What Pembee Is
Pembee is a UK-based booking platform built for activity providers — clubs, camps, courses and classes. It handles online booking with custom registration forms, attendance rosters, flexible pricing from drop-ins and class packs to monthly subscriptions, and payments through Stripe including Apple Pay, Google Pay and Klarna. Its site reports over 900,000 bookings processed and more than £40M collected for organisers, and it is very well reviewed: 4.9 out of 5 on Capterra as of August 2026, albeit from a modest 23 reviews. Pembee's biggest pricing virtue is rare in this market — everything is published, including the transaction fee, so you can work out your real cost from the website. This page does exactly that: the plans, the fees, a worked example for a small kids activity club, and an honest comparison with ClassForKids and Bizzly.
How Pembee Pricing Works
Like most platforms in this market it is a two-part model: a monthly plan fee plus a percentage on the payments you take online. What sets Pembee apart is that both parts are published.
Part one: the monthly plan
Two plans: Standard at £30 a month and Premium at £70 a month, with 2 months free on yearly billing (the annual figures are not displayed, but paying for 10 months works out around £300 and £700 a year). Standard covers the operational core — booking, registration forms, rosters, subscriptions and class packs, trial tickets, discount codes, automatic tax collection and up to 5 admin users. Premium is where the growth features live: waitlists, abandoned-cart reminders, a custom domain, conversion tracking, customer account credits, unlimited admins and Zapier. Both start with a 30-day free trial, no card required.
Part two: the 0.59% application fee
Every Stripe online payment carries a 0.59% application fee, stated identically on both plans and worded explicitly as being “in addition to Stripe processing fees”. So a UK club pays roughly 0.59% to Pembee plus around 1.5% + 20p per card payment to Stripe. Two things stand out. First, the rate is low — several competitors charge 1 to 3%, and ClassForKids has been reported by one club at 3.1%. Second, it is printed on the pricing page rather than quoted in a sales call, which means you can model your annual cost in a spreadsheet before you ever speak to anyone. The fee wording covers online payments; cash taken at the door is reconciled in the platform rather than charged.
Plans and Fees at a Glance
| Item | Estimated Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Pembee Standard | £30/month | Registration forms, attendance rosters, monthly subscriptions, session passes and class packs, trial tickets, discount codes, booking reminders, automatic tax collection, site themes and branding, website integration, Apple Pay / Google Pay / Klarna, 90-day email history, up to 5 admin users. |
| Pembee Premium | £70/month | Everything in Standard plus waitlists, abandoned-cart reminders and trial follow-up emails, custom domain, brand-based theme generation, conversion tracking (Google Ads, GA4, Meta Pixel), monthly transaction reports, customer account credits, 1-year email history, unlimited admins, Zapier. |
| Annual billing | 2 months free | Pembee advertises "2 months free" on yearly billing but does not display the annual figures on the pricing page. Paying for 10 months works out at roughly £300/year on Standard and £700/year on Premium. |
| Application fee | 0.59% per online payment | Charged on Stripe online payments on both plans, worded as "in addition to Stripe processing fees". Cash payments are reconciled in the platform, and the fee wording covers online payments only. |
| Card processing (Stripe) | Around 1.5% + 20p | Stripe's standard UK card rate, paid on top of the application fee. This is the same processing cost you would pay on any Stripe-based platform, including Bizzly. |
| Free trial | 30 days | No card details required, cancel any time. One of the longest trials in this market — ClassForKids offers 7 days and Bizzly 14. |
| Bizzly Base | £19/month (£190/year) | 50 bookings, 1 calendar, 10 pages, full drag-and-drop website builder, attendance registers, review collection, Stripe payments. No platform fee on bookings. |
| Bizzly Standard | £29/month (£290/year) | 200 bookings, 3 calendars, WhatsApp AI assistant (500 messages), waitlists, free trial sessions, custom profile fields, SMS reminders (50), Google Business Profile integration, Google Analytics. |
| Bizzly Pro | £49/month (£490/year) | Unlimited bookings and calendars, custom domain, branded email domain, merch store, per-venue pricing, WhatsApp 2,000 messages, 200 SMS/month. 14-day free trial, no card required. |
Read the table as a genuinely transparent price list — every line is published by the vendor. The one figure you cannot look up is the annual price, which is advertised as “2 months free” without the number being displayed; the arithmetic above is ours.
The 0.59% Fee in Practice
Annualised, the fee stays small at typical club volumes. On £2,500 of monthly parent payments it is about £14.75 a month, or roughly £177 a year — noticeable, not painful. On £40,000 of annual payments it is £236. Compare that with a platform charging 3%: the same £40,000 costs £1,200. Pembee's percentage is closer to a rounding error than a second licence fee, which is exactly what a platform fee should look like.
