Membership billing for a martial arts school or gym typically runs from about $99/month for software-plus-service, up to a percentage of collected revenue for full-service billing. Member Solutions starts at $99/month. The bigger cost most owners miss isn’t the monthly fee — it’s the revenue that quietly leaks out when failed payments never get recovered.
That’s the short version, and we’ll back up every piece of it below. But here’s why we’re writing this at all: most billing companies won’t tell you what they charge. You fill out a form, you book a demo, you sit through a pitch, and then you find out the number. We think that’s backwards. So this post states real prices, explains the two pricing models you’ll run into, and — the part nobody else covers — walks through the cost that doesn’t show up on any invoice.
We’re Member Solutions. We’ve been doing billing for martial arts schools since 1991 — 35 years, 11,000+ businesses. That’s our bias, stated upfront. We’ll still tell you the honest version, including the fees that do apply.
The short answer: typical price ranges
Martial arts billing pricing falls into a few recognizable buckets. Here’s what you’ll actually encounter when you shop:
| Pricing model | Typical cost | What you get | Who charges this way |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software-only | ~$0–$159/mo flat | Self-service billing tools; you run collections yourself | Mindbody, Glofox, many gym apps |
| Software + service (flat) | ~$99–$199/mo + transaction fees | Software plus a team that handles billing and recovery | Member Solutions |
| Percentage of collections | ~3%–10% of collected revenue | Full-service billing; the company takes a cut of what it collects | Traditional billing companies, ASF (quoted) |
| Hybrid / per-member | ~$1–$3 per active member/mo | Scales with your roster size | Various |
A few honest caveats on this table. The “software-only” tier looks cheapest because it is cheapest — but you’re the one chasing failed payments, which is exactly where the money is (more on that below). The percentage-of-collections tier can look expensive on paper but aligns the billing company’s incentive with yours: they only make more when they collect more. And almost every flat-fee plan adds per-transaction processing fees on top — the headline monthly number is rarely the whole bill.
If you want to see how this fits into the broader economics of running a school, our breakdown of average gym profit margins puts these costs in context — billing is usually a small line item next to rent and payroll, but unrecovered revenue can quietly eat a chunk of your margin.
Flat fee vs. percentage of revenue — which model, and when
These are the two models that actually matter, and the right one depends on your size and what you want off your plate.
Flat monthly fee (e.g., $99/month plus transaction fees) is predictable. You know your cost regardless of how many members you bill or how much revenue runs through. As your school grows, the flat fee doesn’t grow with it — so your cost per member drops the bigger you get. This is the better deal for established schools with a solid roster: at 200+ members, a flat fee is almost always cheaper than a percentage.
Percentage of collected revenue (e.g., 3%–10% of what’s collected) scales with you in both directions. A brand-new school with 30 members pays very little; a school doing $50K/month pays a lot more. The upside: the billing company’s paycheck is tied to how well they collect, which is a real incentive alignment if recovery is hands-on. The downside: once you’re at scale, you may be paying far more than a flat fee would cost for the same work.
The honest rule of thumb: if you’re small and just starting, a percentage model keeps your costs proportional to your revenue. If you’re established with a healthy roster, a flat fee almost always wins on total cost. Either way, ask what the model does at your member count — not at the demo’s example numbers.
What’s usually NOT in the base price
Here’s where we’re going to be straighter with you than most companies are, including about ourselves.
The advertised monthly fee is rarely the complete cost. Watch for these:
- Transaction / processing fees. Almost universal. Every card swipe and ACH pull carries a fee. At Member Solutions, transaction fees apply per transaction on top of the monthly price — we don’t pretend they don’t exist.
- Setup / onboarding fees. This is the one nobody likes to talk about. We’ll address ours plainly in a second.
- Add-on modules. Some platforms charge extra for the member app, advanced reporting, or marketing tools. Ask what’s in the base plan versus à la carte.
- Statement / batch fees, chargeback fees, PCI compliance fees. The small line items that add up.
