We’re going to do something unusual for a company blog: write a comparison post that’s actually fair.
You’re probably here because you’re shopping for billing and management software for your gym, martial arts school, or fitness studio. You’ve narrowed it down to two names that keep coming up together — Member Solutions and ASF Payment Solutions — and you want someone to lay it out straight.
Here’s our bias, stated upfront: we’re Member Solutions. We’ve been doing billing for martial arts schools and fitness studios since 1991 — 35 years. ASF has been at it even longer, since 1973. We think we’re the best option for a specific type of owner, but we also know we’re not the best option for everyone. If ASF is a better fit for you, we’d rather tell you that than waste your time.
And here’s why this comparison is harder to write than most: ASF is the company most like us. Both of us lead with collections, both of us put real people behind the software, and both of us have decades of heritage in this exact industry. The differences are real, but they’re subtle — and they matter more than the marketing on either side suggests. We’ll get to the one that actually decides this.
A quick note on how to read this
We’ve organized this comparison by the categories that actually matter when you’re running a school or studio. For each one, we’ll tell you what each company does well and where it falls short. At the end, we’ll match each to the type of owner it serves best.
No “and the winner is…” after every section. Just the facts as we understand them. Where ASF is genuinely strong — and there are real places where it is — we’ll say so plainly.
Platform Overview
ASF Payment Solutions
ASF Payment Solutions has been in fitness billing since 1973 — that’s over 50 years, and it’s a longer track record than ours. Their focus is tight and deliberate: gyms, fitness studios, and martial arts and specialty fitness. They aren’t trying to serve every recurring-revenue business under the sun; they’ve gone deep on fitness and stayed there.
Their pitch is a fully integrated, all-in-one platform at one price with no add-on fees — billing, member management, scheduling, a member app, POS and inventory, analytics and reporting, and an employee timeclock, all included. They publish a live collection-rate figure (around 95%) and lean on it hard, alongside numbers like recovered dollars over a rolling 30-day window.
What they’re known for: A genuinely integrated fitness platform where everything is in one system at one price, a strong support team that includes member-facing agents, and a long, credible history in this industry.
Member Solutions
We’ve been around since 1991 — 35 years. We serve 11,000+ businesses, with deep roots in martial arts and a growing presence in fitness. Our platform handles the software side — scheduling, member management, POS, belt tracking, marketing tools. But what makes us different isn’t the software. It’s the team.
We’re also broader than fitness. Martial arts schools are our home, fitness studios are a big part of the book, but we also bill for health clinics, specialty shops, trades businesses, and other companies with recurring revenue. ASF is more tightly fitness-focused — that’s a real difference, and depending on your business it can cut either way.
What we’re known for: A dedicated billing team that does hands-on, human revenue recovery — real people who call the member, work with banks, dispute chargebacks, and chase the paperwork. Software plus a service team. We’ll explain why that distinction matters more than you’d think. See the platform in action →
Membership Management & Billing
This is where most owners spend the most time and lose the most money, so let’s start here. It’s also where ASF and Member Solutions overlap the most — and where the one real difference lives.
ASF Payment Solutions
ASF’s billing is built into their all-in-one platform, so member management, billing, and reporting all live in one system. They handle recurring memberships, and their recovery model is built on smart retry logic — automated re-attempts at statistically optimal intervals — combined with member self-service tools that let members update their own card information when a payment fails.
Strengths: The integration is clean. Because billing, the member app, and member management are one system, a member updating an expired card is a smooth, self-service flow. Their automated retry logic is well-tuned, and the live collection-rate figure they publish suggests it works for a lot of their customers. For an owner who wants one integrated system handling the whole operation, this is a real advantage.
Limitations: The recovery model is fundamentally automated retries plus member self-service. The software re-attempts the charge and prompts the member to fix their own card. That works — until it doesn’t. When the retries fail and the member doesn’t log in to update their card, the recovery effort largely stops there. ASF’s support team is excellent at answering questions (more on that below), but the core recovery engine is software-driven, not a team picking up the phone to chase down a specific declined payment on a member’s behalf.
Member Solutions
Our billing engine handles the standard stuff — recurring memberships, family billing, frozen accounts, payment plans, and detailed reporting. The platform gives you a dashboard to see everything. We also run automated retries, same as ASF. But here’s where we diverge:
When the automated retries don’t work, our team takes over. Not an email. Not a “please log in and update your card” prompt. A person. They’ll call the bank to find out why the transaction was declined, track down updated card information, dispute chargebacks on your behalf, and follow up with the member professionally until the payment is recovered or the situation is resolved.
