ClassForKids Pricing 2026: What It Actually Costs Per Month

What ClassForKids Is

ClassForKids (also listed as Class4Kids) is a Scotland-based booking and management platform built specifically for children's activity providers: swimming schools, football and rugby coaching, gymnastics, dance, drama, martial arts, holiday camps and after-school clubs — one of the best-known names in the UK kids activity market, and deservedly so. Pricing is where most research stalls. The headline monthly figure is published; the fee you pay on every booking is not. That gap is why two clubs of similar size give wildly different answers when asked what ClassForKids costs them. This page breaks down both halves of the bill, works through what a typical club actually pays, and is honest about where a broader platform like Bizzly is a better fit — and where it plainly is not.

How ClassForKids Pricing Works

It is a two-part model: a flat monthly software licence, plus a percentage fee on the payments you take through the platform.

Part one: the monthly licence

UK Standard pricing starts from £34.99 per month — a single licence covering every core feature, with no ladder where registers or waiting lists sit behind a higher tier. Crucially it does not scale with headcount: unlimited children, coaches and venues are included, plus a free listing on the ClassForKids Discovery Site. Above it sits a Bespoke plan, priced on application for larger and multi-site operations, adding dedicated account management; there is no public figure for that. Directory listings for non-UK customers show around $49.99 to $69.99 a month, or roughly $699.99 billed annually.

Part two: the per-booking fee

This is the part that decides your real cost, and the part you cannot look up. Every online booking carries a transaction fee. The vendor's position is that fees depend on the size and structure of your business and on the volume of payments you process, that the estimates in its own pricing calculator are exactly that, and that your final rate is confirmed by your account manager. The clearest public data point comes from a club rather than the vendor: one UK football coaching club's parent FAQ, published January 2024, itemised Class4Kids platform fees at 3.1% with Stripe card processing of 1.5% + 20p listed separately on top. Whether your quoted rate is inclusive or exclusive of card processing changes the annual bill by several hundred pounds, so ask explicitly. Recurring subscriptions then carry a further 0.5% per transaction through Stripe Billing, which ClassForKids describes as a negotiated rate against Stripe's standard 0.7% — and its help centre is explicit that clubs should raise plan prices to cover it.

Tiers and Fees at a Glance

Read the table as two separate decisions. The licence line is predictable and modest — genuinely good value for a specialist product. The fee lines grow with you, and they are the ones you cannot look up, which is the main criticism levelled at ClassForKids pricing transparency.

The Per-Booking Fee in Practice

A percentage fee sounds small until you annualise it. At roughly 3%, every £1,000 of parent payments costs about £31, so a club turning over £40,000 a year through the platform pays near £1,240 in platform fees alone — around three times the annual licence — before card processing is counted.

That is not automatically bad. If the rate is bundled it includes card processing you would pay regardless — already 1.5% plus 20p on a standard UK card rate before anyone has built you any software — and in exchange you get the platform, free onboarding and data migration, and support that reviewers generally speak well of. If it is unbundled, as one club's published FAQ suggests, you are paying roughly 4.6% all in, which is a very different proposition. What frustrates people is not the level of the fee but that it is quoted rather than published: you cannot model your costs from the website, or sanity-check your quote against what other clubs pay. Get the rate in writing early, and ask whether it differs between term bookings, camps and subscriptions. Passed on, a £120 term booking becomes roughly £124 at checkout — most families will not blink, though the vendor's own guidance notes a visible fee can nudge some parents back to offline payment, putting the admin back on you.

What the Licence Fee Does Not Cover

Beyond transaction fees, two things sit outside the monthly figure and belong in any honest budget.

• A website. You get booking pages, an iFrame you embed into a site hosted elsewhere, and a Discovery Site listing — not a marketing website with your own branding, service pages and SEO. Most clubs run a separate Wix, Squarespace or WordPress site alongside it, a further £0 to £25 a month plus what it cost to build and keep updated.
• Integrations and non-class income. Reviewers note the absence of Zapier and similar connectors, and that invoicing for uniform, kit or show fees is awkward — the built-in mechanism is one configurable set-up fee on a term or camp booking, which covers membership or insurance well but is not a shop. Discount codes also appear not to carry over when families auto-enrol from one term to the next, which is worth confirming if renewal offers are part of how you retain families.

Total Cost: A Worked Example

Take a typical small provider: around 90 children on the register, weekly term-time classes across two venues, roughly £3,200 a month collected from parents across about 110 card transactions, half of it on recurring subscriptions and the rest paid termly.

