For fifty years, everything sold to martial arts schools — billing companies first, software after — has run on a percentage of tuition. We put the math from the major platforms in one place, with sources and dates, and looked at the newer pricing model that puts a school's software bill at $0.
Published July 2026 · Updated August 3, 2026
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If you've ever stood at your front desk and told a parent there's "an issue with your card" that "needs updating in the system" — because saying your card declined to a family whose kid you just promoted felt impossible — this report is about the machinery behind that moment.
Not the parent. Not you. The machinery.
We pulled the published pricing of the major school-management platforms, the complaint patterns across the big review sites, and fifty years of billing-company history, and put the numbers in one place. Every figure below carries a source and an as-of date, and our commercial relationships are disclosed on this page.
What the math shows: the fee you can feel but never quite see has a shape, a history, and — recently — an exit.
It started in 1973.
That's the year ASF Payment Solutions opened its doors. The pitch to school owners was genuinely appealing: hand us your billing, we'll chase the payments, you go teach. And for a while it felt like relief. Then the arrangement revealed its price. Full-service billing companies charge roughly 3% to 10% of everything a school collects — a figure Member Solutions, in the business since 1991, publishes in its own billing-cost guide (as of June 2026). And when a parent tried to cancel and hit a 60-day-notice wall or a demand for proof they'd moved, the anger didn't land on the billing company. It landed on the school. Owners of that era found themselves paying a percentage of their own tuition for the privilege of collecting it — and apologizing to families for money behavior they never chose.
Software was supposed to end that.
The second era arrived with generalist platforms, and MindBody became its cautionary tale. Owners describe the same arc in review after review: excited at signup, then the line items start. A base plan that runs $99 to $159 a month per location climbs through tiers to $699 and beyond; the branded app is another $249 to $299 a month; processing lands around 3.5% effective; clients acquired through the marketplace carry a 20% commission (capped at $30); and the contract auto-renews, typically for 24 months (FitBudd, Pabau, and CheckThat.ai cost analyses, 2026; Better Business Bureau complaint file). One industry cost guide puts a typical two-location boutique's real spend at $1,000 to $1,700 a month, all-in (FitBudd, 2026). Not every school owner has lived that specific escalation. But almost every owner recognizes the shape of it: signed up at one price, watched the number grow.
Which brings us to now.
The third era is the one most schools live in now — martial-arts-specific platforms, and lately "free" ones. Better products, honestly. Same underlying economics. Kicksite's subscription climbs with your student count: $49, $99, $149, $199 a month as you cross 25, 50, and 100 active students, plus 2.9% + $0.25 on every card payment (Capterra and Kicksite's own published pricing, 2026). Zen Planner runs $99 to $348 in flat tiers, but the typical all-in lands at $447+ once the website, marketing suite, and branded app are added — and its processing rates are quote-only, which tells its own story (Zen Planner pricing page and Gymdesk's review, 2026). Spark holds at a flat $199. Gymdesk scales $75 to $200 by member count with 2.9% + $0.30 processing. MyStudio runs $99 to $299. And PushPress Core — genuinely $0 a month, forever — charges 4.19% + $0.30 on every card payment, which on $10,000 of monthly tuition works out to roughly $419 to $449 in fees (PushPress help center, Dec 2025; corroborated by Gymdesk and third-party comparisons). Free software. Bigger skim.
Here is the whole fifty years in one table:
| Vendor | Software cost | Processing / revenue take | Source (as of) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Member Solutions (billing era) | Software costFrom $99/mo with service | ProcessingFull-service billing ≈ 3–10% of collected tuition | SourceTheir own published billing-cost guide (June 2026) |
| ASF (billing era, est. 1973) | Software cost— | ProcessingLegacy percentage-of-what-you-collect model | SourceMartialTalk owner accounts; BBB complaint file (2025) |
| MindBody | Software cost$99–$699+/mo per location; branded app +$249–$299/mo | Processing~3.5% effective; 20% marketplace commission; 24-mo contracts typical | SourceFitBudd, Pabau, CheckThat.ai (2026) |
| Zen Planner | Software cost$99–$348 tiers; typical all-in $447+/mo with add-ons | ProcessingQuote-only (unpublished) | SourceZen Planner pricing page; Capterra; Gymdesk (Jan 2026) |
| Kicksite | Software cost$49–$199/mo, rising with student count | Processing2.9% + $0.25/card | SourceCapterra; Kicksite's own pricing (2026) |
| Spark Membership | Software cost$199/mo flat | ProcessingCard/ACH rates not published | SourceSpark help center (Apr 2026) |
| MyStudio | Software cost$99–$299/mo | ProcessingQuote-based | SourceMyStudio pricing page; Capterra (June 2026) |
| Gymdesk | Software cost$75–$200/mo, rising with member count | Processing2.9% + $0.30 | SourceGymdesk's own cost guide (Apr 2026) |
| PushPress Core | Software cost$0/mo | Processing4.19% + $0.30/card (≈ $419–$449/mo on $10K processed) | SourcePushPress help center (Dec 2025); Gymdesk |
| HotGlue Advantage | Software cost$0/mo | ProcessingCard costs priced into listed tuition; families paying by bank transfer get 4% off; ACH 1%; $49/mo processing minimum applies | Sourcehotglue.app/lp/martial-arts (August 3, 2026) |
Different decades. Different logos. One business model: a percentage of your tuition, packaged three different ways. The billing companies took it openly. The platforms take it as a subscription that grows when your school does, plus a processing rate on every dollar, plus the add-ons that arrive over time. The line items changed. The percentage never left.
