Registration Software Cost in 2026: The 3 Real Layers

Updated September 18, 2026

At Journey to STEAM we eliminated $83K in annual admin costs. We got back 16 hours a week.

I lead with those two numbers because they're the 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 $83K and here's 16 hours, and here's how the accounting works.

Registration software has three cost layers. Most operators price the first one, argue about the second one, and skip the third one, which is where the money is.

How much does registration software cost?

Registration software costs a monthly subscription, from $0 to several hundred dollars, plus a per-registration fee paid by you or by families at checkout, plus card processing of about 2.9% + 30¢, plus the labor of every job the software doesn't do. For a growing camp or class business, the subscription is the smallest of those layers.

Let me take them in order. Every competitor figure below comes from that company's own public pages, checked September 18, 2026.

Layer 1: the subscription

This is the number on the pricing page, and it's the number everybody compares.

• Jumbula: $15 Pay As You Go, $150 Rise, $285 Ascend per month. Source: jumbula.com/pricing.
• Sawyer: $79, $219 and $399 per month across its three published plans, or $71, $189 and $379 billed annually. "There is no setup fee." Source: hisawyer.com/for-business/pricing.
• Jackrabbit Class: from $49 a month, or from $93 with the branded app plus a $169 one-time app setup. The price is tiered by student count. Source: jackrabbitclass.com/pricing.
• CourseStorm: four plans starting at $119 a month, or $99 a month billed yearly. Source: coursestorm.com/pricing.
• ActivityHero: $99 a year for its registration software, or $299 a year for the Plus plan. Source: business.activityhero.com/superhero-pricing.
• Jotform: a Starter plan at no cost with limits and Jotform branding. Its pricing page says paid plans start at $19 per month. Source: jotform.com/pricing.
• Regpack: no figure published. Three tiers, each with a "Get Pricing" button. Source: regpacks.com/pricing.
• Homeroom: no cost to schools and PTOs. Families pay a service fee, and the amount isn't stated. Source: homeroom.com/info/resources/pricing.
• 6crickets: no pricing page. Its registration page describes the tool as "at minimal cost and free for many." Source: 6crickets.com/registration.
• Google Forms plus Venmo or Zelle: no subscription. Forms costs nothing on a personal account. Source: workspace.google.com/products/forms.
• enrops: Free is $0. Pro is $99 a month or $990 a year. Custom is by quote. No per-location pricing. Source: enrops pricing.

So the published range runs from $0 to several hundred dollars a month, and three things about that range matter more than the numbers.

First, layer 1 is the cheapest of the three layers for most operators, and it's the one vendors compete on hardest, which tells you where they'd prefer your attention. Second, check what the price is tied to. Jackrabbit's fee is based on your total student count, so a growing program moves up the ladder. Third, most of these companies publish a plan price. Few show what a family pays at checkout, line by line.

Three of them don't publish full pricing: Regpack, Homeroom and 6crickets. Quote-only pricing has fair reasons behind it, because complicated programs are hard to price in a list. 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 setup line too. Jackrabbit's branded app carries a $169 one-time setup. Sawyer states plainly that there's no setup fee. Those are real numbers that don't appear in a monthly comparison.

Layer 2: who pays the per-registration fee?

This is the layer that grows with you, and it's the part people mean when they go looking for camp registration software pricing and come back confused. The subscription is published. This one is often a sentence in a help center.

Per-registration pricing in this category takes one of six shapes. Real examples, from each company's own pages, checked September 18, 2026.