Two caveats for your planning. First, the fee sits on top of Stripe processing, so your all-in payment cost is roughly 2.1% plus 20p per card payment — model both lines, not just the headline. Second, the pricing page does not say whether the 0.59% can be surcharged to parents at checkout rather than absorbed, the way some competitors allow. At £15 a month it barely matters, but if you care, ask before you commit.
What the Monthly Fee Does Not Cover
The plan fee is honest, but two things still sit outside it and belong in a full budget.
- A marketing website. Pembee gives you themed, branded booking pages and widgets to embed into a site you host elsewhere — on Premium you can put them on your own domain. It is not a website builder: there is no drag-and-drop editor for building your home page, venue pages and policy pages. Most clubs run a separate Wix, Squarespace or WordPress site alongside, a further £0 to £25 a month plus whatever it costs to build and keep updated.
- The Premium features you may grow into. Waitlists, cart-abandonment emails, customer account credits, conversion tracking and the custom domain all sit at £70 a month. A club that starts on Standard and later fills its classes should budget for the Premium price, not the Standard one.
Total Cost: A Worked Example
Take a small kids activity club: around 100 bookings a month across weekly classes and a holiday camp, collecting roughly £2,500 a month from parents across about 100 online card payments.
| Item | Estimated Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Plan fee | Pembee £30 · Bizzly £29 | Pembee Standard against Bizzly Standard — the fair like-for-like at 100 bookings a month, which sits comfortably inside Bizzly Standard's 200-booking allowance. |
| Application fee on £2,500 of parent payments | Pembee ~£14.75 · Bizzly £0 | 0.59% of £2,500. Bizzly charges no platform fee on payments at any volume. |
| Card processing on £2,500 | Pembee ~£57.50 · Bizzly ~£57.50 | Around 1.5% + 20p across ~100 card payments, paid to Stripe on either platform. Identical on both sides. |
| Website | Pembee £0 to £25 · Bizzly £0 | Pembee gives you a themed booking site and embeds; clubs wanting a full marketing site usually pay for Wix or Squarespace alongside. Bizzly includes the whole site builder on every plan. |
| Monthly total on the entry plans | Pembee ~£102 to ~£127 · Bizzly ~£86.50 | The Pembee range is whether you also pay for a separate website. A gap of roughly £16 to £41 a month. |
| Monthly total if you need waitlists or a custom domain | Pembee ~£142+ · Bizzly ~£86.50 to ~£106.50 | Waitlists push Pembee to Premium at £70. On Bizzly, waitlists are on Standard (£29); a custom domain needs Pro (£49). |
On the entry plans the two land close together: Pembee around £102 a month all in (or up to ~£127 with a separate website subscription), Bizzly Standard around £86.50 with the website included. That £16-to-£41 gap is real money but not decisive on its own. The comparison turns on which features you need. If your classes fill and you want waitlists, Pembee moves to Premium at £70 and the totals become roughly £142 against £86.50 — waitlists are included in Bizzly's £29 Standard plan. If what you want is a custom domain, Pembee needs Premium (£70) and Bizzly needs Pro (£49). And if you need neither, Pembee Standard is a perfectly fair price for a well-reviewed specialist tool.
How it scales
Because the Pembee percentage is small, scaling hurts far less than on higher-fee platforms. Double the club to £5,000 a month and the application fee is still only about £29.50 a month. The bigger scaling questions are elsewhere: on Pembee, whether growth pushes you into Premium features; on Bizzly, the booking allowance — 100 bookings a month fits Standard's 200 cap, but a club running well past that needs Pro at £49, which is still below Pembee Premium at £70.
Pembee vs ClassForKids vs Bizzly
These three occupy usefully different corners of the same market. Against ClassForKids, Pembee's pitch is transparency and cost: a published 0.59% fee against a per-booking rate that is quoted per club (one UK club published 3.1%), and £30 a month against £34.99. ClassForKids answers with free hands-on onboarding and data migration, a parent-facing Discovery Site that can bring you families, and the option to pass its booking fee to parents on most bookings. If migration support or the marketplace matter to you, ClassForKids justifies its premium; if you want a low, knowable cost, Pembee wins that head-to-head.
Bizzly comes at it from a different angle: a broader service business platform where the website is not an add-on but the centre. Plans are £19, £29 and £49 a month, payments run through your own Stripe account with no platform fee at all, and every plan — including £19 Base — includes a fully flexible drag-and-drop website editor: home page, class pages, venue pages and policies all editable, with 26 drop-in components including the booking calendar, timetable, plans, a store and cart, testimonials and the customer portal. Per-page SEO with a search-result preview, version snapshots, a media library with stock photography and AI page creation are included, so the marketing site, class listings and checkout become one system on one bill.
