ons that move the true number a lot, and run promos that change monthly. Payment-processing rates in particular are often quoted only on request. Where a figure is secondhand (a review site, an operator report), we say so. Treat published numbers as a floor, not a quote, and confirm anything material with the vendor before you sign.

The quick comparison

"Cut" = any platform take-rate on transactions, on top of card processing. Entry prices are the lowest published monthly figure; real spend is usually higher once tiers and add-ons stack.

Verify before relying on any cell. Sources are linked per platform below.

The per-platform detail (public figures)

• Mindbody — Starter ~$99/mo, charged per location; higher tiers (Accelerate, Ultimate, Ultimate Plus) are widely reported at ~$259–699+ but are secondhand/sales-led, not official. Processing ~2.99% + $0.30 card-present, ~3.5% online. Branded app and livestream/on-demand are add-ons. 12–24 month auto-renewing terms are widely reported. (pricing, marketplace fees, fee breakdown — Gymdesk)
• Arketa — public solo tiers $49 / $83 / $124 (billed annually); studio tiers are "book a demo." A 3% Arketa fee on every transaction sits on top of Stripe (~6% all-in on solo plans). Month-to-month unless you opt into annual. (arketa.com/pricing)
• Momence — the lower your monthly fee, the higher the cut: Basic free (5%), Pro $60 (2.5%), Custom $199 (0% platform fee). A +~1% over standard Stripe is widely reported. Operators report $250–2,000+/mo once add-ons and locations stack (secondhand). (momence.com/pricing)
• WellnessLiving — Starter $69 / Business $199 / BusinessPro $349, Enterprise custom; no transaction revenue-share. Livestream (FitLIVE) and on-demand (FitVID) are flat add-ons. Free onboarding + 2 free data migrations; 15% off for veterans and registered non-profits. (wellnessliving.com/pricing)
• Vagaro — the most transparent: priced per bookable calendar, ~$24–30 for one, scaling to ~$84/mo at 7+. No transaction cut. Branded app $100 one-time
  • $100/mo. (vagaro.com/pro/pricing)
• Glofox (ABC Glofox) — sales-led, quote-gated, per location; advertised "from $99/mo" with no published tiers. A platform surcharge over Stripe is reported but not officially published. One widely cited operator complaint is a ~70% mid-contract price increase (secondhand — we flag it as an operator report, not an established fact). (glofox.com/plans)
• Walla — public flat tiers per location: Starter $220 / Core $320 (annual) / Pro ~$557–599. Pure Stripe pass-through (2.9% + $0.30, no markup). Branded app $149/mo (US only), included in Pro. Free data migration. (hellowalla.com/us/pricing)
• Tandava (open source — ours) — the software is free (AGPL-3.0); there's no platform cut and no app-store cut because there's nothing in the middle taking a percentage. Your real costs are infrastructure (Supabase free tier to ~$25/mo for small studios), Stripe at standard rates, hosting (often free), and your own time to deploy and maintain it. It's a V1 alpha reference implementation, not a managed service. (github.com/TaylorONeal/tandava)

How it adds up at scale

A no-cut, public-tier platform charges a flat fee plus card processing, full stop. A revenue-share platform changes the math: on $20,000/mo in card sales, Momence's free-tier 5% would take ~$1,000/mo, and Arketa's flat 3% ~$600/mo on solo plans — on top of Stripe. At three locations, almost every hosted platform charges per location, so a $320 tier becomes ~$960/mo before add-ons. Vagaro (per bookable calendar) and Tandava (self-hosted, locations are row-level isolation in one deployment) are the structural outliers.

Rule of thumb: flat per-location pricing is predictable and rewards high-volume studios, because cost doesn't grow with revenue. Revenue-share feels cheap at low volume and gets expensive as you grow — the opposite of what a scaling business wants. Mindbody sits apart: its cut is tied to discovery, not volume, which is the most defensible model of all — if the discovery is real.