Absorbing the fee, ClassForKids lands around £212 a month before a website, or nearer £237 with one. Bizzly Pro comes in around £119 all in, website included. That is a real gap — roughly £1,100 to £1,400 a year — driven almost entirely by the percentage fee, not by the licence. Pass the booking fee to parents and the picture changes completely: ClassForKids drops to roughly £113 to £138, putting the two within about £20 of each other. At that point the decision is not about money at all. It is whether the Discovery Site and free migration are worth more to you than a full website builder and a WhatsApp AI assistant.

How it scales

The gap widens with revenue, because one side is a percentage and the other is not. Double the example club to £8,000 a month across roughly 250 transactions and, on the unbundled reading, ClassForKids costs about £473 a month absorbed — near enough £5,700 a year — against roughly £219 a month, or £2,630 a year, for Bizzly Pro plus Stripe processing. Even on the bundled reading it is around £303. Percentage pricing is cheap when you are small and expensive when you are not; flat pricing is the reverse. One caveat the other way: Bizzly caps bookings at 50 on Base and 200 on Standard, so ninety children attending weekly needs Pro. ClassForKids has no cap at all.

Where Bizzly Fits

Bizzly is a broader service business platform that covers kids activity providers rather than a kids-only specialist. Plans are £19, £29 and £49 a month, payments run through your own Stripe account, and it is a global, multi-currency product — each business bills in its own currency. Bizzly charges no platform fee on bookings at all: you pay Stripe's standard rates, nothing else.

The full website is in the plan, not bolted on

This is the biggest structural difference. ClassForKids gives you an iFrame to embed. Every Bizzly plan — including the £19 Base tier — includes a fully flexible drag-and-drop website editor, where the whole public site is editable page by page: home page, class pages, venue pages, policies. There are 26 components to drop in, including the booking calendar, the timetable, your plans, a store and cart, testimonials, contact forms and the entire customer portal, so the marketing site, class listings and checkout become one system on one bill. Styling goes from a global theme and custom colours down to a raw CSS inspector on an individual element, each page carries its own SEO settings with a search-result preview, edits are captured as version snapshots you can roll back, and there is a media library with stock photography plus AI page creation and refinement if you would rather start from a draft. The bounds are honest ones: the editor itself is a desktop tool, and you build from the component palette rather than injecting your own code. For a club currently paying ClassForKids plus a Squarespace subscription plus a designer to change the timetable each term, consolidating that is often the bigger saving.

Subscriptions, packs and season billing, side by side

Bizzly runs every billing model a kids club actually needs, simultaneously: monthly plans with booking quotas, session or lesson credit packs with expiry dates, one-off term and holiday-camp packs, and season subscriptions. The term and camp packs handle school-term billing properly — mid-term pro-rating so a family joining in week four pays for what is left rather than the whole block, and camps sellable either as a whole week or day by day. Season subscriptions go further: members auto-roll into the next season, billed natively through Stripe, with the cancellation policy configurable per season — billing-period end, a notice period, or the end of the season. Capacity is held while a family is at the checkout, so a popular block cannot oversell. Most platforms do one of these models well and treat the rest as a workaround; running them all without three sets of spreadsheets is the point.

Booking is gated on payment, and the AI answers the phone

Bizzly's booking quotas are payment-gated: billing and booking are one system, so a family can only book what their active plan, pack or credits cover, and if payment lapses, booking access is removed automatically — no reconciliation step where you cross-check a register against a payments report to find who has quietly stopped paying but is still turning up. Each plan carries its own booking rules too: how far ahead families can book, how late they can book a session, and how much notice they must give to cancel.

From Standard upwards, a WhatsApp AI assistant handles the enquiries that otherwise land on your phone. It books and cancels sessions, searches availability including recurring slots, suggests alternatives when a class is full, joins and checks waiting lists, answers account, subscription and invoice questions, raises support tickets and answers business questions from a knowledge base you write — 24/7, with customers verified by one-time passcode before it touches their account. Standard includes 500 messages a month, Pro 2,000. For a coach who is poolside or pitchside all day, that is the difference between answering enquiries at 9pm and not having to. ClassForKids has nothing equivalent.

