Pricing
One price, and you can see all of it.
No tiers. No per-member creep. No quote form. Below is the subscription, the money that goes to other companies, and the things the price does not cover.
Annual
Two months free$490 / year
About $41 a month. Saves $98 against paying monthly.
Start free trial14 days free, no card, no sales call. Both plans have every feature.
Total cost
What you pay us, and what you pay everyone else
Two other companies touch this: Stripe moves the money, Twilio moves the texts. Both bill you directly at their own published rates. We never mark them up and never take a cut.
| Paid to | For | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| BookClay | The whole platform Unlimited members, classes and staff. Every feature. | $49 / mo |
| Stripe | Card processing on the money your customers pay you Stripe’s published US online rate. Paid to Stripe on your own account. BookClay adds no markup and takes no share. | 2.9% + 30¢ per charge |
| Twilio | Text messages, if you turn SMS on Billed by Twilio on your own account. A studio sending a few hundred texts a month lands in the single-digit dollars. Email costs nothing. | about 1¢ per message, plus ~$1.15/mo for the number |
| A2P 10DLC | One-time US carrier registration for business texting Required by the US carriers for anyone sending business SMS, not by us. Skip it entirely and run on email instead. | roughly $4 to register, then a few dollars a month |
A worked example
A studio with 60 members and four classes a week, collecting about $12,000 a month and sending 400 texts, pays $49 to BookClay, roughly $360 to Stripe on the money it collected, and about $6 to Twilio. The Stripe line is not new spend: you already pay it on whatever you use today.
Third-party rates are those companies' published US list prices as of August 2026 and are set by them, not by us. Check their own pricing pages for the current figure.
Does it pay for itself
Run your own numbers
The honest test is not whether $49 is cheap. It is whether the software returns more than $49 of seats, dues and hours a month. Change the inputs to yours.
Your studio
Per month
- Seats the waitlist refills4 seats a month at $65$260
- One member who does not drift awayA single $175 membership kept for the month$175
- Admin hours you stop working6 hr/week at $30/hr$779
+$1,165 / month
On these numbers it clears its own cost about 25× over, or $13,985 across a year.
Seats: 4 × $65 = $260. This assumes the waitlist fills every seat that opens, which it will not if nobody is on the waitlist.
Retention: exactly one member at $175. We deliberately do not model a percentage improvement across your whole base, because we have no honest number to put there yet.
Time: 6 hr × 4.33 weeks × $30 = $779. This is only real money if you actually stop paying someone for those hours, or genuinely value your own at that rate.
The subscription line is $49. Stripe and Twilio costs are not in this calculation because you pay those on whatever software you use, including none.
In the plan
All of it, on both plans
There is no upgrade path, because there is nothing above this.
Bookings
- Unlimited classes, workshops and multi-week series
- Every meeting date of a series on the calendar
- Waitlists that promote and charge automatically
- Cancellation windows and refund rules you set once
- Private events, parties and studio rentals
- Public booking page, or an embed for the site you already have
- Registration forms and waivers attached to a class
Members and money
- Unlimited members and students
- Membership plans, tiers and perks
- Recurring dues on your own Stripe account
- Failed-card retries and dunning
- Gift cards, account funds and studio credit
- Point of sale for clay, tools and glaze
- Invoices, tax rates and firing fees
The studio floor
- Kiln and firing queue, greenware through pickup
- Firing fees by size and cone
- Pickup reminders with the shelf number
- Member check-in kiosk
- Member portal with magic-link sign in
- Supplies and inventory
Front desk and growth
- AI front desk answering SMS on your studio number
- Nightly at-risk and hot-lead classification
- Retention messages drafted for your approval
- Lead pipeline with a drag-and-drop board
- Segments and broadcast
- Referrals and review collection
- Weekly digest email
Everything else
- Unlimited staff logins, no per-seat charge
- Owner, assistant and instructor roles
- Outbound webhooks and an API key
- Shopify and Square connections if you already use them
- Data export, any time, in full
- Every feature on both the monthly and the annual plan
Not in the price
Things BookClay does not do
Better to find this out now than in week three.
