UK, US, and Australian prices for nine platforms, compared properly.

Most pricing pages only tell you half the story. You see a monthly fee, then find out later about payment processing, setup fees, or a charge for students who aren't even active anymore.

This guide prices the whole thing in three currencies across nine platforms.

Looking at one market in more depth? See our UK dance studio software comparison.

The short answer

One thing most people miss: two platforms charge their percentage on top of what Stripe or GoCardless already charges. That can quietly add another 1.5% to a rate you thought you knew.

Three ways this software gets priced

1. Flat monthly tier. You pay a set fee for a set number of students or families. Used by Membermeister, ClassForKids, DanceBiz, Jackrabbit, and Studio Pro. Easy to forecast, but the bill still lands in a quiet August.

2. A percentage of what you take. No monthly fee. This is how Class Manager's billing works. A slow month costs you almost nothing.

3. A hybrid. Monthly fee and a percentage. This is how ClassForKids works, and in practice how any tiered platform works once you add card fees on top.

Which model suits you comes down to how even your income is. A term-time dance school with a dead August pays a flat fee for a month it earned nothing in. A year-round swim school with steady direct debits doesn't feel that the same way.

What are you actually being charged for?

Four platforms tier their pricing, and all four count something different:

Jackrabbit's own help centre says your fee is based on "the total number of Active and Inactive Students in your system," counted "on a random day of the month." Old records you forgot to archive can cost you real money, on a day you can't predict.

The takeaway: the same 200-child school could be billed as a 200-student account, a 140-customer account, or a 460-student account, depending purely on whose meter it's standing on.

🇬🇧 UK prices

Class Manager's 2.7% + 20p already includes payment processing. It's the whole bill, not the first half of one.

🇺🇸 US prices

Jackrabbit Class used to publish a full table of pricing bands by student count. It doesn't anymore. The site now shows starting prices only. Older band-by-band figures still floating around on review sites aren't on Jackrabbit's own site today, so we haven't repeated them.

Two things worth knowing before you sign:

• Their own pages disagree on setup fees. The pricing FAQ says "no setup fees or hidden charges." The Jackrabbit Plus page says "One-time setup fee of $169 plus app store fees." Both are live right now.

• Billing terms are strict. A $25 late fee on the 7th, suspension on the 10th, and data "subject to deletion" if an account stays suspended.

In their favour: a 90-day money-back guarantee, free data imports, and over 7,000 reported clients.

Studio Pro is simple on the surface: unlimited students on every plan, for $49, $79 or $165 a month. The tiers bite on messaging instead:

• Essentials ($49): one-way texting only

• Premier ($79): adds two-way in-app messaging

• Elite ($165): two-way texting, 3,000 texts included, then 2¢ per message

The Parent Portal App and Class Manager App are listed as separate items, and the processing rate isn't published anywhere.

🇦🇺 Australian prices

DanceBiz is the local option, and prices in Australian dollars: A$35.95 for up to 50 customers, rising through A$65.95, A$115.95 and A$145.95 to A$245.95 for up to 1,000. Above that, you're quoted directly.

Counting customers rather than students helps a school full of siblings. A business can have 200 students but only 150 paying customers.

• Included: 14-day trial, no setup fees, free support, free data import

• Watch for: "Some add-on features may incur additional charges," with no list of which ones

• Missing: no processing fee published anywhere

• Odd inconsistency: the annual plan shows a discount on DanceBiz's UK pricing tab, and "N/A" on the Australian one

Studio Pro has no Australian pricing at all. No currency selector, so you pay in USD and carry the exchange rate yourself. Worth reading their small print too: "SMS texting is available on the Elite plan for studios in the U.S. and Canada." Elite is $165 a month, and two-way texting is most of what you're paying for. An Australian studio can buy that tier and simply not get the feature.

ClassForKids isn't in this table on purpose. Their pricing page says prices shown are "for UK clubs… Contact us for Australia and New Zealand." They do serve Australia; they just won't quote a price without a call.

Where each one stops being the cheapest option

A percentage-based fee is cheap when you're small, and expensive once you're big. So here's the point where ours stops winning.

We ran the numbers using ClassForKids' own worked example: a 200-student club running 3 terms at £100 a term. That's £60,000 a year across 600 invoices.

We come second here. On a competitor's own example club, Membermeister on Direct Debit beats us by £48 a year.

Widen it out, and here's roughly where the crossover points sit:

Want to run your own numbers? Take your annual card income, multiply by our rate, add 20p per invoice. Compare that against twelve monthly fees plus their percentage on the same income. That's the whole method.

Three caveats that would shift these lines:

• ClassForKids' Enterprise rate starts at 1.5%, which beats our 2.7% comfortably at real volume. We can't run that sum because the fee is quote-only.

• Membermeister's figures exclude VAT; ours don't need a VAT line since there's no subscription.

• The GoCardless comparison assumes Direct Debit for everything, which won't suit every school.

One thing that moves back in our favour: a percentage only applies to money that flows through the platform. Class Manager lets you mark invoices paid by cash, BACS, cheque or direct debit, so a studio that takes some payments offline pays the percentage on less than its full income.

The other bill: your time

Money isn't the only cost here. The other bill arrives in hours, and no one prints it on a pricing page.

Studios using Class Manager have reported saving up to 25 hours a week on admin. Note the up to: not guaranteed, and it's from our own customers telling us, not independent research. Treat it as a ceiling, not an expectation. (Studio Pro makes a similar claim: a testimonial citing a $65,000 reduction in staff costs.)

An hour of your time has two prices:

• What it costs to replace: what you'd pay an administrator to do the job instead

• What it could earn: what you'd make teaching in that hour instead

The second number is usually much bigger. A £30 private lesson is worth more than an hour of invoice-chasing you could pay someone £13 to do.

The honest discount: not all recovered time converts to income. Some lands at 10pm on a Tuesday when nobody wants a lesson. Some just clear a backlog. So take roughly a third of it as sellable. Get back 25 hours, sell 8 of them at £30/hour, and that's £240 a week: around £9,000 over a 38-week teaching year. Swap in your own hours and rate; the method is the point, not our numbers.

Where the time can go:

1. Private one-to-ones. Fastest to fill, since the demand already exists in your class list

2. A new session. A drop-in class, an adult beginners' hour, a holiday workshop

3. Training and qualifications. Slowest, but it compounds: a new certification lets you charge more for classes you already teach, every term, from then on

And some hours shouldn't be sold at all. Parents messaging your personal WhatsApp at 9pm, or questions landing on the studio Facebook page on a Sunday, aren't really admin. They're your evening being interrupted. Class Manager's chats keep that traffic inside the app, where it waits until you choose to open it.

So which one should you actually pick?

Want to switch to Class Manager?

If you're ready to stop paying for software during the months you're not even earning, our team can walk you through it. Book a demo and we'll show you around, or create your free account and explore it yourself.

Learn more about how Class Manager can help you here:

• Class Management Comparison: Class Manager vs MemberMeister

• 7 Payment Friction Points Killing Class Studio Revenue (And How To Fix Them Fast)

• 9 Studio Bottlenecks Class Management Software Can Fix

• Reporting Software for Dance Studios: How to Turn Class Manager Data into Smart Decisions