The day-to-day admin is covered too

Day registers you can mark Present, Late or Absent with a note against each mark, print for a poolside clipboard, or filter across sessions as a roster — with register access as its own staff permission. Waiting lists (Standard and above) queue families in order and auto-offer a freed place with a time-limited claim link, paid through Stripe, with the queue visible to admins so you can promote by hand. Free trial sessions (Standard and above) are a per-service toggle with a “Book a trial” call to action, tracked per child. Children sit as profiles under one paying adult, with custom profile fields driving per-slot eligibility so an age band or level automatically decides who can book which class, and registration forms capturing medical details, consent, emergency contacts and gate codes.

Staff can book on a family's behalf using their plan or credits (or complimentary), move a child between sessions, drag a whole session to a new time, and cancel per child with explicit notify and credit-return choices. Parents get a portal that lets them pause and resume, change plan, cancel under your policy with a live refund quote, and see credits, receipts, purchase history and each child's bookings — plus GDPR data export and erasure without emailing you. Around it: automated booking confirmations, 24-hour email and SMS reminders (SMS from Standard), waiting-list offers, failed-payment chasing and credit-expiry warnings; review requests by SMS magic link that you moderate and auto-publish to your site's testimonials, on every plan; discount codes via Stripe promotion codes, which is also how sibling and family discounts are applied; a merch store with variants and stock control on Pro; custom staff roles with a read/write permission matrix and team invites; HubSpot CRM; and sessions synced with Google Calendar. Standard adds Google Business Profile integration and Google Analytics; Pro adds a custom domain, branded email domain, per-venue pricing and 200 SMS a month.

What Bizzly genuinely does not do

Be clear-eyed about this, because for some clubs it decides the question. There is no parent-facing discovery marketplace, so Bizzly will not put your classes in front of families who are not already looking for you — the ClassForKids Discovery Site is a real acquisition channel, and SEO plus a Google Business Profile is slower to work. No badge or award scheme tracking, which matters if you run a swim school on a staged awards pathway. No per-child progress journal or lesson-report templates — the nearest equivalent is the note you can save against each attendance mark. No coach payroll or commission splitting, and no attendance-driven billing: billing is plan and pack based, so you cannot charge purely on sessions attended. Sibling discounts work, but through discount codes rather than being detected automatically at checkout. Parents cancel and rebook rather than rescheduling themselves from the portal, though your staff can move a booking for them. The WhatsApp assistant cancels and rebooks for the same reason — it has no reschedule action. No native mobile apps, only a responsive web app. And onboarding is self-serve rather than a person migrating your data. If an awards pathway or a marketplace listing is central to how you grow, that is not a gap you can price your way around: ClassForKids is the right answer.

When Each Is Worth the Money

ClassForKids earns its price if:

• You intend to pass the booking fee to parents, which makes the effective platform cost close to £35 a month
• The Discovery Site brings you families — a marketplace listing you do not have to market is worth real money
• You are adding venues, coaches or children fast, or running session volumes that would hit a capped booking allowance
• You want someone to migrate your data and hold your hand through setup at no charge
• A staged award or badge pathway is part of how you run and market your sessions

Bizzly is the better fit if:

• You want your website and your booking system to be one product on one bill, with the whole site editable page by page
• You absorb payment fees rather than surcharge parents, so a percentage fee lands entirely on you
• Your income is subscription-heavy, where the ClassForKids fee is always absorbed and never passed on
• You need memberships, credit packs and term or season blocks side by side, with mid-term pro-rating for late joiners and seasons that auto-roll families into the next block
• You want discount codes — including sibling and family offers — running through your own Stripe account
• You want booking access tied automatically to payment status, so lapsed families cannot keep booking
• You want a WhatsApp AI assistant answering parent enquiries and taking bookings while you are coaching
• You want a flat cost you can look up rather than a rate you have to negotiate, billed in your own currency

Verdict

ClassForKids is a well-built specialist with a fair licence fee and a reputation for expense that is only half deserved. The expense, where it exists, comes from a booking fee many clubs choose to absorb rather than pass on; fix that decision consciously and the platform is competitively priced for what it replaces. The legitimate criticism is transparency: you cannot model your total cost from the website, and you should not have to sit a sales call to learn the number that will dominate your bill.

Bizzly is the cheaper and structurally simpler option when your requirement is a proper website, memberships and term or season billing running side by side, a WhatsApp assistant fielding parent enquiries, and booking gated on payment — all for one flat fee with no percentage taken off the top. It is the wrong option if a marketplace listing, an award scheme or a hands-on data migration is central to how you operate. Work out your likely annual payment volume, decide whether you will absorb or surcharge, then compare. For a wider view of the market, read our ClassForKids alternatives comparison, or see current plans on the Bizzly pricing page.