Recess vs Arketa
Arketa is a modern boutique platform for yoga, pilates and group fitness, and the client facing side of it is genuinely well made. The difference shows up the moment a family is involved. Recess is one product with nothing above it to upgrade to, and it is built around terms, enrollments and several children under one account.
Every Arketa figure on this page was read on arketa.com and help.arketa.com on 30 August 2026, and each one is traced to its source at the bottom.
Recess has no monthly platform fee, no per feature add-ons and no setup cost. It earns a service fee of approximately 5% paid by the member at checkout, and card and bank processing is covered by Recess out of that fee.
Recess is not built for groups past about a hundred locations. Under that, this is a fair fight. Over it, keep looking, and we would tell you so on a first call rather than after you signed.
Arketa lists eleven kinds of business on its own site: solopreneur, single location, multi location, yoga, pilates and Lagree, group fitness, gym, recovery and wellness, personal training, spin and massage. Every one of them is an adult booking a class for themselves, and Arketa is good at that. If a parent is enrolling two children in a twelve week term and paying for both from one card, the shape of the software starts to matter more than the shape of the schedule.1
The line where a boutique platform stops.
Every claim in the right hand column was read on Arketa's own pricing page, feature pages or help center. Where they publish a number it is quoted. Where they do not, this page says so instead of guessing.
Arketa has built the best looking client experience in this category, and the pieces fit because one team made all of them. The booking page keeps your colors and your fonts and never hands a client off to somebody else's checkout. The branded app is designed rather than wrapped around a web page. The website builder, the schedule and the payments are one system, so a booking taken on your site is already in your dashboard.
If the problem you are actually solving is that your studio looks borrowed at the moment a client pays, stay where you are. That is the thing Arketa is best at, and nothing further down this page outweighs it.
Your own app, on the App Store, under your own name, included. On Arketa the custom branded iOS and Android app sits on Studio Suite, their top plan, and on the add-on list beside it, and no price is published for either route. It gates more than the icon: their own Challenges and Achievements page says those run with the Branded App and the Marketing Suite. On Recess every studio is published to the Apple App Store and Google Play under its own listing from day one, with challenges, progress and push notifications inside it, at no cost.
And every feature, free, permanently. Read Arketa's own plan cards downward and the ladder is plain: point of sale, staff management and payroll reporting start at Studio Core; email and text campaigns, automated workflows and the lead pipeline start at Studio Growth; the app, the website and the ad integrations start at Studio Suite; accounting and bookkeeping sit alongside as add-ons. On Recess a studio with sixty members runs the same software as one with six hundred, and there is no plan above the one you are on to be moved onto later.
One published rate, and three that are not.
Arketa publishes exactly one price on its pricing page: $49 a month for the Individual plan, billed annually, covering one team member login and one location. The card notes that annual billing saves 17%, and the month to month figure is not shown. Studio Core, Studio Growth and Studio Suite all read "Custom, request a demo for pricing", and every one of those cards sends you to a demo.
Do the platform fee and the card fee stack? Yes, and Arketa answers that itself rather than making you find out. Their pricing FAQ says it in one line: their Individual partners are charged 3% along with Stripe's fees. Their feature table prints both halves in the same column, an Arketa transaction fee of 3% and a Stripe rate of 2.9% plus 30 cents. That is unusually straight for this category and it deserves saying so out loud.
What is not published is the part a real studio pays. On the Studio plans the transaction fee row reads "Let's talk", and the same FAQ sends studio partners to an Account Executive. So both numbers that decide a studio's bill, the monthly fee and the percentage, are settled in a conversation. None of the five add-ons carries a published price either. That is not dishonesty, it is a sales model, but it means you should get all of it in writing before you sign anything.
The $49 sits underneath all of that, and at any real volume it is the small half of the bill. A studio taking in $12,000 a month on the Individual plan pays $588 a year in plan fees and about $9,500 a year in transaction and processing fees, on an average sale of $45. This is a different shape of cost from a platform whose headline is its monthly price, and it is why the slider below moves the way it does.