• Flat fee per registration. CourseStorm: "a $2.49 per registration fee" on all plans (coursestorm.com/pricing). Expensive on your low-priced programs, cheap on your high-priced ones. A $30 mini-camp pays 8.3%. A $400 week pays 0.6%.
• Flat fee paid by the family. Sawyer: a booking fee of $1.99 on orders over $30 and up to $100 and $3.99 over $100, charged to the customer (help.hisawyer.com). ActivityHero: a $0.99 service fee on registrations of $20 or more, paid by the purchaser (help.activityhero.com).
• Percentage paid by the business. ActivityHero: a 1.7% registration fee on top of $99 a year (business.activityhero.com/superhero-pricing). Feels invisible at 50 registrations. Doesn't at 500. It grows with your price, so it lands hardest on your premium programs.
• Marketplace percentage. Sawyer: 30% on its entry plan, where marketplace listing is required, and 20% or 15% opt-in on the higher plans, on orders booked on the Sawyer Marketplace (hisawyer.com/for-business/pricing). ActivityHero's marketplace option is 15% on paid registrations (business.activityhero.com/pricing). 6crickets takes a commission on enrollments its marketplace brings, and the rate isn't published (6crickets.com/marketing).
• Enrollment credits. Jumbula: 10 enrollments included on Pay As You Go, then packs from 10 for $20 up to 500 for $550 (jumbula.com/pricing). That's $2.00 down to $1.10 per enrollment depending on pack size. Their stated policy: "Enrollment credits are not refunded when students drop out."
• Percentage paid by the family. 6crickets: a school management fee of "currently 5% of the provider's list price or $10 fee depending on configurations," paid by parents (6crickets help center). Homeroom: a service fee added on top of the class price, amount not stated (homeroom.com/info/resources/pricing). enrops: a 3% enrops service fee per registration, minimum $1.99, maximum $14.99 by card. Pay by bank and save: 2%, maximum $9.99.

The floor and the ceiling are the part to look for. A ceiling caps the fee as your prices rise, which makes it the most predictable of the six shapes.

What happens to the fee on a refund?

Ask this before you sign anything, because families ask you, and you're the one standing there.

• Sawyer's help center says its booking fee is non-refundable, including when a class is canceled (help.hisawyer.com, checked September 18, 2026).
• ActivityHero states "the ActivityHero service fee is not refunded," and that its registration fee is non-refundable (help.activityhero.com, checked September 18, 2026).
• 6crickets states "Stripe does not return our fees when a payment is refunded" (6crickets help center, checked September 18, 2026).
• Regpack's help center says it cannot refund card processing costs after they are captured (help.regpack.com, checked September 18, 2026).
• CourseStorm and Jackrabbit Class don't state a policy on their own sites that I could find.
• The enrops service fee is refunded to the family whenever the registration is refunded.

What does Stripe processing cost?

Card processing is a separate bill. It's charged by the payment processor, and it stacks on top of everything above.

• Stripe's published US rate: "2.9% + $0.30 per successful transaction for domestic cards." Bank debits are 0.8% with a $5.00 cap. Source: stripe.com/pricing, checked September 18, 2026.
• Jumbula and Sawyer both state Stripe's standard 2.9% + 30¢. Sawyer lists bank payments at 0.8% with a $5 maximum. Sources: jumbula.com/pricing and help.hisawyer.com.
• Jackrabbit Class doesn't publish rates. They're quoted. Source: jackrabbitclass.com.
• Regpack shows one number: "Payment processing as low as 1.5%." Source: regpacks.com/pricing.
• Homeroom has providers price in 3% to cover Stripe's card costs. Source: homeroom.com/info/resources/pricing.
• Venmo charges a business profile 1.9% + $0.10 per payment. Source: venmo.com/resources/our-fees.
• enrops runs on your own Stripe account at Stripe's standard rate. Your only cost is Stripe's standard processing.

Some platforms present the platform's fee and the card processing cost as one line 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.

Bank payment, where offered, is cheaper than card and worth enabling on your higher-priced programs.

Who pays layer 2, and what happens when you make it visible

You have two choices: cover the fee out of your program price, or have families pay it 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 screen that told parents, "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 been told the fee is avoidable, which means you've been told it's unfair, and you've been offered a payment method that your operator can't track and might not receive. One sentence, three kinds of damage.

If families pay the fee, name it plainly, keep it consistent, and don't apologize for it. A service fee paid by the family is common for kids activities and camps. On enrops it's included in the price from the first screen, so the price families see first is the price they pay. If you cover it, build it into your price deliberately so you don't discover it in March.

Layer 3: what is the real cost of a free tool?

This is the layer that produced the $83K.