Strengths: You don’t deal with the hard cases of failed payments. The retries-failed, member-went-quiet scenario — the one that quietly drains revenue every month — is exactly the one our team works by hand. Software sends a reminder; we make the call.
Limitations: If you want complete control over every billing interaction — if you’d rather be the one (or have your own staff be the one) reaching out to members about failed payments — our hands-on model is less of a fit. And if your involuntary churn is already low and well-managed by automated retries plus self-service, the human-recovery layer is less of a differentiator for you than it is for an owner bleeding revenue to declines.
The honest read on collection numbers
ASF publishes a collection rate of around 95% — meaning roughly 95% of billings get collected, versus an industry average they cite around 80%. Our headline stat is different: clients recover up to 19% more revenue from their delinquent accounts. Those are two different measurements and they should not be read as the same number.
ASF’s 95% is a level — the share of total billings collected. Our 19% is an improvement — how much more a client pulls in from their delinquent accounts compared to their own prior baseline. One describes where you end up; the other describes how far we move you from where you started. You can’t directly subtract one from the other or stack them on the same chart. Be skeptical of anyone — us included — who tries to make these line up into a tidy “we beat them by X%” claim. They measure different things.
Recovery Model (The One That Decides This)
If you only read one section, read this one. Everything else in this comparison is a tie-breaker; this is the actual fork in the road.
ASF Payment Solutions
ASF recovers failed payments with software and member self-service. When a charge declines, their system re-attempts it on a tuned schedule, and the member gets prompted to update their own payment method through the app. Their support team is there to answer questions — including from your members — but the recovery work itself is automation plus the member fixing their own card.
This is a perfectly good model, and for a lot of fitness businesses it’s enough. Modern retry logic recovers a meaningful chunk of declines on its own, and members who care about keeping their membership will often update a card when prompted.
Member Solutions
We recover failed payments with people. Automated retries run first — same as ASF — but the cases retries can’t fix are where a trained billing specialist steps in. They call the bank. They dispute the chargeback. They track down the new card number. They follow up with the member directly, professionally, so you don’t have to.
This isn’t an add-on or an upsell. It’s the company. It’s why we describe ourselves as a billing team rather than a billing app.
The honest distinction: ASF’s recovery is automated retries + member self-service. Ours is automated retries + a human team doing the labor. Neither is universally “better.” If your declines are mostly fixable by a retry or a card update, ASF’s model gets you most of the way for less coordination on your end. If your declines are the stubborn kind — expired cards on members who’ve gone quiet, chargebacks, bank-side holds — that’s the work our team does by hand, and it’s work no automation does for you.
All-in-One Platform & Features
ASF Payment Solutions
This is a genuine ASF strength, and we’ll credit it fully. Their platform is all-in-one and everything is included at one price: billing, member management, scheduling, a member app, POS and inventory, analytics and reporting, and an employee timeclock. No à la carte add-on fees. For an owner who wants a single integrated system running the whole front desk — check-ins, retail, schedule, payroll-adjacent timeclock — ASF’s breadth is hard to beat. You’re not stitching tools together; it’s one platform.
Member Solutions
Our platform covers the essentials — scheduling, member management, POS, marketing tools — and for martial arts specifically we have belt tracking, rank management, and family billing across multiple students and programs built in, which ASF and most generalist platforms don’t match. But we’ll be straight with you: our software feature breadth is narrower than a full all-in-one like ASF’s. We don’t position ourselves as the system that also runs your inventory and your employee timeclock.
Honest take: If you want the deepest single integrated platform — one login that handles billing, retail, scheduling, app, and timeclock — ASF’s all-in-one breadth genuinely may suit you better. We’ve chosen to be deep on billing and recovery rather than wide across every operational tool. That’s a deliberate trade, and it’s not the right trade for every owner.
Support
ASF Payment Solutions
ASF’s support is a real strength, and it’s more than most software companies offer. They provide a full support team plus a dedicated onboarding specialist, and — notably — member-facing support agents, meaning their team will answer your members’ billing questions directly. Phone and email, with email response times they put at around one business hour, Monday–Friday 9–6 ET plus after-hours coverage for urgent issues. They describe it as “not a generic help desk,” and the member-facing piece in particular is a meaningful differentiator. If a member calls confused about a charge, ASF can handle that conversation so you don’t have to.
Member Solutions
We provide phone support — actual humans who answer the phone — and every account has a dedicated account manager. For billing-specific issues (the ones that keep owners up at night), our billing team handles them proactively; you often don’t even know there was a problem until it’s already resolved.