On setup fees — our honest disclosure: We don’t bald-faced claim “$0 setup fees.” Here’s the real deal: setup fees do apply if you don’t implement within 30 days of signing on. If you get up and running inside that window — which most schools do, because onboarding takes 1–2 weeks with a dedicated account manager — the setup cost is waived. Drag it out past 30 days and the fee applies. We’d rather you hear that from us now than discover it on an invoice later.
That’s the kind of thing a “contact sales” wall is designed to keep vague. We’d rather just say it.
The hidden cost: unrecovered failed payments
Now the part that matters more than every line item above combined.
Every membership business has failed payments. Cards expire. Banks flag transactions. Members switch accounts and forget to update their billing info. This isn’t members choosing to quit — it’s revenue you already earned, walking out the door because a charge didn’t go through. The industry calls it involuntary churn, and it’s a meaningful slice of recurring revenue every single year.
Here’s the math that should scare you more than a $99 fee. Say you run $40,000/month in memberships and 5% of payments quietly fail and never get recovered. That’s $2,000/month — $24,000/year — gone. No software fee comes close to that.
So the real pricing question isn’t “what’s the monthly fee.” It’s “what happens when a payment fails, and who goes and gets that money back?”
This is the difference between software and a billing team. Cheap software-only tools retry the charge a few times and send the member an email asking them to update their card. That recovers the easy declines. The hard ones — the expired card on a member who’s gone quiet, the chargeback that needs disputing, the bank-side hold — those just become lost revenue.
At Member Solutions, when the automated retries don’t work, a real person takes over. They call the bank to find out why the transaction declined, track down updated card info, dispute chargebacks on your behalf, and follow up with the member professionally. The result: our clients recover up to 19% more revenue from their delinquent accounts than they did before. That’s not a software feature. That’s people doing the work. You can read more about how that recovery process actually works on our revenue recovery page.
Frame it this way: a $99/month fee that recovers an extra $1,500/month in failed payments isn’t a cost. It pays for itself many times over. The cheapest billing on paper can be the most expensive once you count what leaks out the back.
How to compare quotes apples-to-apples
Once you start collecting quotes, they won’t line up neatly — different companies bundle different things. Use this checklist to normalize them:
- Get the all-in monthly number, not just the headline. Add the base fee + transaction fees + any per-member or add-on charges at your actual volume.
- Ask about setup fees explicitly — and the conditions. (Are they waived if you implement quickly? What’s the trigger?)
- Pin down the pricing model at your size. A percentage quote and a flat quote look very different at 50 members vs. 300. Run both at your real roster.
- Ask the recovery question directly: “When a payment fails and the automated retry doesn’t work, what happens next — does a person call the bank, or does the system just email my member?” This is the single most revealing question you can ask, and the answer is rarely on the pricing page.
- Confirm security posture. You’re handling members’ payment data. Member Solutions is PCI-DSS Level 1 — the highest compliance tier. Ask every vendor what theirs is.
- Separate software cost from service cost. A cheap software-only tool and a software-plus-team service are not the same product. Compare what each number actually buys.
The trap is comparing a flat software fee against a full-service price as if they’re the same thing. They’re not. One sells you tools; the other does the work.
What Member Solutions charges, plainly
No demo required to learn this. Here are our numbers:
- $99/month — on an annual plan.
- ~$199/month — on a month-to-month plan (the annual commitment is the cheaper path).
- 2.9% per transaction — the processing fee on payments collected.
- Setup fees: waived if you implement within 30 days of signing on. They apply if implementation runs past that window. Most schools are live in 1–2 weeks with a dedicated account manager, so most never see a setup charge.
What that monthly fee includes that a software-only plan doesn’t: the billing team. The people who recover your failed payments, call the banks, dispute chargebacks, and chase the paperwork are part of the same price — not an add-on, not an upsell. That’s the whole point of how we’re built: software plus a service team, since 1991, PCI-DSS Level 1, across 11,000+ businesses.
You can see the full pricing breakdown on our billing services and software pricing page — published, on purpose, so you can comparison-shop without sitting through a pitch.
And if you’d rather just get a straight quote for your specific situation, book a free billing assessment — we’ll quote you on a 15-minute call. No form-then-wait, no pressure. We still answer the phone.