The short answer
- A small studio typically pays for seven or eight subscriptions: booking software, newsletters, gift cards, forms, a call scheduler, Zoom, reviews and a website builder.
- At today's list prices the cheapest realistic pile is about £178 a month, about £2,130 a year, before a review tool; about £234 with one.
- The booking software is more than half of it. The rest adds up because nobody cancels it.
- One tool that does most of it costs a fraction of that. OPEN's Plus plan is £39 a month. Some separate tools are still worth keeping; I say which below.
Sources: each vendor's own pricing page, read on 28 October 2026. The method is at the end.
In this article
I'm Nik and I make OPEN, booking and payment software for studios. I've spent the past weeks reading the websites of yoga, pilates and dance studios in London, Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh and Brighton, and most show the same thing: a booking link to one company, a newsletter sign-up from another, a gift card page from a third, a form from a fourth. Each made sense the day it was added. Together they're a monthly bill nobody looks at as a whole. So I added it up.
The pile, tool by tool
The rule: the cheapest plan a one-location studio with one or two teachers would realistically pick, at the price on the vendor's own page on 28 October 2026, on monthly billing. Where the page only showed dollars or euros, I converted at the European Central Bank's rate and marked it.
| What it does | Tool and plan | List price | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Booking, passes, memberships | TeamUp, up to 100 active customers | £99 a month | 101–200 customers is £139 |
| Newsletters | Mailchimp Essentials, 500 contacts | £9.81 a month | First-year offer price, shown as 15% off |
| Gift cards | Gift Up!, pay as you go | 3.49% of each card, minimum $0.50 | No monthly fee; £3.49 on £100 of cards a month |
| Forms (intake, waivers, feedback) | Typeform Basic | $39 a month, about £29 | Dollars on the page; $28 if paid yearly |
| Booking calls and private sessions | Calendly Standard | £10 a month | £8 if paid yearly; the free plan allows one event type |
| Online classes | Zoom Workplace Pro | $15.99 a month, about £12 | Dollars on the page; the free plan stops group calls at 40 minutes |
| Review requests | NiceJob Starter | $75 a month, about £56 | Dollars on the page; most small studios skip this and ask by hand |
| Website | Squarespace Basic | €17 a month, about £14 | Euros on the page from where I sit; €12 if paid yearly |
The worked total
For a studio that uses everything except the review tool:
| A month | A year | |
|---|---|---|
| Booking software (TeamUp) | £99.00 | £1,188 |
| Newsletters (Mailchimp) | £9.81 | £118 |
| Gift cards (Gift Up!, on £100 of cards) | £3.49 | £42 |
| Forms (Typeform) | £29.26 | £351 |
| Calls (Calendly) | £10.00 | £120 |
| Online classes (Zoom) | £12.00 | £144 |
| Website (Squarespace) | £14.22 | £171 |
| Total | £177.78 | £2,133 |
Add NiceJob for reviews and it's £234.05 a month, £2,809 a year.
That's the cheapest version. It assumes you stay under 100 active customers on TeamUp, under 500 contacts on Mailchimp, and that Mailchimp's first-year price is what you pay. A studio with 150 active members and 1,200 people on its list is already on the next tier of both.
What changes when one tool does most of it
OPEN does the booking, passes and memberships, payments, newsletters and automated messages, forms, and a studio page to send people to, on one plan. The Plus plan is £39 a month.
What it doesn't do yet, so you don't find out later: Zoom classes run through OPEN once Zoom finishes reviewing our integration. Gift cards and Google review requests aren't in the product today. UK Direct Debit isn't there yet either, so memberships run on card. And a studio page on OPEN lives on our domain, not yours; if your own domain matters, keep the website builder.
So the honest comparison today is £39 for OPEN, plus £14 for the website and £12 for Zoom if you teach online: about £65 a month against £178.
When a separate tool is still the right call
- Your own website. If your Squarespace or Wix site brings people in from Google, keep it and link it to your booking page. A studio page inside booking software is for the studio that has no website.
- A big newsletter. Mailchimp with thousands of contacts and designed campaigns is a real tool. If the newsletter fills your workshops, don't move it to save £10.
- Forms with logic. A Typeform that branches on the answer beats a simple built-in form. If your forms are "name, email, any injuries", the built-in one is fine.
- Zoom. For a serious online programme, Zoom is the tool. The booking software only needs to hand people the link.
- Reviews. A paid review tool makes sense with several locations or a hundred new people a month. For one studio, asking at the end of class with the link on a card costs nothing and works.
The test: does the separate tool do something the combined one can't, and do you use it every month? If yes, keep it. If you pay for it because it was there when you opened, that's the £10 that becomes £120 a year.
Add up your own pile
The same list prices sit in a small calculator on our UK page: tick what you pay for and see your own total at the UK studio software calculator. If your numbers differ from mine, tell me; the prices here get rechecked and the date at the top moves when they do.
How I worked it out
- Prices, read on 28 October 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page: TeamUp (the Marketing Suite is a separate £89 add-on), Mailchimp (the Free plan is capped at 250 contacts and 500 sends a month), Gift Up!, Typeform, Calendly, Zoom Workplace Pro, NiceJob and Squarespace. Mindbody and Glofox publish no list price, so TeamUp stands in for booking software because it does.
- Currencies. Typeform, Zoom and NiceJob showed dollars and Squarespace euros when I read them. Converted at the ECB reference rates of 27 October 2026 (€1 = $1.1150 = £0.83658). If they show you pound prices, the table is slightly off, not the argument.
- Gift cards. Gift Up! charges per card, so £3.49 is an example on £100 of cards a month, not a measured figure.
- OPEN. Plus plan, £39 a month, from our UK page. No studio's data is used in this post. General information, not financial advice.
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I make OPEN, booking and payment software for studios, with newsletters and forms in the same place as the bookings. If you'd like to see your own pile next to it, book half an hour with me.