Comparison

Recess vs Amilia

Amilia is a Montreal built recreation platform, and its own pricing page names the organizations it is best matched with: YMCAs, JCCs and Parks and Recreation departments. So the question here is not whose feature list is longer. It is who the software was shaped around, what the plan commits you to before you have taken a single payment, and whether a bill still arrives in a month you sold nothing.

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Every Amilia figure on this page was read on Amilia's own pricing page, product pages, legal pages and help center on 30 August 2026, and every one of them is listed at the foot of the page.

Two things to settle before the rest of this page

Recess has no monthly software fee, no tiers, no add ons and no setup cost. It earns roughly 5% paid by the member at checkout, and card and bank processing comes out of that fee rather than being billed to you on top of it.

Recess is not built for networks past about a hundred locations. Past that a group needs central tooling we do not have, and we would rather write that here than tell you on the third call.

Who each one suits, plainly. If what you run is a public recreation catalog, with resident and non resident pricing, scholarship funds, halls that get rented out by the hour and a cost recovery target you have to report on, Amilia was built for precisely that and this page will not pretend otherwise. If what you run is an independent studio with a term timetable, a summer camp, one household paying for two children on different ladders and six instructors to pay at the end of the month, that is a different shape of business, and it turns out to be a different shape of bill.

Point by point

What changes when you move.

Amilia changes its pricing and its features without notice. Every figure in their column is printed on their own site or written in their own help center and legal pages, and each is dated in the sources at the foot of this page. Check anything that will decide your answer.

Recess

Amilia

What the organization is billed

Nothing. No plan, no tier, no add on, no setup fee. Recess earns roughly 5% paid by the member at checkout.

Standard is $99 a month, Advanced is $499 a month, Custom is on application. Underneath the plan sit a 1% Amilia service fee on every new invoice issued, card processing at 2.85% plus 30 cents on Standard or 2.75% plus 30 cents on Advanced, and eChecks at 1% plus 50 cents. Implementation and onboarding start at $899 on Standard and $2,999 on Advanced.1

Which currency the price is in

The Recess fee is a percentage of what your members spend, so there is no plan price to convert in the first place.

Not stated on the pricing page. The English page and the French page both print a bare dollar sign with no currency label anywhere on them. Their Master Service Agreement is the page that settles it: amounts are in Canadian dollars if the signing entity is Amilia Enterprises Inc., and in US dollars if it is Amilia Technologies USA Inc. Ask which entity your contract names before you budget from the number on the page.1,2,3

The term you are signing

None. No contract term, no notice period and nothing to buy out. Stop selling and the fee stops with you.

Their Master Service Agreement, dated 01/05/2026 on the page, sets a default initial subscription period of twenty four months unless a Service Schedule says otherwise. It renews automatically for a year at a time and can be cancelled only on ninety days notice before the renewal period ends. Ending it early costs, in their words, 100% of all remaining fees that would have been payable for the remainder of the subscription period.3

What a $100 registration costs

About $5, paid by the member. The studio keeps the $100 and pays nothing for processing.

$4.15 on the Standard plan, and the $99 a month is on top of it. That is their 1% service fee on the invoice plus 2.85% and 30 cents on the card. Both rates are published figures of theirs rather than an assumption of ours, which is more than most of this category prints.1

Caps on the plan you are on

None. One version of Recess, with no account count, no store count and no facility count to grow into.

The plan is sized. Standard carries one online store, up to 10 facilities and up to 5,000 active accounts, where an active account is one that has received an invoice in the last two years. Advanced carries three stores, 20 facilities and 10,000 accounts. Unlimited exists only on Custom, whose price is not published.1

Two way texting

Included, in the same product, at no extra price: two way text and email, templates, sequences, campaigns and push notifications.

SmartText, which their help center describes as two way text and email with automations, templates, surveys and a built in AI assistant, delivered by their partner Pidj. On their own pricing table it is a premium add on: on demand and paid for on Standard, one of two add ons you may pick on Advanced, tailored on Custom. No price for it is published.1,8

The app in a member's pocket

Your studio's own app, published under your own name and icon on the Apple App Store and Google Play, included from the first day: schedule, booking, payments, progress, messages and check in.