On billing models, Bizzly runs subscriptions, session credit packs, one-off season and holiday-camp packs, and season subscriptions side by side. The packs handle school-season billing properly — pro-rated joining mid-block so a family arriving in week four pays for what is left, and camps sellable as a whole week or day by day — while season subscriptions auto-roll members into the next season with configurable cancellation policies, and capacity is held while a family is at the checkout. Booking quotas are payment-gated: billing and booking are one system, so lapsed payment removes booking access automatically. And from Standard up, a WhatsApp AI assistant answers parent enquiries around the clock — booking and cancelling sessions, searching availability, suggesting alternatives when a class is full, joining waitlists and answering account and invoice questions, with customers verified by one-time passcode. Neither Pembee nor ClassForKids offers anything equivalent.
And the honest gaps on Bizzly's side: a 14-day trial against Pembee's 30, booking caps of 50 and 200 on the lower plans where Pembee publishes none, no Zapier or Mailchimp integration, no abandoned-cart reminder emails, sibling discounts via Stripe discount codes rather than anything automatic, no parent-facing marketplace, no badge or award scheme tracking, self-serve onboarding rather than a person migrating your data, and a responsive web app rather than native mobile apps. Parents cancel and rebook rather than rescheduling themselves from the portal, though staff can move a booking for them.
Bizzly vs Pembee: Feature Comparison
| Feature | Bizzly | Pembee |
|---|---|---|
| Online class and session booking | ||
| Attendance registers / rosters | ||
| Customisable registration forms | ||
| Monthly subscriptions and memberships | ||
| Session passes and class packs | ||
| Season and block booking packs with pro-rating for late joiners | Blocks supported; pro-rating not published | |
| Season subscriptions that auto-roll, with configurable cancellation policies | Not published | |
| Free trial sessions as bookable services | Standard plan+ | Trial tickets on Standard |
| Waiting lists with automatic claim offers | Standard plan+ (£29) | Premium only (£70) |
| Discount codes | Via Stripe promotion codes | |
| Automatic tax collection (VAT) | Optional Stripe Tax | |
| Apple Pay and Google Pay | Via Stripe | |
| Klarna at checkout | Depends on your Stripe payment-method settings | |
| Payment-gated booking quotas | Not published | |
| Fully flexible drag-and-drop website builder | Themed booking site + embeds, not a site builder | |
| Custom domain | Pro plan (£49) | Premium plan (£70) |
| WhatsApp AI assistant answering parent enquiries | Standard plan+ | |
| Abandoned-cart reminder emails | Premium only | |
| Customer account credits | Premium only | |
| Zapier and Mailchimp integrations | Zapier on Premium; Mailchimp listed | |
| HubSpot CRM integration | ||
| Conversion tracking (GA4, Meta Pixel, Google Ads) | Google Analytics, Standard plan+ | Premium only |
| Review requests, moderation and publishing to your site | Not published | |
| Platform fee on online payments | None from Bizzly | 0.59% + Stripe processing |
| Booking allowance capped by plan | 50 / 200 / unlimited | No booking cap published; Standard caps admins at 5 |
| Currency | Multi-currency, global | GBP, USD, EUR, AUD, NZD, SGD |
| Free trial | 14 days, no card | 30 days, no card |
When Each Is Worth the Money
Pembee earns its price if:
- You want a specialist activity booking tool with every cost published up front — no sales call to learn your fee
- You already have a website you like and just need excellent booking pages and embeds attached to it
- You want the longest trial in the market — 30 days, no card — to prove the parent experience before paying
- You take payments through Apple Pay, Google Pay or Klarna and want them working out of the box
- Your volumes are high enough that a 0.59% fee beats percentage rates elsewhere, and you do not need the Premium-only features
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 need waitlists or free trial sessions without paying a £70/month top tier — both sit on Bizzly's £29 Standard plan
- You want no platform fee at all on parent payments, just Stripe's standard processing
- You need season packs with pro-rated joining and season subscriptions that auto-roll families into the next block
- 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 custom domain at £49 a month rather than £70
Verdict
Pembee is one of the easiest platforms in this market to recommend investigating, precisely because it hides nothing: £30 or £70 a month, 0.59% on online payments, all printed on the pricing page, with a 30-day trial to test it against your real families. Reviews are outstanding, if still few in number, and the fee structure is among the cheapest going. The watch-outs are the Premium jump — waitlists, custom domain, cart reminders and account credits all live at £70 — and the absence of a real website builder, which usually means a second subscription somewhere else.
Bizzly is the stronger fit when you want the website, billing and booking to be one flat-fee product: waitlists and trial sessions at £29, no percentage taken off the top, season billing that pro-rates and auto-rolls, and a WhatsApp assistant fielding parent messages. It is the wrong choice if a 30-day trial, Zapier, cart-recovery emails or an uncapped entry plan are what you are optimising for. Price the plan you will actually need in a year — not the one you need today — then compare. For the other UK specialist, read our ClassForKids pricing breakdown, or see current plans on the Bizzly pricing page.