Every job your software doesn't do is a job you do. That labor has a cost, and the reason nobody prices it is 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:

• Registration and payment collection
• Payroll
• The program schedule, by site, by day, by instructor
• Parent updates and reminders
• Enrollment status, so you know today whether a section will run
• Rosters a partner can receive
• Invoicing and collections from partners

Seven tools. The veterans I called ran five. I ran seven, and the subscriptions were a rounding error. Six of those seven handed me back a job I then did by hand, and the hand was mine, on a Sunday. 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 two grew, and it cost me more work than year one did. I had expected the opposite. I thought once I had more volume, 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.

The clearest picture I can give you of layer 3: the week my third child was born, payroll was still being run by hand, and my husband brought the laptop to the hospital so it went out on time. One rule I have is to pay people on time. That week was a system failure with a deadline.

The worked example

Here's how to calculate the real registration software cost for your own operation. Do this with your own numbers. It takes fifteen minutes and it will change what you buy.

Fill in each line twice, once at last year's registration count and once at double:

1. Platform subscription, 12 months.
2. Per-registration fee × registrations, if you pay it.
3. Card processing, which is separate.
4. Your labor: hours per week on the seven jobs × 50 weeks × your hourly value.
5. Add the four. That's your true annual cost.

Two rules for filling that in. Use last year's real registration count. Your goal is a different number. 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 is an expensive tool.

Here's what the layer 1 and layer 2 math looks like on published pricing, at 200 registrations averaging $150, over twelve months. Subscription plus platform fees paid by the business only. Card processing is left out because it applies to everybody.

• Jumbula Pay As You Go: $180 subscription, plus two 100-enrollment packs at $140 each, $280. About $460, before the 10 included enrollments.
• ActivityHero: $99, plus 1.7% of $30,000, $510. About $609. Families also pay $0.99 per registration.
• Jackrabbit Class: from $588, and no per-registration fee is published. Ask for the tier at your student count.
• Sawyer entry plan, billed annually: $852, plus 30% of any order booked through its marketplace. Families also pay the $1.99 or $3.99 booking fee.
• CourseStorm Starter, billed yearly: $1,188, plus $2.49 × 200, $498. About $1,686.
• enrops Free: $0, and $0 to enrops per transaction. Families pay $4.50 per registration by card, or $3.00 by bank.

Now double the volume and watch what happens. CourseStorm's fees go from $498 to $996. ActivityHero's go from $510 to $1,020. Jumbula's 400 enrollments fit inside one 500-pack at $550. Jackrabbit moves when your student count crosses a tier. enrops stays at $0 to the business.

That's the whole lesson. The cheapest platform at 200 registrations is frequently not the cheapest at 400, and few pricing pages show you the crossover. You have to draw it yourself. Fifteen minutes.

When I ran the equivalent of this on my own operation, the answer was $83K a year in admin costs and 16 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 want you to hear. If your true annual cost comes back at a number that makes your stomach drop, read it as 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 we went and built something. You have options I didn't have, and the first one is that you now know the number.

What about the money leaks that aren't fees at all?

Three of the most expensive costs in this business don't appear in any software comparison, so I'm putting them here.

Cancelling programs. When we cancel a program for low enrollment, most of those families don't come back. That's my own experience at Journey to STEAM, and it's the reason we run closer to break-even than we used to. Cancelling feels like containing a loss. It trades eight weeks of thin margin for the lifetime value of a family.

Pricing blind. On an intro call with another operator, we compared what the same school paid each of us per child. Each of us had been told ours was one of the highest rates the school paid. The two numbers didn't match. He told me his heart sank.

Operators lose money because they have nobody to compare notes with, and no software line item fixes that. One phone call will.

Taking a bad deal to get in the door. I once accepted partnership terms I had already refused, to get in. Then my prices had to match their internally run programs. Then the hours: they wanted a day so long it required two instructors, because you can't have one person working eleven and a half hours without a bathroom break, at before-and-after-care rates. Ma'am.

I ended it. It was making us bend until we break. Evaluate the full operating burden before you evaluate the split.

How much does summer camp cost from the parent side?

Parents compare your program to whatever is in the local parks and recreation guide, and that guide sets the ceiling in most markets. Know your ceiling before you set your price: how to set camp and class prices walks through it.