If you've never paid for a platform — if your school still runs on a spreadsheet, Venmo, and a binder of paper waivers — this applies to you doubly. You're about to choose your first platform, and every option on the default list runs on the model this report just described. You get to skip the decade of platform-hopping the owners around you already paid for.
Put the model in plain terms: it's a lease with a landlord who charges you rent plus a cut of everything your students pay you. You'd move. Except every building on this street runs the same lease.
Here's the pattern worth naming, because most owners have lived it without seeing it. You get fed up. You demo three alternatives. You brace for the move — and everyone who's tried to leave one of these platforms knows the exit is harder than the entrance; one owner coined "migration migraine" for it. You switch. And eighteen months later the new bill has crept to within sight of the old one, because a subscription that scales with students plus a percentage on every payment is the same math wearing a different logo. Sound familiar? It happens even at the best-liked vendors: one veteran school owner reported being quoted a processing rate three separate times, then charged a different one after signing (SoftwareAdvice review, Kicksite). You weren't picking bad vendors all those years. There was nothing else on the menu.
Recently, something structurally different showed up in this niche. Call it Full-Tuition Billing, because that's what it does — the school receives its full intended tuition on every payment.
The mechanics take one worked example — and it starts with the price list itself. The class you meant to price at $100 goes on the list at $104, because the cost of card processing now lives inside the number. A family that pays by card pays $104. A family that pays by bank transfer gets a 4% discount and pays $100. Either way, the school nets $100 — the tuition you actually intended to charge is the tuition that lands in the account.
And the software fee? There isn't one. The platform is funded by the card spread — the processing cost that card-choosing families already cover inside the listed price — instead of by a subscription on the school's books. Versions of the idea are starting to surface across the niche — a few incumbent platforms now offer optional student-paid fee settings bolted onto their subscriptions. But bolting the option onto the old model isn't the same as building on the new one. HotGlue, a martial arts platform built entirely on this model, charges $0 a month for its software: no tiers, no per-student pricing, no contract (hotglue.app/lp/martial-arts, verified August 3, 2026). Growth stops raising your software bill, because there is no software bill to raise.
And the moment this report opened with — the declined card, the script, the parent you'd rather not call? On the platform's autopay, a failed payment triggers the system's own retry and reminder. The conversation stops being yours.
HotGlue publishes both plans' full pricing on its page — worth a look if you want to check this model against your own numbers now. The full picture, including the catch, continues below.
You've earned the right to ask. "Free" software already exists in this market, and the industry itself will tell you how it works: Gymdesk publishes the counter-argument outright — free plans aren't charity; the vendor makes it up on processing (Gymdesk cost guide, Apr 2026). PushPress Core is the working example: $0 a month, funded by a 4.19% + $0.30 card rate. The usual catch is a bigger skim, hidden one layer down.
So where's this one? Disclosed, structural, and almost none of it paid by you. HotGlue is built by OneFront, a payments company — not a software company. Its Google Play listing says it plainly: "we make money when you get paid" through payment processing (Google Play, as of July 2026). The software costs $0 because software was never the revenue. Processing is. And the school-side fee sheet, in full: $0 software, $0 card fees, 1% on bank transfers, and a $49-a-month processing minimum that a school running real tuition volume clears without thinking about it (their pricing page, as of August 3, 2026). That's the entire list.