- A phone number. You bring your own Twilio number, or run on email and skip SMS.
- Payment processing. You connect your own Stripe account and the money goes to your bank, not through us.
- Website design. BookClay gives you a booking page and an embed widget, not a full site builder.
- Accounting. It exports cleanly, but it is not a bookkeeping system.
- Onsite hardware. The check-in kiosk runs in a browser on any tablet you already own.
Shape of the deal
How this pricing model compares
Not a feature-by-feature table, which every vendor writes to flatter itself. Just the commercial terms, which are the part that bites later.
| BookClay | Typical studio software | |
|---|---|---|
| Flat monthly price | $49 | Tiered, usually by member count |
| Per-staff-seat charge | None | Common above a small team |
| Share of your class revenue | None | Varies by platform |
| Card processing | Your own Stripe, at Stripe’s rate | Often the platform’s account |
| Free trial | 14 days, no card | Usually a demo call first |
| Setup or onboarding fee | None | Sometimes several hundred dollars |
| Minimum contract | None, cancel from settings | Often annual |
| Data export on leaving | Full, any time, self-serve | Varies |
The right-hand column describes patterns that are common in class-booking and membership software generally. It is not a claim about any one named competitor, whose current terms you should read on their own pricing page. Our side-by-side with Kilnfire is more specific.
The exit
What it costs to leave
Every vendor tells you how to get in. Here is the way out, written down before you need it.
Nothing, in money.
No cancellation fee, no notice period, no exit interview. You cancel from the settings page and keep access until the period you paid for runs out.
Your data comes with you.
Members, classes, bookings, attendance, kiln records and billing history export as CSV, self-serve, including after you cancel.
Your money was never ours.
Stripe is your account. Your customer relationships, payment methods and payout history stay with Stripe when BookClay is disconnected.
The one real cost is the switch itself.
Re-pointing your booking links and re-training staff takes a day or two. That is true in either direction, which is worth remembering on the way in as well.
Questions
Pricing questions
- Is there a per-member or per-seat charge?
- No. The price is the same whether you have 20 members or 400, and every staff login is included. There is no tier where the good features live.
- Do you take a percentage of my revenue?
- No. Class fees and membership dues run through Stripe Connect on your own Stripe account and settle directly into your bank. BookClay charges only the subscription. Stripe charges their standard processing fee, and that money goes to Stripe, not to us.
- So what will month one actually cost me?
- The $49 subscription, plus Stripe’s 2.9% + 30¢ on whatever your customers pay you, plus roughly a dollar a month for a phone number and about a penny a message if you switch SMS on. A studio collecting $12,000 a month and sending 400 texts would pay us $49, Stripe about $360, and Twilio about $6.
- What happens after the 14-day trial?
- Nothing is charged, because the trial does not take a card. If you want to keep going you add a payment method. If you do not, the account simply stops at the end of the trial and your data stays exportable.
- Can I cancel?
- Yes, from the settings page, without emailing anyone. You keep access through the end of the period you already paid for. There is no cancellation fee and no notice period.
- What happens to my data if I leave?
- You export it. Members, classes, bookings, attendance, kiln records and billing history all come out as CSV, and you can do it yourself at any time, including after you have cancelled. We do not hold data hostage as a retention tactic.
- Is the annual plan a lock-in?
- It is a prepayment, not a contract. You get two months free for paying up front. If you leave partway through we do not refund the remainder, which is the trade for the discount, so if that bothers you take the monthly plan.
- Will the price go up?
- If it does, studios already on a plan keep their rate for at least twelve months from the change, and we tell you before it happens rather than after.
Try it before you decide anything.
Fourteen days, no card, no call. Or open a seeded demo studio and click around without even making an account.