Honest take: This is closer than it is in most comparisons, because both of us put real people behind the software. ASF’s member-facing support agents are a genuine strength — they’ll field your members’ billing questions directly, which is valuable. Our team’s emphasis is slightly different: less a help desk your members call, more a recovery team working your delinquent accounts. Both are real human support. Which one matters more depends on whether your pain is fielding member questions or recovering lost revenue.
Security & Compliance
We’re going to be honest here rather than claim a parity we can’t publicly back up.
ASF Payment Solutions
ASF publishes a strong, specific security posture: PCI-compliant since 2004, listed on the Visa Global Registry of Service Providers, and subject to annual independent audits. Those are concrete, externally verifiable credentials, and they’re a legitimate reason an owner who weighs security certifications heavily might lean ASF.
Member Solutions
We take payment security seriously and handle sensitive payment data every day across 11,000+ businesses. But we’ll be candid: we don’t publicly advertise the same specific certification badges ASF does on this page. If published, named security certifications are a deciding factor in your evaluation, ASF lays theirs out plainly, and you should weigh that. We’d rather tell you that than imply a credential match we’re not showing you here.
Setup & Onboarding
ASF Payment Solutions
ASF’s onboarding is a credible strength. They quote being fully live in 30–45 days, assign a named migration specialist, and lean on what they describe as 30-plus years of doing migrations — with the goal that your members never notice the switch happened. For a platform switch, that’s a reassuring, well-rehearsed process.
Member Solutions
Our onboarding takes 1–2 weeks. We assign you a dedicated account manager who walks through everything — importing your member data, setting up billing agreements, configuring payment processing, and training you on the platform. Because we’re also standing up the billing service (not just software), there’s coordination involved, but you’re not doing it alone.
Honest take: Both are guided, specialist-led migrations — neither is a fend-for-yourself setup. Our timeline is typically shorter on paper; ASF’s process is more elaborately staged for a bigger all-in-one cutover. Any platform switch involves data migration and a learning curve regardless of who you choose.
Pricing & Transparency
Let’s talk real numbers — and the honest gap here is about transparency, not just price.
ASF Payment Solutions
ASF does not publish pricing. To get a number, you’ll need to book a demo and go through their sales process. That’s common in this industry, and it’s not a knock on them — but it does mean you can’t comparison-shop on price from their website. Their pitch is that everything is included at one price with no add-on fees, which is genuinely appealing if the all-in-one breadth fits your needs; you’ll just have to get the actual figure from a conversation.
Member Solutions
- Price: $99/month
- Transaction fees: apply per transaction
- Note: Our pricing includes the billing team. The humans who recover your failed payments, handle chargebacks, and manage collections are part of the same monthly fee, not an add-on.
We publish our price on purpose. We think you should be able to know what something costs before you sit through a demo.
The transparency contrast (stated fairly)
We publish $99/month; ASF asks you to book a demo for a quote. That’s a real difference and we think transparency is a virtue — but it’s not a verdict. ASF’s all-in-one platform includes more software surface area (POS, inventory, timeclock) than our $99 plan, so a flat price-to-price comparison isn’t apples-to-apples. The fair framing: we’ll tell you our number up front, and you’ll need a demo to get theirs. What you get for each number is different. Compare what you’d actually use.
What Happens When a Payment Fails?
This is the section that actually determines how much money you keep, and it’s where the two recovery models diverge most clearly.
Every membership business has failed payments. Credit cards expire. Banks flag transactions. Members change accounts and forget to update their billing info. Industry estimates put involuntary churn — members lost to failed payments, not because they wanted to leave — at a meaningful slice of recurring revenue every year.
So here’s the question: when a payment fails at your school next Tuesday, what actually happens?
On ASF Payment Solutions
The system retries the payment automatically on a tuned schedule. If the retries don’t recover it, the member is prompted to update their own card through the member app — self-service. ASF’s support team is available, including member-facing agents who can answer a member’s questions about the charge. For the share of declines that a retry or a quick card update fixes, this works well, and their published collection figures suggest it works for a lot of their customers.
Where it stops short: the member who never logs in, the expired card nobody updates, the chargeback that needs a dispute filed. The automation has done its job; from there it largely waits on the member to act.
On Member Solutions
The system retries automatically — same as ASF. But when the retry doesn’t work, our billing team takes over. Not a self-service prompt. A trained billing specialist.