Two answers, and both of them are theirs. The Amilia app is a real native app on both stores, and it is one app shared by every organization: a member's Shop tab lists the stores they have already visited. Separately, Amilia announced a partnership in June 2025 that lets an organization white label its mobile experience through Familyworks. That app is a second company's product, and no price for it appears anywhere on Amilia's pricing page.7,9

Moving cost onto the participant

That is the whole model. Roughly 5% is added at the member's checkout and it covers processing, so nothing is billed to the studio at all.

Closer to us here than almost anyone else in this category. A free Service Fee app in their App Store adds a configurable percentage or dollar line to an invoice, and their payments page says you can offset processing costs with surcharge fees where local laws allow. Read their own caveat too: the fee is calculated at item level and shrinks with discounts and proration, so their article says the amount charged may be higher or lower than the actual transaction cost. None of it touches the plan fee, the 1% or the onboarding fee, which stay yours.4,6

Hours, rates and the payroll run

Shifts, clock in and out, pay rates by class type or by head count, payroll reporting, automated substitute finding when a coach drops out, roles and permissions.

Staff recruitment, staff schedules, availability set by staff from their app, and a timesheet export carrying an hourly rate and hours worked per activity occurrence. Their own article names two limits worth knowing before you rely on it: the hours come from the activity schedule rather than from a clock, and changing a staff member's rate rewrites the rate on past timesheets, which is why the article tells you to save the file. Their help center carries no article on finding a substitute.10,11

Resident pricing, rentals and cost recovery

None of it. No resident and non resident pricing, no scholarship funds, no cost recovery reporting, no halls rented by the hour on a public calendar. Recess is not built for a public catalog.

Yes, and this is the reason to stay. Facility rental with conflict checking on a public calendar, access control at checkpoints and kiosks, fundraising prompts inside store checkout, self serve scholarships, targeted benefits that go past resident and non resident pricing, and a Cost of Service tool that sets ideal subsidy levels against calculated ones.1,5

One household, several children

Family and team accounts, sibling billing, one balance and one card across the household, shared forms and waivers. Sibling discounts recalculate when a child pauses or leaves, and multi class discounts count by student or by family.

Genuinely strong, and we are not going to shave it. A family account that other members are invited to log into, memberships sold to individuals and to households, family memberships and a family multipass, one wallet of saved cards and bank accounts, and installment payment plans a parent can take at checkout.1,7,11

Bringing your records with you

Automated migration run by our team: members, guardians and family links, ranks and promotion history, attendance, memberships and billing.

Their pricing FAQ says a Professional Services team will migrate your data from another system, that the price varies with your organization's data load, and that you get the figure by speaking to a sales representative.1

The one reason to stay on Amilia

Amilia is built for public and community recreation, and it does not hide it: their pricing page says the organizations they are best matched with are YMCAs, JCCs and Parks and Recreation departments, and their Custom plan is written for exactly those three. That buys you a whole category of things Recess does not have and is not building: halls rented by the hour on a public calendar with conflict checking, access control at checkpoints and kiosks, self serve scholarships, fundraising prompts inside checkout, benefits that go past resident and non resident pricing, and a Cost of Service tool that sets ideal subsidy levels against calculated ones.

If you are a parks department, a Y, a JCC or a multi activity community organization with a cost recovery target to report on, Amilia is the better fit and you should stay where you are. Nothing further down this page outweighs it.

The two reasons to leave

The plan is a commitment, and three more charges sit under it. Their own Master Service Agreement sets a default initial subscription period of twenty four months, renewing automatically a year at a time, cancellable only on ninety days notice, and it prices an early exit at 100% of all remaining fees for the rest of the period. Under that term sit the $99 or $499 a month, a 1% Amilia service fee on every new invoice issued, 2.85% or 2.75% plus 30 cents on every card, and onboarding from $899 or $2,999. On Recess there is no plan to pick, no term to serve, no notice to give and nothing to buy out, and in a month you sold nothing the software costs nothing.

The core is generous. Growth is what sits outside it. Give them the credit they are owed: every SmartRec core feature really is on every plan, registrations, memberships, programs, POS, merchandise, discounts, forms and fundraising alike. What is not on every plan is the size of it, and four things beside it. Standard stops at one online store, ten facilities and five thousand active accounts. SmartRec Analytics, Community Segments, unlimited API access and SmartText, which is their two way texting, are premium add ons: paid on demand on Standard, two of the four included on Advanced, and no price published for any of them. On Recess there is one version of the product, no ceiling to hit and nothing left to buy.

