Kids Club HQ Pricing 2026: Per-Child Costs Explained

What Kids Club HQ Is

Kids Club HQ is a UK admin system built specifically for out-of-school clubs: breakfast clubs, after-school clubs, wraparound care contracted to schools, and holiday clubs. It brings online bookings, live registers, automated invoicing and child records (sessions, emergency contacts, dietary requirements, GP details) into one place, and its integrated payment solution — Kids Club HQ Pay — handles cards, Direct Debit, instant bank transfer and Tax-Free Childcare. Unusually for this market, the pricing is genuinely published: a calculator on the vendor's site shows your monthly figure before you ever speak to sales. What the calculator does not spell out is how the sliding scale is computed, what the payment fees add, or how the per-child model compares with flat-fee platforms as a club grows. This page covers all three, and is honest about where a broader platform like Bizzly is a better fit — and where it plainly is not.

How the Sliding Scale Works

There are no named tiers and no feature ladder. One product, one monthly fee, and the fee is set by the average number of unique children booked into your clubs per day — a child attending both breakfast club and after-school club on the same day counts once. That daily number is averaged over the month to produce your bill, so a quiet half-term week pulls the average down rather than bumping you into a peak tier.

Reading the calculator on the pricing page, the scale runs: £49 per month up to about 50 children a day, then £7 more for every additional 10 children up to 90; from around 91 children the base becomes £79 (flat to 100, then £7 per 10 up to 150); above 150 it becomes £119, flat to 200, then £7 per extra 10 beyond that. At roughly 1,000+ children a day the calculator stops quoting and asks you to contact the vendor for custom pricing. All figures exclude VAT — the £49 headline is £58.80 a month at the standard rate.

Two structural points work strongly in a wraparound provider's favour. There is no per-site fee: a club operating at four schools pays one bill based on total average children, not four licences. And there are no upfront costs — “No upfront costs. No nasty surprise extras, ever” is the vendor's own wording. Members of the Out of School Alliance get a further 15% off the monthly fee.

Costs at a Glance

Read the table as two separate bills. The monthly software fee is published, predictable, and fair at small scale. The payment lines are per-transaction and depend entirely on how your families pay: an all-card club pays a percentage much like it would on any platform, while a Direct Debit and Tax-Free Childcare club collects large invoices for 80p each — one of the cheapest collection rails in the sector.

Kids Club HQ Pay Fees in Practice

Kids Club HQ Pay is the integrated payment solution, and its fee schedule is published in full — a transparency point in the vendor's favour. UK consumer cards cost 1.4% + 20p, which is the same as Stripe's standard UK rate, so on card income Kids Club HQ has no fee advantage or disadvantage against a Stripe-based platform. Amex, business and premium cards rise to 2.2% + 20p, EEA cards to 2.5% + 20p, and rest-of-world cards to 3.5% + 20p. Card funds are available for payout in about 3 business days, and payouts themselves are free.

The flat-fee rails are where the model gets interesting. Direct Debit, Instant Bank Pay and Tax-Free Childcare each cost 80p per payment regardless of size. Collect a £300 monthly wraparound invoice by card and the fee is about £4.40; collect it by Direct Debit and it is 80p. Across 60 families that is roughly £215 a month of difference — far more than the software fee itself. If you can move families onto Direct Debit or they already pay through the government Tax-Free Childcare scheme, the effective cost of the whole system drops sharply. Two small fees to note: refunds cost 50p each and chargebacks £15, so a holiday club with a generous cancellation policy should budget a few pounds a month for refund fees.

What the Monthly Fee Does Not Cover

Three things sit outside the calculator figure and belong in an honest budget.

• VAT. Every advertised price excludes it. Small clubs below the VAT registration threshold cannot reclaim it, so the real cost of the £49 base is £58.80 a month.
• Payment fees. Per-transaction, as above. On £12,000 a month of card income that is roughly £190; on the same income by Direct Debit, under £50. Your payment mix, not the software fee, is the biggest variable in the total.
• A marketing website. Kids Club HQ is an admin and booking system; it does not advertise a website builder. Clubs that need a public site for parents to find — service pages, staff, policies, SEO — typically run a separate Wix, Squarespace or WordPress subscription alongside it at £0 to £25 a month plus build costs.

Total Cost: A Worked Example

Take a typical wraparound provider: breakfast and after-school clubs at two schools, an average of 60 unique children a day in term-time, collecting about £12,000 a month from parents.

If every family pays by card, the two platforms land within about £20 a month of each other — Kids Club HQ around £261 all in, Bizzly Pro around £243 — and the decision is not about money. It is about what each fee buys: built-in Tax-Free Childcare and Direct Debit on one side; a full website, subscription billing, holiday-camp packs and a WhatsApp AI assistant on the other. Shift the same club to Direct Debit collection and Kids Club HQ's payment bill collapses to under £50 a month, making it clearly cheaper. Grow the same club to 150 children a day and the software line inverts: £114 +VAT against a flat £49, with the gap widening £7 +VAT for every extra 10 children.