One more comparison worth making

Before I started, I considered buying a franchise. I sat through the sales call. What stopped me was doing exactly the math in this article. I inventoried what I already had, I called people who had done it, and I built it myself.

The frame I used then is the frame I use on every vendor now: price the ongoing cost of giving up a revenue share against the temporary cost of building or buying it yourself.

That's the whole question. An uncapped percentage of your revenue is a very different purchase from a fee with a ceiling you can forecast.

What enrops costs, on all three layers

Compare every tool on all three layers, including ours.

• Layer 1: enrops is free for businesses. Free is $0, Pro is $99 a month or $990 a year, Custom is by quote. Every plan includes unlimited registrations, families, programs, sites and partner schools. No per-location pricing. A new account gets full access through its first 100 paid registrations, then chooses Pro or Free. Registrations aren't blocked on any plan.
• Layer 2: the business pays enrops $0 per transaction on every plan, unless it chooses to cover the enrops service fee. Families pay 3% per registration, minimum $1.99, maximum $14.99 by card, or 2% by bank, maximum $9.99. Refunded to the family whenever the registration is refunded. No service fee on donations, tips, gift add-ons or $0 registrations. Payment plans split the total into the installments you set, with no interest, plan fee or late fee.
• The math on a $240 program: program $240.00, enrops service fee $7.20, family pays $247.20 by card. Stripe's standard processing is $7.47. You net $232.53.
• Layer 3: live today, self-serve: registration links and QR codes, mobile checkout, editable digital waivers, a schedule builder that knows the school calendar, rosters with a live total-enrolled count, confirmation emails, abandoned registration recovery, discount codes and refunds. Set up with our team: instructor assignments and offers, contractor instructor pay through Stripe, and roster sends to partner sites. Not part of enrops today: monthly autopay tuition, skill tracking and makeup scheduling.

See the full pricing, click through a sample registration, or line it up against a specific tool on the comparison pages, starting with enrops vs Sawyer. If camps are your business, start at enrops for camps.

What this all adds up to

Layer 1 is the number you see. Layer 2 is the number that grows with you. Layer 3 is the number that's already costing you the most and has not once appeared on an invoice.

Run the worked example. Put a real number on your hour. Then compare every tool on all three layers.

I built a business in this market. Journey to STEAM: 75+ school sites, 2,500+ students, 95% of school partners renew. 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 costs nothing and it's worth more than any of this.

I walk through this math out loud in the finance episode of The Youth Enrichment Leader: real cost layers, seasonal revenue planning, and the projections that get operators through the valleys.

Frequently asked questions

How much does camp registration software cost per month?

Published plans run from $0 to several hundred dollars a month. Jumbula starts at $15, Jackrabbit Class at $49, Sawyer at $79 and CourseStorm at $119, each per month on their own pricing pages, checked September 18, 2026. enrops is free for businesses.

Who pays the per-registration fee?

It depends on the platform. CourseStorm and ActivityHero charge the business. Sawyer, Homeroom and 6crickets add a fee the family pays. On enrops, families pay the enrops service fee by default and the business can choose to cover it.

Is card processing included in the software price?

No. Card processing is billed separately by the payment processor. Stripe's published US rate is 2.9% + $0.30 per successful domestic card payment (stripe.com/pricing, checked September 18, 2026).

What does enrops cost a business?

The Free plan is $0 a month and the business pays enrops $0 per transaction. Your only cost is Stripe's standard processing. Pro is $99 a month or $990 a year.

I'm pricing my first camp. Where do I start?

Read how to start a summer camp for the steps, the costs and the timeline, then run the worked example above with your own numbers.

Create your first registration. Free for businesses. Live in under 5 minutes.

Arielle Hammond, Ed.D. is the founder of enrops, registration and payments software for kids programs, and host of The Youth Enrichment Leader, presented by enrops.

All competitor pricing in this article comes from each company's own public pages, checked September 18, 2026. "Not published" means the company does not state it publicly. If you work at one of these companies and something here is out of date, email hello@enrops.com and I'll correct it.