What Sawyer Is
Sawyer (hisawyer.com) is a US registration and class-management platform built for children's activity providers — camps, after-school programmes, art and music studios, swim schools, gyms and franchises. Founded in 2015 and owned by DaySmart since late 2023, it is a two-sided product: business software for scheduling, registration and payments on one side, and a parent-facing marketplace on the other, which Sawyer says over a million parents use to find activities. That marketplace is the most distinctive thing about Sawyer's offer — and also the most distinctive thing about its pricing, because it is paid for by commission. This page breaks down the published plans, the fees that sit around them, what a typical provider actually pays in a month, and where a flat-fee platform like Bizzly is a better fit — and where it plainly is not.
How Sawyer Pricing Works
There are four moving parts: a monthly software subscription, card processing on every payment, a booking fee your parents pay at checkout, and — if you use the marketplace — a commission on the orders it brings you.
Part one: the subscription
Three published plans plus a quoted one. Launch is $149 per month ($1,548 per year); Grow is $219 per month, or $189 per month billed annually ($2,268 per year); Scale is $399 per month, or $379 per month billed annually ($4,548 per year); Enterprise is priced on application for large organisations, schools and franchises. Monthly contracts run month to month with 30 days' notice to cancel; annual contracts auto-renew, and since December 2024 state-mandated sales tax applies to subscription fees where applicable. One wrinkle: as of August 2026 the public pricing page also markets Launch as “3% per transaction” — a revenue-share pricing option Sawyer's help centre says new businesses are eligible for in their first year. A brand-new programme can effectively start on percentage pricing rather than a fixed subscription, which is generous at low volume and expensive the moment volume arrives.
Parts two to four: the fees around the subscription
Card processing for new accounts (sold on or after 1 June 2026) is 3% + $0.30 per transaction through Stripe, deducted before payouts; ACH bank payments, where activated, are 0.8% with a $5 cap. Separately, a Sawyer Booking Fee of $1.99 to $3.99 is added to most orders over $30 and paid by the parent, not deducted from your payout. And orders arriving through the Sawyer Marketplace carry a commission of 30% on Launch, 20% on Grow and 15% on Scale — mandatory on Launch, opt-in above it. Each of these gets its own section below, because each behaves differently in your budget.
Plans and Fees at a Glance
| Item | Estimated Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Sawyer Launch | $149/month ($1,548/year) | Basic scheduling and pricing options, gift cards and class packs. Marketplace listing is required on this plan, at a 30% commission on marketplace orders. As of August 2026 the public pricing page also markets Launch as "3% per transaction" pricing — a revenue-share option new businesses are eligible for in their first year. |
| Sawyer Grow | $219/month, or $189/month billed annually ($2,268/year) | Adds custom form fields, payment plans, waiting lists, memberships and monthly billing. Marketplace listing becomes optional, at a 20% commission on marketplace orders. Directory listings note review collection and instant daily payouts arrive at this level. |
| Sawyer Scale | $399/month, or $379/month billed annually ($4,548/year) | Adds custom payment options, Zapier integration, custom reports, Google and Facebook pixel support, and a dedicated account manager. Optional marketplace listing at a 15% commission. |
| Sawyer Enterprise | Price on application | For large organisations, schools and franchises. No public figure — you need a sales conversation. |
| Card processing | 3% + $0.30 per transaction | Sawyer's published rate for new accounts sold on or after 1 June 2026, processed through Stripe and deducted before payouts. Older accounts may be on different rates — check your own agreement. |
| ACH payments | 0.8% per transaction, $5 cap | Plus a $1.50 account authorisation fee per new bank account. ACH transactions are exempt from the Sawyer Booking Fee. |
| Sawyer Booking Fee (paid by parents) | $1.99 to $3.99 per order | Charged to the customer at checkout, not deducted from your payout: $1.99 on widget orders of $30-$100 and $3.99 above $100; $2.99 and $3.99 on marketplace orders. Orders of $30 or less, memberships, recurring payments, gift cards and ACH are exempt. Non-refundable, and businesses cannot currently waive it. |
| Website builder add-on | $15/month | Sawyer itself provides booking pages and an embeddable widget; a website comes via the DaySmart Pro Tools site builder as a paid add-on, or you host your own site elsewhere. |
| 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 and no booking fee charged to parents. |
| 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 fixed half and a variable half. The subscription line is published and predictable — genuinely more transparent than several UK competitors that quote per club. The variable half is processing, the booking fee your families see, and the marketplace commission, and those are the lines that decide whether Sawyer is a bargain or the most expensive item in your budget. Note the directory discrepancy too: Capterra and GetApp list Launch at $129 and Grow at $199, figures that line up with annual-effective or older pricing rather than the current help-centre numbers used here.