Where Bizzly Fits

Bizzly is a broader service business platform that covers kids clubs and activity providers rather than a wraparound-care specialist. Plans are a flat £19, £29 and £49 a month regardless of how many children you host, payments run through your own Stripe account, and it is a global, multi-currency product. Bizzly charges no platform fee on bookings at all: you pay Stripe's standard rates (1.4% + 20p on UK consumer cards — the same card rate as Kids Club HQ Pay), nothing else.

The website is in the plan, not bolted on

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, club 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, session listings and checkout become one system on one bill. Styling runs from a global theme 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. The bounds are honest ones: the editor is a desktop tool, and you build from the component palette rather than injecting your own code. For a club currently paying for booking software plus a Squarespace subscription plus someone to update it each half-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 credit packs with expiry dates, one-off packs for a school-term block or a holiday camp, and season subscriptions. The pack billing handles term-time blocks properly — pro-rating for late joiners, so a family arriving in week four pays for what is left rather than the whole block — and holiday camps sell 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. Capacity is held while a family is at the checkout, so a popular week cannot oversell. Booking is payment-gated throughout: a family can only book what their active plan, pack or credits cover, and if payment lapses, booking access is removed automatically — no cross-checking a register against a payments report to find who has quietly stopped paying but is still turning up.

The AI answers the phone, and the admin is covered

From the Standard plan up, a WhatsApp AI assistant handles the enquiries that otherwise land on your phone at pickup time. It books and cancels sessions, searches availability including recurring slots, suggests alternatives when a session is full, joins and checks waiting lists, answers account, subscription and invoice questions, and answers business questions from a knowledge base you write — 24/7, with parents verified by one-time passcode before it touches their account. Standard includes 500 messages a month, Pro 2,000. Alongside it: day registers marked Present, Late or Absent with a note per mark and a printable sheet; waiting lists (Standard+) that auto-offer freed places with time-limited claim links; free trial sessions (Standard+) as a bookable per-service toggle; children as profiles under one paying adult, with custom profile fields driving per-slot age or school-year eligibility; registration forms capturing medical details, consent and emergency contacts; staff bookings on a family's behalf with per-child cancel and move; automated confirmations, 24-hour email and SMS reminders, failed-payment chasing and credit-expiry warnings; review requests by SMS magic link, moderated and auto-published to your site; and discount codes via Stripe promotion codes, which is also how sibling and family discounts are applied.

What Bizzly genuinely does not do

Be clear-eyed about this, because for a wraparound club it can decide the question. Bizzly does not support Tax-Free Childcare — payments run through your own Stripe account, and TFC is not a Stripe payment method. There is no built-in flat-fee Direct Debit rail either: UK businesses can enable Bacs Direct Debit in their own Stripe settings, but it is not the default path and Stripe's rates apply, not a flat 80p. There is no contract-style automated invoicing keyed to a weekly attendance pattern — billing is plan, pack and subscription based, so you cannot bill purely on sessions attended. Sibling discounts work through discount codes rather than being detected automatically at checkout. Parents cancel and rebook rather than rescheduling themselves from the portal, though staff can move a booking for them. There are no native mobile apps, only a responsive web app, and onboarding is self-serve rather than a person migrating your register. If TFC income and Direct Debit invoicing are the spine of your club, that is not a gap you can price your way around: a wraparound specialist like Kids Club HQ is the right answer.

When Each Is Worth the Money

Kids Club HQ earns its price if:

• A meaningful share of your income arrives through Tax-Free Childcare or Direct Debit, where the 80p flat fee is close to unbeatable
• You run school-contracted wraparound care on weekly patterns, where contracts with automated invoicing map exactly onto how you operate
• Your average daily headcount is modest — under about 90 children a day the software fee stays under £77 +VAT
• You operate across several schools and want one bill with no per-site charge
• You are an OOSA member and can take a further 15% off the monthly fee

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
• Your families pay by card, so the flat-fee rails you would be giving up are ones you never used
• Your headcount is large or growing — 150 children a day costs £49 flat, not £114+ +VAT, and the gap widens from there
• You sell holiday camps whole or day by day, memberships and session packs side by side, with pro-rated joining for late arrivals
• 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 running the club
• You want waiting lists with automatic claim offers, free trial sessions, and review collection publishing to your own site

Verdict

Kids Club HQ deserves credit for doing what much of this market does not: it publishes its pricing, in full, including the payment fees. The per-child sliding scale from £49 +VAT is fair and cheap for small and mid-sized wraparound clubs, there are no setup or per-site fees, and the 80p flat rails for Direct Debit and Tax-Free Childcare are a genuine structural advantage for clubs whose families pay that way. The honest caveats are that the fee grows with your register, VAT sits on top of every advertised figure, and you will still need a website from somewhere else.

Bizzly is the stronger option when your club looks more like an activity business than a school service: card-paying families, holiday camps and memberships to sell, a marketing site to run, and a headcount that would make per-child pricing expensive — all for a flat £19 to £49 with no platform fee on bookings. It is the wrong option if Tax-Free Childcare and Direct Debit invoicing are how your club gets paid. Work out your payment mix and your realistic average daily headcount, then compare — both trials are free, and running them in the same fortnight costs nothing. For the wider market, see how Kids Club HQ's pricing stacks up against ClassForKids and Pembee, or see current plans on the Bizzly pricing page.