What it costs

Four charges, one term, and one number they never print.

Start with the credit, because they have earned some. Amilia publishes two of its three plan prices, both card rates, the eCheck rate, the service fee, the account and facility caps and the onboarding floor, all on one public page you do not have to book a call to see. Most of this category publishes a starting price and stops. Standard is $99 a month and Advanced is $499 a month. Custom is on application.

Do the charges stack? Yes, and their own table is where you can read it. Under the heading Transaction Fees they list a service fee, described as a 1% fee Amilia will charge on every new invoice that is issued, and separately credit card fees of 2.85% plus 30 cents on Standard and 2.75% plus 30 cents on Advanced, and eCheck fees of 1% plus 50 cents. Those sit on top of the monthly plan, and implementation is a further one off starting at $899 on Standard or $2,999 on Advanced. Note the base carefully before you model it: their wording puts the 1% on the invoice issued rather than on the card payment taken, so ask them to confirm what it applies to.

A $100 registration on their Standard plan, at their own published rates

Registration$100.00

Amilia service fee, 1% of the invoice−$1.00

Credit card fee, 2.85% plus 30 cents−$3.15

Left after their published transaction fees$95.85

Every rate in that card is theirs, not an estimate of ours. What it leaves out is the $99 that arrives whether you sold anything that month or not, and the $899 onboarding in year one. On Recess the same $100 registration leaves the studio with $100, and the member pays roughly $5 at checkout instead.

Which currency is that $99 in? Their pricing page does not say. Neither the English page nor the French one carries a currency label anywhere on it, just a bare dollar sign. The page that does answer it is their Master Service Agreement, which states that amounts are in Canadian dollars if the signing entity is Amilia Enterprises Inc. and in US dollars if it is Amilia Technologies USA Inc. We are not going to convert one into the other for you and neither should a sales deck. Ask which entity your contract names.

On passing cost to the participant, they are closer to us than almost anyone else on this list, and it is worth saying so. A free Service Fee app in their App Store adds a percentage or a dollar amount as a line on the invoice, and their payments page says you can offset processing costs with surcharge fees where local laws allow. So the picture is not one vendor billing the business and another billing the member. Their own help article is where the difference actually lives: the fee is calculated at item level and shrinks when a discount or a proration applies, so in their words the amount charged may be higher or lower than the actual transaction cost, and the article says outright that the feature is not there to precisely offset payment processing fees. Recess is one fee, at checkout, with processing already inside it.

The genuine difference is not the transaction line at all. It is the shape of the commitment. On Amilia you sign a term, by default twenty four months, and you carry a plan fee, a 1% invoice fee and an onboarding fee whatever the month looked like. On Recess there is no software bill, no processing account, no term and no charge in a month with no sales.

That is a trade, not a free lunch, and it does not automatically fall our way. If you would rather carry a fixed, forecastable line in a budget and keep your members' checkout total clean, a monthly plan is a defensible answer, and for a municipality with a procurement cycle it may be the only answer. Do the arithmetic on your own volume before you believe anyone, us very much included.

Run it yourself

Where your organization lands on their table.

The account slider picks their published plan the way their own table does, because active accounts are what the plan is sized by. Past ten thousand accounts Amilia publishes nothing at all, and the calculator says so rather than inventing a figure. One assumption is used and it is marked here and on the lines themselves: the 30 cents per card transaction is applied at an average sale of $60, because the number of transactions behind a revenue figure is yours and not theirs.

What goes through the platform each month?

$18,000

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$2k$150k

How many active accounts?

3,000

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50012,000 accounts

An active account is their definition: one that has received an invoice in the last two years.

Amilia planStandard, their published price for that account count$1,188a year

Amilia service fee1% of every new invoice issued, their published rate$2,160a year

Credit card fees2.85% published, plus 30 cents at an assumed $60 sale$7,236a year

RecessNo plan, no service fee, no processing billed to you$0a year

Leaves the organization on their side, and not on ours

$10,584

every year, at their published rates, before onboarding

Three of those four lines are Amilia's own published figures. The only assumption is the 30 cents per transaction, applied at an average sale of $60, and onboarding from $899 in year one is left out of the total entirely. On Recess your members pay a service fee of about 5% at checkout, which on $18,000 a month is roughly $10,800 across a year, paid by them rather than by you. Both halves of that are on this page deliberately.