Processing and Booking Fees in Practice
Sawyer's card rate of 3% + $0.30 sits a shade above Stripe's standard published US rate of 2.9% + $0.30, so a small slice of every payment is platform margin on top of raw processing. On $4,000 a month of parent payments across 60 orders that is roughly $138 — about $6 a month more than raw Stripe. Not nothing, but not the line that changes a decision. ACH is the lever worth pulling: at 0.8% capped at $5, a $600 camp payment costs $4.80 instead of $18.30 by card, and ACH orders skip the booking fee entirely.
The Sawyer Booking Fee deserves more attention than it usually gets, precisely because it never appears on your invoice. Every widget order between $30 and $100 adds $1.99 at checkout, and every order over $100 adds $3.99 ($2.99/$3.99 on the marketplace); memberships, recurring payments, gift cards, ACH and orders of $30 or less are exempt. The parent pays it, you cannot currently waive it, and it is non-refundable even if the family cancels. Across a season, a family booking weekly classes and a camp can quietly hand Sawyer $30 or more in fees that look, to them, like part of your price. It costs your business nothing directly — but it is your checkout it appears on, and your front desk that fields the question about it.
The Marketplace Commission
This is the piece of Sawyer pricing with no equivalent at most competitors. Orders that come through hisawyer.com — rather than your own site's widget — carry a commission: 30% on Launch, 20% on Grow, 15% on Scale. On Grow and Scale the listing is optional, so you can run Sawyer purely as software and never pay it. On Launch it is required.
Judge it as a marketing cost, not a software cost. If the marketplace delivers families who would never have found you, 15-20% of a first order is comparable to what a paid-ads funnel costs — and Sawyer's reach with over a million parents is real distribution that a booking tool cannot otherwise give you. The risk runs the other way: a family who would have booked on your own site anyway, but happens to book through the marketplace, costs you 20% of the order for nothing. There is also a subtler dynamic — the marketplace lists your competitors alongside you. Track where your marketplace bookings actually originate before deciding the commission is paying for itself, and if it is not, Grow and Scale let you switch the listing off.
Total Cost: A Worked Example
Take a typical small US provider: weekly classes plus school-holiday camps, roughly $4,000 a month collected from parents across about 60 orders (~240 individual session bookings), with a fifth of that revenue arriving through the Sawyer Marketplace. They are on Grow, billed monthly, and pay for the $15 website add-on.