The big-ticket problem: workshops, trainings, retreats

Teacher trainings and retreats are large transactions ($3,000–5,000+), and at ~2.9% card processing a single $3,000 training costs ~$87 per student — ~$1,700 on a 20-person training just to accept the cards. Note the nuance that cuts in Mindbody's favor: its marketplace commission is capped at $30, so on a $3,000 training it's effectively ~1%. On big-ticket items, processing is the dominant cost, not the platform fee — which is exactly why so many studios take trainings and retreats offline (bank transfer, check) where the cost is roughly 0%. The economics aren't in dispute; the explicit "we do it to dodge fees" framing is partly studio-stated. (Gymdesk, Brett Larkin)

App-store cuts: the layer most people get wrong

If you sell through a mobile app, Apple and Google may take a cut — but only sometimes, and the distinction is the most important thing here:

• In-person services are exempt. Apple's Guideline 3.1.3(e) says physical goods/services consumed outside the app must not use In-App Purchase. An in-person class, a studio membership, a workshop you physically attend: no app-store commission. Google has the same physical-services carve-out.
• Digital content is not exempt. An auto-renewing subscription to a streaming / on-demand library generally must use IAP: Apple 30% standard, 15% under the Small Business Program (<$1M/yr) and after a subscriber's first 12 months. Google is mid-restructure (March 2026: roughly a 20% service fee + ~5% processing, 10% on subscriptions, rolling out by June 30, 2026).
• The cut is about the purchase type, not the device. The same membership sold on the web avoids the app-store cut entirely — which is why studios push memberships and big purchases to web checkout and keep the app for booking.

In flux — verify before relying on precise US numbers. After Epic v. Apple, the December 11, 2025 Ninth Circuit affirmed Apple's contempt but reversed the zero-commission remedy and remanded, so the exact allowable commission on linked-out US purchases is unsettled as of June 2026, and Google's restructure is still rolling out. (Apple guidelines, Apple SBP, Google Play fees, Fenwick on Epic v. Apple)

The argument: a lead is worth a cut, a booking is not

Strip away the feature lists and pricing comes down to one question: what is the platform actually being paid for?

A single class booking is a $15–25 transaction and an easy one — take a name, hold a spot, charge a card. That software is a commodity. The hard, valuable thing is discovery: putting a brand-new person in front of your schedule and getting them to buy. That value isn't the first booking; it's Customer Lifetime Value (roughly monthly revenue per member ÷ monthly churn). At $50/mo and 10% monthly churn, that's ~$500 of lifetime value, and good retention pushes it well into four figures. That's why acquisition is expensive everywhere: health-and-fitness Google Ads run ~$5 per click and ~$63 per lead (2025 benchmarks), and boutique studios commonly spend $100–300 to acquire one member. Nobody pays $63 for a lead worth $20 — they pay it because the lead is worth $1,000. (WordStream, WellnessLiving CLV guide)

So when is a cut fair? When the platform actually sourced the lead. Mindbody's marketplace charges 20% of the first purchase, capped at $30, on a genuinely new client who found you in the Mindbody app — and $0 on existing clients, self-sourced clients, and pack/membership redemptions. If that person becomes a $1,000+ member, paying up to $30 to acquire them beats $63–300 through ads. The platform did the expensive part (discovery) and took a slice of the cheap part (the booking). That's the deal working.

When is it just a tax? When the platform sourced nothing. If a student found you on Instagram, a referral, or your own website and the platform is merely the cash register, a large percentage cut drains margin the platform didn't earn. That's the whole reason some studios route their biggest transactions off-platform — not anti-software, just refusing to pay a lead price for a booking service. (We go deeper on this in discovery platforms vs. your own funnel.)

Commission is rational compensation for sourcing a high-value lead. It is not rational as a tax on a transaction you already owned. Discovery is the expensive, valuable thing; the booking layer, however slick, is plumbing.

How big is this line, really?

Worth keeping in proportion. In our profitability model, swapping a two-room studio from an enterprise-tier platform to a self-hosted one is worth about $439 a month and three members of break-even. Trimming 600 square feet off the same studio's lease is worth $3,405 a month.

Software is the line you can change in a week, which is exactly why it gets more attention than it deserves. Fix it, then go and look at the lease. The full arithmetic is in what a yoga studio actually makes.

A note on this comparison

Our honest opinion, offered to help — not legal or financial advice, and we'd recommend your own counsel review any contract.

• Public information only, linked and checked June 2026; secondhand, estimated, or sales-gated figures are labeled as such.
• Numbers drift — promos, tiers, and processing rates change monthly. Treat published figures as a floor and confirm with the vendor.
• We make one of these (Tandava, open source), so we have a bias and disclose it.

All product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners; we are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with any platform mentioned. Found something out of date? Tell us and we'll update.