Straight answers

The six things recreation programs write in about.

Free software with a member fee. Where is the catch?

The catch is that money still moves, it just moves from a different pocket. Recess is free permanently and every feature is included, with no plan to pick and nothing waiting on a higher tier. It earns roughly 5% paid by the member at checkout, and card and bank processing comes out of that rather than being billed to you. So more money moves in total than under a flat monthly plan, and none of it moves out of the studio. Whether you would rather carry a predictable cost yourself or have your members carry a percentage is a genuine decision, and not an obvious one.

I run a parks department. Do I lose resident pricing and scholarships if I move?

Yes, and you should not move. Recess has no resident and non resident pricing, no self serve scholarship funds, no fundraising prompt in checkout, no access control at a checkpoint, no hall rental on a public calendar and no cost recovery reporting. Amilia has all of it, their Custom plan is written for parks departments, YMCAs and JCCs, and their own pricing page names those three as the organizations they are best matched with. If that describes you, this is not a close call and we would tell you the same thing on a call.

Is Amilia's $99 in Canadian dollars or US dollars?

Their pricing page does not say. We read both the English page and the French page on 30 August 2026 and neither carries a currency label anywhere, only a bare dollar sign. Their Master Service Agreement is the page that answers it: amounts are in Canadian dollars if the entity signing is Amilia Enterprises Inc., and in US dollars if it is Amilia Technologies USA Inc. So the answer depends on which of their two companies your contract names, and it is worth asking before you put the number in a budget. We have deliberately not converted one into the other anywhere on this page.

Am I signing a two year contract with Amilia?

By default, yes, on the agreement they publish. It sets an initial subscription period of twenty four months unless your Service Schedule says otherwise, renewing automatically for one year at a time, and cancellable only on ninety days notice before the renewal period ends. Leaving early is priced at 100% of all the fees that would have been payable for the rest of the period. Your own Service Schedule can override that, which is the whole point of reading it, so get the term and the exit in writing rather than taking a web page's word for it, ours included. On Recess there is no term at all.

Amilia can charge my members a fee too. Is this the same model?

On that one point they are much closer to us than the rest of this category, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Amilia ships a free Service Fee app that adds a percentage or a dollar amount to an invoice, and their payments page says processing costs can be offset with surcharge fees where local laws allow. The difference is not who pays the transaction fee. It is that on Amilia the plan fee, the 1% on every invoice issued and the onboarding fee are the organization's regardless of what you configure, and their own help article says the Service Fee is not there to precisely offset processing and may come out higher or lower than the real cost. On Recess there is one fee, it is the member's, processing is already inside it, and there is no second bill underneath.

Can I text a parent both ways without buying an add on?

On Recess, yes, both ways, by text or email, in the product at no extra price. Amilia has real two way texting and we are not going to imply otherwise: SmartText does two way text and email with automations, templates, surveys and an AI assistant, and it is delivered by their partner Pidj. What their pricing table says is where it sits. It is one of four premium add ons, paid for on demand on the Standard plan, one of two you may choose on Advanced, and no price for it is published on any tier.

Every figure on this page, and the page it was read on

Every Amilia claim here was read on Amilia's own website, legal pages and help center on 30 August 2026, not on review sites, roundups or summaries. Amilia changes its pricing and its features without notice. Verify anything that will decide your answer.

1. Pricing page: Standard at $99 a month and Advanced at $499 a month, Custom on application, the 1% service fee described as charged by Amilia on every new invoice that is issued, credit card fees of 2.85% plus $0.30 and 2.75% plus $0.30, eCheck fees of 1% plus $0.50, active account caps of 5,000 and 10,000 with the definition of an active account, one and three online stores, ten and twenty facilities, implementation starting at $899 and $2,999, the four premium add ons shown as on demand on Standard and two of your choice on Advanced, the full SmartRec core feature table, the Custom plan described as custom solutions for YMCA's, JCC's and Parks and Rec departments, the navigation line naming YMCA, JCC and Parks and Recreation as best matched, nonprofit pricing, and the FAQ answer on data migration by their Professional Services team priced by data load. www.amilia.com/pricing