| Item | Estimated Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Plan fee | Sawyer Grow $219 · Bizzly Pro £49 (~$63) | Grow is the realistic Sawyer plan once you want waiting lists, custom form fields and memberships. Bizzly Pro is the fair comparison at this volume: ~240 monthly bookings exceeds the 200 that Standard allows. |
| Card processing on $4,000 of parent payments | Sawyer ~$138 · Bizzly ~$134 | Sawyer: 3% + $0.30 across ~60 orders. Bizzly: Stripe's standard published US rate of 2.9% + $0.30, paid to Stripe directly. Near enough a wash. |
| Sawyer Booking Fee | Parents pay ~$120-$240 · Bizzly $0 | Roughly $1.99-$3.99 on each of ~60 orders. Not your cost, but it raises every checkout price your families see, cannot be waived, and is non-refundable even if they cancel. |
| Marketplace commission on $800 of marketplace orders | Sawyer ~$160 · Bizzly n/a | At Grow's 20% rate, if a fifth of your revenue arrives through the Sawyer Marketplace. Skip the marketplace on Grow or Scale and this line is $0 — on Launch you cannot opt out. |
| Website | Sawyer $15 add-on or a separate site · Bizzly £0 | Bizzly includes the full drag-and-drop site builder in every plan. On Sawyer you pay for the add-on builder or run a Wix/Squarespace site alongside. |
| Monthly total, no marketplace orders | Sawyer ~$372 · Bizzly ~$197 | Sawyer Grow monthly + processing + the site add-on, against Bizzly Pro + Stripe processing. Annual billing trims Sawyer to ~$342. |
| Monthly total, with the marketplace leg | Sawyer ~$532 · Bizzly ~$197 | The commission is the swing line. Whether the marketplace brings you $800 of families you would never have reached — for $160 — is the whole question. |
Without marketplace orders, Sawyer lands around $372 a month ($219 + ~$138 processing + $15 site add-on); with the marketplace leg it is nearer $532. Bizzly Pro comes in around $197 all in — £49 (roughly $63 at the time of writing) plus Stripe's standard processing — with the website builder included. That is a gap of roughly $175 to $335 a month. But the comparison is only honest if you name what the gap buys: on Sawyer, $160 of it is commission on $800 of marketplace revenue, and if those are genuinely new families, that line is acquisition spend, not software cost. Strip the marketplace out and the software-for-software gap is about $175 a month, driven by the subscription difference and the site add-on.
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 with a 14-day free trial and no card required, payments run through your own Stripe account at Stripe's standard rates, and it is a global, multi-currency product — each business bills in its own currency, which makes it a natural fit for UK and international providers that Sawyer's USD-and-US-market focus does not serve. Bizzly charges no platform fee on bookings and adds no booking fee to your parents' checkout: the price you set is the price they pay.
The website is in the plan, not an add-on
Sawyer gives you booking pages and a widget, with an actual website costing $15 a month extra through the DaySmart Pro Tools builder or a separate Wix or Squarespace bill. 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, with 26 components to drop in (booking calendar, timetable, plans, store and cart, testimonials, contact forms, the entire customer portal), styling from a global theme down to a raw CSS inspector on an individual element, per-page SEO settings with a search-result preview, version snapshots you can roll back, a media library with stock photography, and 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.
Subscriptions, packs and season billing, side by side
Bizzly runs every billing model an activity business actually needs, simultaneously: monthly plans with booking quotas, session packs with expiry dates, one-off season and holiday-camp packs, and season subscriptions. Season and camp packs handle block billing properly — mid-season pro-rating so a family joining in week four pays for what is left, and camps sellable as a whole week or day by day. Season subscriptions auto-roll members 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 — and capacity is held while a family is at the checkout, so a popular block cannot oversell. Booking quotas are payment-gated: a family can only book what their active plan, pack or credits cover, and if payment lapses, booking access is removed automatically.
The AI answers the phone
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. Sawyer has nothing equivalent. Around it sit attendance registers with Present/Late/Absent marking, waitlists with time-limited paid claim links (Standard+), free trial sessions (Standard+), child profiles with custom fields driving per-slot age and level eligibility, staff bookings on behalf of families, a parent portal with pause/resume, plan changes, policy-driven cancellation with a live refund quote and GDPR self-serve, review requests that publish 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, because for some providers this decides the question. There is no parent-facing discovery marketplace — Bizzly will not put your classes in front of families who are not already looking for you, and Sawyer's million-parent marketplace is a real acquisition channel that SEO and a Google Business Profile replace only slowly. No gift cards. No Zapier integration. No badge or award scheme tracking, and no per-child progress journal — the nearest equivalent is the note saved against each attendance mark. Payment methods follow your own Stripe Dashboard settings, so ACH-style bank debits depend on what Stripe offers your country rather than being a built-in rail with a fee cap. Parents cancel and rebook rather than rescheduling themselves from the portal (staff can move bookings for them). No native mobile apps — a responsive web app. And onboarding is self-serve rather than a person migrating your data. If marketplace distribution is the reason Sawyer is on your shortlist, Bizzly does not replace that channel, and you should weigh Sawyer's commission against what you currently pay for advertising, not against a software subscription.
