What Mindbody Actually Costs a Small Studio

If you run a yoga, fitness, dance, or martial-arts studio in Nova Scotia, there is a fair chance Mindbody is the largest software bill you pay, and a fair chance you could not say, off the top of your head, what it adds up to. That is not carelessness. The cost is spread across a subscription, a contract, a marketplace, a payment processor, and a set of add-ons, and no single line on any statement shows the total.

This article lays the pieces out one at a time. We are a competitor, so read it as one: every fact below is stated as precisely as we can make it, with its scope and its limits, because a vague accusation would be easy to dismiss and would not help you decide anything. Where we do not know a number, we say so rather than guess.

1. The Subscription

Mindbody publishes a "starting at" price per location, across three tiers (Starter, Accelerate and Ultimate), but what you pay depends on the tier, the add-ons, and what was negotiated when you signed, which is why two studios of the same size in the same town can be paying noticeably different amounts. We do not repeat the starting price here because it is not what you pay; the honest source is your own last invoice. Pull it out before you read on, because everything below stacks on top of it.

2. The Contract

Mindbody's fixed terms run 12, 24 or 36 months, renew automatically, need at least 30 days' notice before the term ends, and allow no mid-term cancellation unless your order form says otherwise. A month-to-month option exists, usually with a 90-day minimum. That is what "12–36-month lock-in contracts" means in practice.

The cost of a contract is not the monthly fee; it is the months you would not have chosen to pay. If the tier goes up at renewal, or a feature you relied on moves to a higher tier, or the studio's needs change, the term does not. A studio that signed a 24-month agreement and wants out after 8 is paying 16 months for software it has already decided to leave. Read the renewal date and the notice window on your agreement today; the renewal you did not see coming is the single most expensive line in this article.

3. The Marketplace Fee, Precisely

This is the one that gets misquoted, in both directions, so here it is in Mindbody's own terms. Mindbody's pricing page says the marketplace fee is 20%, capped at $30 USD (about $42.81 CAD at the Bank of Canada rate of 1.4271 on 2026-10-09), and only on the first purchase by someone new to your business whom the Mindbody app delivered. Your existing members' regular bookings carry no marketplace fee. Promoted intro offers are charged separately, each time one sells; Mindbody does not publish that rate.

Two things follow from that. First, the fee is not a tax on your whole business: your regular members paying their regular memberships are not charged it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Second, the fee is exactly a tax on growth. Every new client the marketplace sends you costs a cut of their first purchase, and every intro offer you promote through it costs a fee each time it sells. If you rely on the app to fill classes, the fee is part of your acquisition cost; if you do not, you are paying for a marketplace you are not using.

4. Whose Marketplace It Is Now

Mindbody and ClassPass are owned by Playlist, which completed its merger with EGYM on March 31, 2026. The company that bills you also owns the marketplace that sells your classes at a discount. Your software vendor is competing with you for your own members.

That is not an accusation of bad faith; it is a description of the incentives. A vendor that earns on discounted marketplace bookings has a reason to make the marketplace attractive, and a studio's full-price membership is the thing a discounted class competes with. Whether that matters to you depends on how many of your members came in through ClassPass and how many of them converted. It is worth knowing the number.

5. Payment Processing

Mindbody has its own processor, Mindbody Payments, but its pricing page says you do not have to use it: you can run Mindbody with a third-party processor of your choice. If you do use Mindbody Payments, a processing rate plus a fixed fee applies to every transaction. We are not going to quote the rate, because it is not published and a wrong number would undermine everything else on this page. What matters for the comparison is which processor your agreement uses, and what it costs you all in.

For contrast, on our platform members pay through your own Stripe account. Stripe's standard processing fee goes to Stripe, the payout goes to you, and EastCoast WebCraft is not in the middle of the transaction. Read that as no marketplace tax on your own members — Stripe fees only.

6. The Add-ons

The branded mobile app, the one with your studio's name and icon rather than the vendor's, is a paid add-on on Mindbody. Beyond that we will not list what is and is not included at each tier, because tiers change and your agreement is the only reliable source. The check is simpler: compare the tier you signed at with the tier you are on now, and add up the add-ons you have turned on since. That difference is a cost that never appeared in the original quote.

7. The Cost of Leaving

The last cost is the one nobody prices until they are paying it. Mindbody's own contracts page describes the data export as a service "for an added fee", available for up to 30 days after cancellation. In other words, getting your data out costs extra and runs on a clock that starts once you have cancelled, which is precisely the moment you are least able to run two systems side by side.

Two costs hide inside that. One is time: a studio that has to rebuild its schedule, memberships, and client list from an export is doing weeks of unpaid work. The other is the saved cards. A member's card on file is the thing that makes a membership renew without anyone lifting a finger, and the fear of losing every card and asking every member to re-enter their details keeps a lot of studios on software they no longer want. Whether those cards can come with you is your current provider's decision, not ours: Mindbody's terms leave cardholder data out of the data it makes available after termination, so ask them in writing before you plan a switch. If the cards cannot move, each member adds a card once, the first time they pay on your new site.

Adding It Up

Take your last invoice and add, for a year: twelve months of the subscription at your tier; the marketplace fee on whatever share of your new clients came through the app and on any promoted intro offers; the processing fees on everything; the add-ons you have turned on; and, if you are thinking of leaving, the months left on the term plus the weeks of rebuild. That total is what Mindbody actually costs your studio. For most small studios the surprise is not any single item; it is that the subscription turns out to be the smaller half.

What the Alternative Looks Like

Our studio package is built to make every one of those lines either zero or visible.

• Flat pricing, the same for every studio. A one-time setup plus a monthly plan, published rather than negotiated, so you can hold it against your invoice line by line.
• No lock-in. The monthly plan carries thirty days' notice, not a multi-year term. You keep your freedom because you own the site and the data; if you leave, they leave with you.
• No marketplace. There is no consumer app between you and your members, so there is no commission on new clients and nobody selling your classes at a discount. New clients find you through your own site, search, and referrals, which is also what the free Snapshot audit looks at. If ClassPass traffic is how you fill classes today, say so on the call; sometimes the switch does not make sense, and we will tell you.
• Your own Stripe account. Stripe fees only, paid to Stripe, from your account; no marketplace tax on your own members.
• No native app. Members register, manage memberships, and pay through a mobile-friendly site and member portal, not an installed app. That is a trade-off, and we would rather you know it now than find out later.
• Managed on one monthly plan. The class and membership system and its hosting are looked after as one thing, under one flat monthly plan (see Studio Platform), by a local developer who knows your studio.
• Your first data load, done for you. One export from one system is included. Mindbody's export is available for up to 30 days after cancellation, so any overlap with your current system can be short or none.

The package is described under Studio Platform on our services page, and the three monthly plans are on the StudioCore page and our pricing page. The fastest way to see which plan fits your studio is a fifteen-minute call.

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