We eliminated $83,000 a year in administrative and operations costs. We got back sixteen hours a week.
I lead with those two numbers because they're the actual subject of this article, and because almost nobody in this category will give you a real number about anything. I don't respect vague claims, so I try not to make them. A ton, massive, significant, so much time saved. Useless. Here's $83,000 and here's sixteen hours, and here's exactly how the accounting works.
Registration software has three cost layers. Most operators price the first one, argue about the second one, and never look at the third one, which is where the money actually is.
Registration software costs a monthly platform fee, plus a per-registration fee that's either absorbed by you or paid by families at checkout, plus the labor cost of every job the software doesn't do. The monthly fee is usually the smallest of the three. For a growing camp or class business, the per-registration fee and the unhandled labor together typically exceed the subscription by a wide margin.
Let me take them in order.
This is the number on the pricing page, and it's the number everybody compares. Here's the actual published range in this category, pulled from live pricing pages on August 14, 2026.
Platform
Published monthly subscription
Jumbula
$15 Pay As You Go · $150 Rise · $285 Ascend
Pembee
$45 Standard · $105 Premium
Jackrabbit Class
from $49, tiered on student count · $245 Enterprise
CourseStorm
$99 to $399 annual · $119 to $499 monthly
Activity Messenger
$99 · $149 · $229
Amilia
$99 Standard · $499 Advanced
iClassPro
$139 · $199 · $299, per location
Sawyer
no subscription on Launch · $189 Grow · $379 Scale (annual)
CampDoc
starting at $340
Regpack · Campminder
no figure published
Homeroom
free for schools and PTOs, families pay the fee
enrops
$0. Free for businesses, permanently
So the honest published range is roughly $15 to $499 a month, and three things about that range matter more than the numbers.
First, layer 1 is usually the cheapest of the three layers, and it's the one vendors compete on hardest, which tells you where they'd prefer your attention. Second, iClassPro charges per location, so a twenty-site operator is looking at a completely different number than the table suggests. Third, five of the twelve platforms I priced won't publish a figure at all. Regpack, Campminder, and Homeroom publish nothing. CampDoc publishes a floor. Jackrabbit publishes a starting price with the ladder inside an image.
I'm not going to say quote-only pricing means somebody's hiding something, because overnight camp with real medical complexity is hard to price in a table. But it costs you a week of sales calls to compare, and if you're a solo operator with forty campers, that week is the most expensive thing in this article.
Watch the onboarding line too. Amilia publishes implementation starting at $899 on Standard and $2,999 on Advanced. Jackrabbit's branded app carries a $169 one-time setup. iClassPro's branded app is $499 setup plus $150 a month. Sawyer states plainly that there's no setup fee. Those are real numbers that never appear in a monthly comparison.
This is the part people mean when they go looking for camp registration software pricing and come back confused. The subscription is published. This one is usually a sentence in a footer.
This is where it gets interesting, and where I want you to slow down.
Per-registration pricing in this category takes one of five shapes. Real examples, real figures, pulled August 14, 2026.
Structure
Who does it
Where it bites
Flat fee per registration
CourseStorm: $2.49 per registration, on every plan
Expensive on your low-priced programs, cheap on your high-priced ones. A $30 mini-camp pays 8%. A $400 week pays 0.6%
Uncapped percentage
Sawyer: 3% per transaction on the no-subscription Launch tier · Amilia: 1% on every invoice issued · Pembee: 0.59% on Stripe payments
Feels invisible at 50 registrations. Doesn't at 500. Punishes your premium programs specifically, because the fee grows with your price
Percentage with a floor
Activity Messenger: 1%, minimum $0.25 on card
The floor makes your cheapest programs disproportionately expensive
Percentage with a floor and a ceiling
Activity Messenger on bank transfer: 1%, minimum $0.50, maximum $5 · enrops, capped
The most predictable of the five, because the ceiling caps your exposure as your prices rise
Enrollment credits
Jumbula: 10 free on Pay As You Go, then packs from 10 for $20 up to 500 for $550
Roughly $1.10 to $2.00 per enrollment depending on pack size. Note their stated policy: credits aren't refunded when a student drops
The family pays it
Homeroom: a service fee added on top of the class price, paid by families. Percentage not published
Costs you nothing directly. Costs your price point something, because the parent sees a bigger total
Two structures don't publish the number at all. Sawyer's booking fee applies to every tier and their own page says you can absorb it or pass it to families, but the amount isn't published. Homeroom's service fee isn't published anywhere, including their provider terms. Ask on the call, and get the answer in writing.
Card processing is not the platform's fee. It's charged by the payment processor, and it stacks on top of everything above.