2. French pricing page, checked for the same figures and for a currency label: the same $99 and $499, the same rates and caps, the same bare dollar sign and no currency named. www.amilia.com/fr/tarifs

3. Master Service Agreement, marked on the page as last updated 01/05/2026: section 9.2, an initial subscription period of twenty four months unless otherwise stated in a Service Schedule; 9.3, automatic renewal for one year, cancellable on ninety days notice before the renewal period expires; 9.4, early termination priced as liquidated damages at 100% of all remaining fees for the remainder of the subscription period; and 10.4, amounts in Canadian dollars if the signing entity is Amilia Enterprises Inc. or US dollars if it is Amilia Technologies USA Inc. www.amilia.com/legal/master-service-agreement

4. Payments product page: online, in person and offline payments, eChecks and ACH, recurring billing and installments, subsidies and split payments, terminals, dispute management, payout reporting and bank reconciliation, and the line that where local laws allow you can offset processing costs with surcharge fees. www.amilia.com/products/smartrec/payments

5. Social Equity product page: segmentation beyond resident and non resident pricing, self serve scholarships, discount types, fundraising through donation prompts in store checkout, and the Cost of Service tool comparing ideal subsidy levels to calculated ones. www.amilia.com/products/smartrec/social-equity

6. Help center, Service Fee, updated 5 March 2026: a free app in their App Store, configurable as a dollar amount, a percentage or both, applied whenever an invoice is created, calculated on the item total rather than the subtotal, overridable by an administrator, and the two caveats quoted on this page, that it is not there to precisely offset payment processing fees and that the charged fee may be higher or lower than the actual transaction cost. help.amilia.com/en/articles/4537067-service-fee

7. Help center, How to use the Amilia mobile app, updated 30 July 2026: the app on the Apple App Store and Google Play under the name Amilia, the Calendar, Shop and Account tabs, the Shop tab listing stores the member has already visited, member barcodes and Amilia IDs, and family registrations visible in one place. help.amilia.com/en/articles/3475132-how-to-use-the-amilia-mobile-app

8. Help center, SmartText powered by Pidj, updated 9 July 2026: two way text and chat, bulk SMS and email, campaigns pulling contacts from programs, activities and memberships, automations, templates, surveys and a built in AI assistant, delivered through Pidj's platform. help.amilia.com/en/articles/9493667-smarttext-powered-by-pidj

9. Newsroom press release dated 25 June 2025, Amilia and Familyworks partner to deliver a more connected mobile experience for families: the ability to white label a mobile app powered by Familyworks, with custom content and tailored user flows, for organizations using SmartRec. www.amilia.com/newsroom

10. Help center, Staff Time Tracking: a timesheet report carrying pay rate and total hours per activity occurrence, hours derived from the staff member's activity schedule, a single base hourly rate per staff member, export to Excel from the Reports tab, and their own note that changing a rate changes the rate shown on past timesheets, with the advice to save the report. help.amilia.com/en/articles/3433654-staff-time-tracking

11. Help center index, the full published article list in English, used for the Staff, Skills, Memberships, Facilities and Integrations sections, including Staff Recruitment, Staff Management, the Amilia App for Staff, Family Account, Family Memberships, Family Multipass, making a skill mandatory for an activity registration, and the Evolia and Ankored partner integrations for staff scheduling, timesheets and compliance. help.amilia.com/llms.txt

12. Help center, The App Store in SmartRec: free and paid apps, apps by Amilia and partner apps, and paid app charges appearing as a line item on the monthly Amilia statement. help.amilia.com/en/articles/4136314-the-app-store-in-smartrec

On assumptions. Only one number on this page is not Amilia's own. The 30 cents per card transaction in the calculator is applied at an assumed average sale of $60, because the transaction count behind a revenue figure is yours and not theirs, and it is labelled as an assumption on the line itself and in the note under it. Their plan prices, their 1%, their card and eCheck rates, their caps and their onboarding floor are all published figures. Where the calculator passes ten thousand active accounts it shows nothing, because past that point Amilia publishes no plan price and no rates at all.

On absence. Where this page says something is not covered by their help center, that is a statement about what Amilia documents in public and not a claim about what their software can be made to do. That applies to the substitute run in particular. Ask them directly, ask us, and take both answers in writing. Claims about Recess describe Recess's own product.

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