How Much Does Court Booking Software Actually Cost?

A club owner in Virginia signed up for a court booking platform advertised at $25 a month. Six months later the invoice was $340. Two more courts had come online, she had added an instructor to run clinics, and the starter tier did not cover either. Nobody lied to her. She just never read past the number on the homepage.

That is the pattern we hear from operators before they call us. The sticker price on a court booking platform is a starting bid, not a total. The real cost comes from four places: per-court fees, per-instructor add-ons, payment processing cuts, and the tier jump that happens the moment you grow past whatever threshold the plan was built around.

Where the number on the pricing page stops being true

Per-court and per-instructor charges

CourtReserve's publicly listed pricing starts around $25 a month for a base plan, then adds roughly $5 per court and $5 per instructor or teaching pro on top of that. A facility running six courts with three coaches teaching lessons is not paying $25 a month. It is paying closer to $70, before anything else gets added on top.

Payment processing cuts

Most platforms route card payments through their own processor and take a percentage of every transaction. A club doing $40,000 a month in court fees, memberships, and lesson payments loses over $1,100 a month to a 2.9% cut. That number never shows up on the pricing page. It shows up on the merchant statement, a month at a time, quietly.

Tier jumps

PlayByPoint's plans run from a Starter tier around $99.99 a month up through Advanced and Premium+ tiers that publicly list in the $600 to $1,000 range. The jump between tiers usually gets triggered by something the operator did not plan for: a second location, a new membership program, a point-of-sale add-on. Growth becomes the thing that costs you money.

Why badminton and pickleball facilities feel this the most

Tennis clubs tend to run fewer, larger courts and a smaller instructor roster, so the per-court and per-instructor math stays contained. Badminton and pickleball facilities are the opposite. A badminton club might run ten or twelve courts inside one building to fit enough players in during peak hours, and a pickleball facility often adds courts every time it can find the floor space. Every one of those courts is a line item on a per-court pricing model. The sport with the tightest margins ends up carrying the pricing structure built for the sport with the widest ones.

What the real bill looks like

Here is how the structure compares across three approaches, based on pricing pages that are public as of this year.

Ask these before you sign

Ask what happens to the price when you add a court, add a coach, or open a second location. Ask whether the quoted number includes payment processing or whether that shows up as a separate line later. Ask what the contract term actually is and what it costs to leave early. Most sales calls answer the first question happily and go quiet on the third. Get the answer in writing, not on a call, because a verbal quote is not what shows up on the invoice eight months later.

Migration is the other cost nobody prices in. Moving member records, active bookings, and payment history off a platform you are leaving can eat a week of staff time if the new vendor does not handle it for you. We do the migration for free, white glove, because we would rather spend that time up front than watch an operator stall out mid-season over a spreadsheet.

Frequently asked questions

Does court booking software have hidden fees?

Not usually hidden on purpose. They are disclosed, just not on the homepage. Per-court add-ons, instructor seats, and payment processing percentages tend to live in a pricing FAQ or come up on the sales call. Ask directly and get it in writing before you sign anything.

Is a cheaper starting price actually cheaper?

Only if your facility stays small enough to never trigger the add-ons. A single-court studio with one instructor might genuinely pay the sticker price for years. A growing multi-court facility usually crosses into add-on territory within a season.

What should a facility actually budget for court booking software?

Model the total, not the base price. Take the base fee, add per-court and per-instructor charges at your current headcount, add processing fees on your real monthly volume. That total is the number to compare across vendors, not the number on the homepage.

If you want to see what a flat, no-per-transaction-fee model looks like against your own numbers, we will walk through it in a 15-minute demo.