Platform
Published card processing
Jumbula
Stripe standard: 2.9% + 30¢
Amilia
2.85% + 30¢ Standard, 2.75% + 30¢ Advanced · eCheck 1% + 50¢
iClassPro
2.9% + 50¢ · AmEx 3.5% · eCheck 1% · plus $10/mo gateway and $10/mo eCheck fees
Activity Messenger
Stripe 2.9% + 30¢, with their 1% on top
Regpack
"as low as 1.5%," custom by volume, quoted on the call
Homeroom
3%, built into the price providers set
Some platforms present the platform fee and the card processing cost as one line item on your statement, which makes it very difficult to know what you're paying for what. Ask any vendor to separate the two in writing. If they won't, that's information.
ACH and bank transfer, where offered, is cheaper than card and worth enabling on your higher-ticket programs. It's usually a separate fee again, stacked on top of the processor's own ACH charge. Three layers turn into five fast if nobody itemizes.
You have two choices: absorb the fee into your program price, or show it to families at checkout.
There's no universally correct answer, but there's a wrong way to do the second one. During an audit of five real registration flows, I found a platform that told parents, on the screen, "if you'd prefer to avoid this convenience fee, we invite you to pay in-person via check."
Read that again from the parent's side. You have just been told the fee is avoidable, which means you've just been told it's unfair, and you've been offered a payment method that your operator can't track and might never receive. That single sentence does three kinds of damage in eleven words.
If you pass the fee through, name it plainly, keep it consistent, and don't apologize for it. If you absorb it, build it into your price deliberately rather than discovering it in March.
This is the layer that produced the $83,000.
Every job your software doesn't do is a job you do. That labor has a cost, and the reason nobody prices it's that it doesn't arrive as an invoice. It arrives as your Tuesday.
Here's the audit. Count how many separate places these seven jobs live in your operation:
Seven tools. The industry average is five, mine was seven, and the subscriptions were never the point. Six of those seven handed me back a job I then did by hand, and the hand was mine, on a Sunday. Layer 3 isn't a line item. Layer 3 was my Sunday.
I was the relay between all of it. Every enrollment moved by hand into four other places. Every instructor change, again. And the cruel part is that growth didn't reduce that work. Growth multiplied it.
Year one cleared my revenue goal. Year two grew, and it cost me significantly more work than year one did. I had expected the opposite. I thought once I had scale, and I could hire more people, this would only get easier over time. That wasn't the case. Without tools underneath the operation, growth multiplies labor instead of compounding.
The clearest picture I can give you of layer 3: November 2024, my third child arrived Sunday night, Monday was payroll, payroll was still being run by hand, and my husband brought the laptop to the hospital and ran it while I was in active labor. That wasn't dedication. That was a system failure with a deadline.
Here's how to calculate the real registration software cost for your own operation, not the advertised one.
Do this with your own numbers. It takes fifteen minutes and it will change what you buy.
Line
200 registrations
400 registrations
Platform subscription (12 months)
$
$
Per-registration fee × registrations
$
$
Card processing (separate)
$
$
Your labor: hours per week on the seven jobs × 50 weeks × your hourly value
$
$
True annual cost
$
$
Two rules for filling that in. Use last year's actual registration count, not your goal. And put a real number on your own hour, even if it feels uncomfortable, because a tool that costs $40 a month and takes eight hours a week isn't a cheap tool.
Here's what the layer 1 and layer 2 math looks like on real published pricing, at 200 registrations averaging $150, over twelve months. Subscription plus platform fee only, card processing excluded because it applies to everybody.
Platform
Subscription/yr
Platform fee on 200 × $150
Layer 1 + 2
Jumbula Pay As You Go
$180
200 enrollments in packs ≈ $280
≈ $460
Pembee Standard
$540
0.59% of $30,000 = $177
≈ $717
CourseStorm Starter (annual)
$1,188
$2.49 × 200 = $498
≈ $1,686
Activity Messenger Light
$1,188
1% of $30,000 = $300
≈ $1,488
Amilia Standard
$1,188
1% per invoice ≈ $300
≈ $1,488, plus $899+ onboarding in year one
Sawyer Launch
$0
3% of $30,000 = $900, plus the unpublished booking fee
≈ $900+
Jumbula Rise
$1,800
unlimited enrollments
≈ $1,800
iClassPro Signature, one location
$1,668
none published
≈ $1,668
enrops
$0
capped per-registration enrops service fee
see the pricing page
Now double the volume and watch what happens. Sawyer Launch goes from $900 to $1,800 because it's a straight percentage. Jumbula Rise stays at $1,800 because enrollments are unlimited. CourseStorm goes from $498 to $996 in fees. iClassPro doesn't move on fees at all, but add a second location and the subscription doubles.
That's the whole lesson. The cheapest platform at 200 registrations is frequently not the cheapest at 400, and nobody's pricing page shows you the crossover. You have to draw it yourself. Fifteen minutes.