Now, if you came up in this industry's business circles, an alarm just went off — the old wisdom says beware the vendor who bundles "free" services with your money flow, because that's exactly how the billing companies got their hooks in. Fair instinct. Aim it at the incentive direction, though, and the picture changes. The billing-era trap was a vendor whose profit grew by extracting more from the school — percentage creep, add-on services, contracts that punished leaving. A processor-funded platform only makes money when the school gets paid. Its built-in incentive is your failed payments getting recovered, your families staying, your school processing more tuition — not less of it reaching you.
One more thing the structure buys: permanence. A software company that copied "$0 forever" would be deleting its only revenue line. A payments company doing it is just describing its business model.
For most owners, this is the real objection — not the math, the mat. Every owner already knows the binary: eat the card fees or pass them on. And passing them on sounds like the thing parents genuinely hate. They have a word for it — "nickel-and-dimed" — and in one WalletHub study, 87% of consumers said extra card fees at checkout make them feel exactly that (consumer-survey data — treat it as directional).
But look at what parents are actually reacting to in that data: a visible extra fee, added at the moment of payment, over and over. This model never shows them one. It's a third option the binary doesn't contain: card costs priced in once, a 4% discount for paying by bank transfer, and then it's invisible — because recurring tuition is decided once at signup, not renegotiated at a register every visit. A pattern cited from PYMNTS data (payments-industry research — and yes, we're telling you the source has an interest here) puts the gap between predicted and real reactions at an enormous spread: roughly 71% of consumers object to fee pass-through in surveys, while about 85% pay without issue in practice. And in the CrossFit world, gym owners have run priced-in fee models for years — with blunter framing than a family program needs, but proof that paying audiences live with it.
The honest part: your card-paying families will see a listed price about 4% higher than today's, and telling everyone takes one announcement, framed as what it is — a discount for paying by bank transfer, under which most families switch and pay what they always did. That email takes an evening. The alternative is the table above, indefinitely.
Read enough reviews in this industry and one sentence recurs in different words: once the contract was signed, the tone shifted. Sales warmth turns into policy citations, and the exit — not the move itself — becomes the monster. So start there. HotGlue has no contract. Nothing auto-renews. There is nothing to cancel your way out of; you can leave whenever you want (hotglue.app/lp/martial-arts, verified August 3, 2026). And the deeper lock most owners have felt — the payment processor holding your families' autopay relationships hostage — doesn't apply when leaving is contractually free.
Then the moving truck: signup is free with no card required, migration from Zen Planner, Kicksite, and MindBody is done for you by their team, white-glove, with a zero-downtime commitment, and there's no student cap.
Two things you should know before you check any of this. First: HotGlue is young. There's no wall of testimonials to show you, and we won't pretend otherwise — which is precisely why every claim in this section is structured so you can verify it personally before a single dollar or student record moves. Second, so your own search doesn't confuse you: the studio platform lives at hotglue.app. The company at hotglue.com is an unrelated data-integration firm that happens to share the name.
Weigh the two worst cases. Investigating and finding it's not for you costs a half-hour. Not investigating costs another year of the model you just read the price of.
We're not going to tell you what you'd save — we don't know your school, and a promise like that wouldn't survive the standard this report set for itself. But their rates are published, and the arithmetic is one line.
HotGlue's Standard plan — the one where the school covers its own card fees, same arrangement as every vendor in the table — runs 3.29% plus 30¢ per transaction (their pricing page, as of August 3, 2026). Take a school doing $12,000 a month in card tuition across 120 payments: that line comes to about $431 a month. Roughly $395 of it is the percentage; $36 is the per-payment fees. Swap in your own volume and the shape doesn't change, only the size. Under the Advantage model, the school's side of that same line is $0 in software, $0 in card fees, 1% on bank transfers, and the $49 monthly minimum.
One thing that comparison understates, in your favor: it counts only processing. If your school currently pays a monthly subscription, add that entire line on top.
Then go check it. Three things are worth confirming on their page before you believe a word of this report: both plans' rates are printed there rather than quoted on a call, the migration list names Zen Planner, Kicksite, and MindBody specifically, and signup takes no card. If any one of those doesn't hold up, you've learned something useful about the report you've just read.
Disclosure: Local Owner Report is a publication of DRF Media LLC. This report contains affiliate links: if you sign up with HotGlue through links on this page, we may earn a commission from payment processing on the platform, at no cost to you. That relationship did not set the figures above — every third-party number in this report carries its source and an as-of date, and we encourage you to check each one. | Privacy Policy | Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information | Contact