Bizzly vs Sawyer: Feature Comparison
| Feature | Bizzly | Sawyer |
|---|---|---|
| Online class and camp booking | ||
| Parent-facing discovery marketplace | 15-30% commission per order | |
| Waiting lists with automatic claim offers | Standard plan+ | Grow plan and above |
| Free trial sessions as bookable services | Standard plan+ | Not published |
| Medical, allergy and consent capture | Custom registration forms | Custom form fields, Grow plan+ |
| Memberships and recurring billing | Grow plan and above | |
| Session packs and class packs | ||
| Season packs with mid-season pro-rating for late joiners | Not published | |
| Season subscriptions that auto-roll, with configurable cancellation policies | Not published | |
| Payment-gated booking quotas | Not published | |
| Fully flexible drag-and-drop website builder | $15/month add-on site builder | |
| WhatsApp AI assistant answering parent enquiries | Standard plan+ | |
| Review requests, moderation and publishing to your site | Review collection on Grow plan+ | |
| Discount codes | Via Stripe promotion codes | |
| Gift cards | ||
| Zapier integration | Scale plan only | |
| ACH / bank debit payments | Via your own Stripe settings | 0.8% per transaction, $5 cap |
| Booking fee charged to parents at checkout | None from Bizzly | $1.99-$3.99 per order over $30 |
| Percentage taken from your own-site revenue | None from Bizzly | None on Grow/Scale; 3% option on Launch |
| Currency | Multi-currency, global | USD, US-focused |
| Free trial | 14 days, no card | 14 days |
For UK readers: the nearer comparisons
If you run a UK club, Sawyer is rarely the practical shortlist — it prices in USD and its marketplace reach is US families. The UK specialists are ClassForKids (from £34.99 a month plus a per-booking fee quoted per club) and Pembee, and the honest UK comparison for Bizzly is against those: see our ClassForKids pricing guide and Pembee alternatives comparison. The structural contrast is the same one this page draws: specialist platforms fund themselves through per-booking fees or commissions, Bizzly through a flat subscription with nothing taken off the top.
When Each Is Worth the Money
Sawyer earns its price if:
- You are a US provider and the marketplace genuinely brings you families — commission on a customer you would never have reached beats most paid advertising
- You want gift cards, payment plans and ACH bank payments as built-in rails with published rates
- You run camps and semester programmes at US scale and want a registration specialist with a dedicated account manager (Scale) behind it
- You are brand new and the first-year “3% per transaction” Launch option lets you start with almost no fixed cost
- Zapier, custom reports and ad pixels (Scale) are part of how you already operate
Bizzly is the better fit if:
- You already have your own audience and resent paying commission or per-order fees on demand you generated yourself
- You want your website and your booking system to be one product on one bill, with the whole site editable page by page
- You do not want a $1.99-$3.99 booking fee appearing on your parents' checkout with no way to waive it
- You need subscriptions, session packs and season blocks side by side, with mid-season pro-rating and seasons 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 are outside the US, or want multi-currency billing in your own currency at £19-£49 a month flat
Verdict
Sawyer is one of the more transparent platforms in this market — the plan prices, the processing rate, the booking fee brackets and even the marketplace commission are all published, which is more than can be said for several UK rivals. The real cost question is structural, not hidden: you are paying a premium subscription ($219 a month for the plan most providers actually need), a processing rate above raw Stripe, a booking fee on your parents' checkout you cannot waive, and a 15-30% commission wherever the marketplace touches your revenue. For a US programme that the marketplace feeds, that bundle can be excellent value. For a provider with their own audience, it is a lot of margin flowing out for distribution they are not using.
Bizzly is the cheaper and structurally simpler option when your requirement is a proper website, subscriptions and season billing running side by side, a WhatsApp assistant fielding parent enquiries, and booking gated on payment — all for a flat £19 to £49 a month with no per-booking fees from Bizzly and nothing added to your parents' checkout. It is the wrong option if marketplace distribution, gift cards or Zapier are central to how you operate. Work out how much of your revenue the marketplace would realistically bring, price the commission as marketing spend, then compare. For the UK view of this market, read our ClassForKids alternatives comparison, or see current plans on the Bizzly pricing page.