When I ran the equivalent of this on my own operation, the answer came back as $83,000 a year in administrative and operations cost and sixteen hours a week of my time. Sixteen hours is the difference between writing curriculum and copy-pasting rosters, and I know which of those two grew the business.
Here's the part I actually want you to hear. If your true annual cost comes back at a number that makes your stomach drop, that isn't evidence you've been bad at this. It's evidence you've been carrying a whole business on your own two hands and it worked anyway. I ran that math and cried, and then I went and built something. You have options I didn't have, and the first one is that you now know the number.
Three of the most expensive costs in this business never appear in any software comparison, so I'm putting them here.
Cancelling programs. When we cancel a program for low enrollment, 97% of those families never purchase anything from us again. Ever. That's our own data, and it's the reason we run closer to break-even than we used to. Cancelling feels like containing a loss. It's trading eight weeks of thin margin for the lifetime value of a family.
Pricing blind. On an intro call with another operator, I asked what he charged per child at a private school we both served. Mine was around $21. His was lower. That school had told him he was receiving one of the highest per-student rates of any program they worked with. They had told me the same thing at $18, and I had to push to get to $20. When I said twenty-one, he told me his heart sank, because it meant they had been lying to him.
The isolation in this industry isn't emotional. It's financial. Operators lose money because they have nobody to compare notes with, and no software line item will ever fix that. One phone call will.
Taking a bad deal to get in the door. A parks and recreation partnership opened at a 60/40 split in their favor. I refused. They moved to 70/30 and I took it just to get in. Then my prices had to match their internally run programs. Then the hours: I start at 8:30 or 9, and they wanted 7:00am to 6:30pm, which means two instructors, because you can't have one person doing eleven and a half hours without expecting them to be able to take a bathroom break, at cheap before-and-after-care rates. Eleven and a half hours, one person, no bathroom. Ma'am. Enrollment came in at one to two kids. Then came a soft threat to the partnership itself.
I ended it. It was just making us bend until we break. Evaluate the full operating burden before you evaluate the split.
Worth knowing, because you price against it. Parents shopping for summer camp are comparing your program to whatever is in the local parks and recreation guide, and that guide effectively sets the ceiling in most markets. Cost is the number one barrier parents report, at 56%.
I'll say the hard part out loud, from my own experience. In STEAM specifically we're beholden to whoever is in the parks and rec summer camp guide, and that's the ceiling. Parents know you're doing robotics, and those LEGO and robotics kits cost three to five thousand dollars, and they're still not going to pay much more. On top of that there's enormous complexity in teaching the lessons alongside the kid-management side of it. If I did it again, I would do sports.
But I'm in this now, so I'm doubling down on it.
What that means practically: know your ceiling before you set your price, and if you can't move the ceiling, move your cost structure. Layer 3 is the part of your cost structure you actually control.
Before I started, I nearly wrote a $40,000 check for a franchise. What stopped me was doing exactly the math in this article. I inventoried what I already had, and I called people who had actually franchised to ask what it was really like. One of them, twenty-plus years in with the brand, told me they had never been given any real tools. Nothing.
The frame I used then is the frame I use on every vendor now: price the permanent cost of giving up a revenue share against the temporary cost of building or buying it yourself.
That's the whole question. A percentage of your revenue, forever, is a very different purchase from a fee you can cap and forecast.
Layer 1 is the number you see. Layer 2 is the number that scales with you. Layer 3 is the number that's already costing you the most and has never once appeared on an invoice.
Run the worked example. Put a real number on your hour. Then compare every tool on all three layers, including mine.
For the record on mine: enrops is free for businesses, permanently. Not free to start, not free for a trial period, free. The business model is a per-registration enrops service fee at checkout with a structure designed to be predictable rather than open-ended, and the current figures live on the pricing page rather than in an article that will go stale. Compare it on all three layers. That's the only comparison that tells you anything.
I did not research this market. I built a business in it. 50 school sites, 75+ programs a year, 7 districts, 2 states, 2,500+ students, 95% school partner renewal. I have paid every one of these costs personally, which is why I can itemize them.
Go do the math. Then go find one operator and compare notes, because that call is free and it's worth more than any of this.
I walk through this math on screen, line by line. Episode 10 of The Enrichment Entrepreneur is the finance episode: real cost layers, seasonal revenue planning, and the projections that get operators through the valleys.
Arielle Hammond, Ed.D. is the founder of enrops, registration and payments software for kids activity businesses. Free for businesses, permanently.
All third-party pricing in this article was taken from each company's public pages on August 14, 2026, and is refreshed quarterly. "Not published" means the company does not state it publicly, not that a capability or a fee is absent. If you work at one of these companies and something here is out of date, email arielle@enrops.com and I'll correct it.