They’ll call the bank to find out why the transaction was declined. If the card expired, they’ll track down the updated information. If there’s a chargeback, they’ll file a dispute on your behalf. If the member needs to be contacted, they’ll do it professionally — no awkward conversations for you.
This isn’t an add-on. It’s not an upsell. It’s what we do. It’s included.
Why this is the deciding question:
Both companies recover the easy declines — the ones a retry or a card update fixes. The money lives in the hard declines, and that’s where the models split. ASF’s hard-decline path is “the member needs to act.” Ours is “our team acts.” If your declines are mostly the easy kind, ASF gets you nearly all the way. If you’ve got a stack of stubborn ones quietly draining revenue every month, the human-recovery layer is the difference between writing that revenue off and getting it back.
This is the question that feature-by-feature comparisons miss. The most important thing your billing partner does isn’t process payments when they work. It’s what happens when they don’t — and whether software or a person handles the part the software can’t.
What We’re Not Great At (Honest Assessment)
We said we’d be fair, so here’s where ASF has us beat:
All-in-one breadth. ASF is a fuller integrated platform. POS and inventory, an employee timeclock, a polished member app, scheduling, and billing all in one system at one price. If you want a single platform running your whole operation, ASF’s scope is wider than ours.
Member-facing app and UI polish. ASF is a purpose-built fitness platform, and the member-facing experience — the app a member uses to book, pay, and update a card — is more polished than ours. If the digital member experience is core to your brand, that’s a real edge for them.
Published security certifications. ASF lays out PCI compliance since 2004, Visa Global Registry listing, and annual independent audits. We don’t publicly advertise the same specific badge set here. If named certifications are a deciding factor, ASF makes them easy to verify.
Longer track record in the category. ASF has been doing fitness billing since 1973 — that’s 50-plus years to our 35. We’re proud of our history, but theirs is longer.
We’ve chosen to be deep rather than wide. We do billing, payment recovery, and membership management — and we do the recovery with a human team behind the software. That’s a deliberate choice, and it’s genuinely not right for everyone.
Who Is Each Best For?
After 35 years of working with school and studio owners, we’ve learned the right choice depends on what problem you’re actually trying to solve. Here’s our honest take:
Choose ASF Payment Solutions if:
- You want a fully integrated, all-in-one fitness platform — billing, scheduling, member app, POS, inventory, and timeclock in one system
- You value a strong support team that will answer your members’ billing questions directly
- Published security certifications (PCI, Visa registry, independent audits) factor into your decision
- Your failed payments are mostly recoverable by automated retries and member self-service
- You run a gym, fitness studio, or martial arts school and want a fitness-specialized vendor
- You’re comfortable booking a demo to get a price and want one all-inclusive number
Choose Member Solutions if:
- Failed payments and collections are your single biggest revenue problem
- You want a human team doing the recovery labor — calling banks, disputing chargebacks, chasing the paperwork — not just automation prompting the member to fix it themselves
- You run a martial arts school and need belt tracking, rank management, and family billing across programs
- Your business is broader than fitness (clinic, specialty shop, trades, or another recurring-revenue model) and you want a partner who handles that
- You want transparent, published pricing ($99/month) without a demo to learn the number
- You’d rather run your business and let a billing team handle the hard money cases
The Bottom Line
This is the closest comparison we write, because ASF is the company most like us. Both of us lead with collections, both put real people behind the software, and both have decades in this exact industry. If you’re choosing between us, you’re already choosing well.
The honest fork is the recovery model. ASF is a fitness-specialized, all-in-one software platform with a strong, member-facing support team and automated billing recovery — best for an owner who wants one integrated system and good support. Member Solutions is a billing team with capable software that does hands-on, human recovery work and serves a broader range of businesses — best for an owner whose number-one pain is failed payments and who wants people, not just software, doing the recovery.
If what keeps you up is “I want one platform that runs my whole gym and good support behind it” — ASF is a genuinely strong, credible choice, and we’d tell you so.
If what keeps you up is “I’m losing money every month to failed payments and I need someone to actually go get it back” — that’s the problem we built our entire company around. When a card declines at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday and the retry doesn’t catch it, our team is the one who picks up the phone, calls the bank, and gets the money back.
If that’s the problem you need solved, we should talk.
Want to talk through your setup?
If you’re comparing platforms and want an honest conversation about whether Member Solutions is the right fit — or whether ASF makes more sense for your situation — we’re happy to talk it through.
No sales pitch. No pressure. Just a conversation with someone who’s seen thousands of schools make this decision.
Talk to Our Team About Your Setup
Or call us directly — we still answer the phone.