Recess is one thing at one price. No plan to pick, no seat count, no setup fee, nothing behind a paywall inside the product. Recess earns a service fee of approximately 5% paid by the member at checkout, and card and bank processing is covered by Recess out of that fee.
That is not automatically cheaper for you, and we would rather say so here than have you work it out later. A fee the member pays is a different trade from a fee you absorb, and some owners would rather keep the checkout total clean and pay a subscription. Run the arithmetic on your own volume before believing anybody, us included.
Try it on the number your studio actually turns over.
Their side uses only the rates Arketa publishes: the $49 Individual plan billed annually, their 3% transaction fee, and the Stripe rate printed beside it. It leaves out refunds, international cards, add-ons and everything on the Studio plans, whose fees are not published. Treat it as their floor rather than their price.
Your members pay a service fee of about 5% at checkout on Recess, which is how the software is free for the studio. That is a real trade rather than a free lunch, and the point of putting both sides on one screen is that you can weigh it.
The questions a pilates and yoga owner asks first.
Actually free, permanently, with every feature included. There is no plan to choose, no add-on to buy and nothing waiting on a higher tier. Recess earns a service fee of approximately 5% paid by the member at checkout, and card and bank processing is covered by Recess out of that fee rather than billed to you on top.
Arketa's booking flow and branded surfaces are the best in this category and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What you get on Recess instead is your own app on the App Store and Google Play from day one at no cost, with your name, logo and colors, rather than an app that begins on their top plan. Look at both and judge the design yourself. If the polish of the booking page is the single thing your decision turns on, that is a fair reason to stay.
Yes, and anyone telling you otherwise has not read their help center. Arketa has family sharing: a household can share a package or membership, a parent can sign the liability waiver on a child's behalf, and a child without an email address gets a placeholder account. Sharing is enabled per pricing option. The difference is what a family is for. On Arketa it is a shared pool of credits. On Recess each child carries their own enrollments, their own tuition and their own progress, paid from one card, which is what a term or a season needs.
Yes. If you are a solo instructor or a single studio teaching adults, your revenue is modest enough that a percentage on every sale costs less than a subscription, and how the booking page looks matters more to you than how a term is enrolled, Arketa is a strong answer and the $49 plan is honest value. We are the better answer when children, terms, progression or several coaches enter the picture, or when the features you need next are the ones sitting on their higher plans.
Recess, and the reason is the plan ladder rather than the price. A new studio needs reporting, two-way messaging, staff records and lead follow-up in its first six months, and on Arketa's own plan cards those are spread across Studio Core, Studio Growth and a paid Marketing Suite. On Recess you get all of it on the day you open, before you have taken a single payment, and there is no plan to outgrow later.
No. There is one version of Recess. It includes two-way messaging by text and email, sequences and campaigns, lead capture and an AI lead agent, client referral rewards, reporting, staff records, shifts and payroll, multiple locations, and your own client app published under your own listing. There is no message allowance to watch and no overage rate.
The Recess team runs it and it is automated. You do not drive an import tool or manage a project. We move your clients, their attendance history, their packages and memberships, and their billing information, and we do the same from Mindbody, Momence, Walla, Glofox and others. Arketa runs a good migration in the other direction too, with a dedicated specialist and a live tracker, so neither of us is asking you to move a spreadsheet by hand.
Every Arketa claim on this page was read on Arketa's own website and help center on 30 August 2026, not on a review site, a roundup or a summary. Arketa can change its plans, features and fees at any time. Verify anything here that matters to your decision, and ask for the Studio numbers in writing.
1. arketa.com/pricing, for the four plans, the $49 Individual price billed annually, the "Custom, request a demo for pricing" wording on Studio Core, Studio Growth and Studio Suite, the five add-ons, the full feature comparison table including the 3% transaction fee, the "Let's talk" Studio rate and the 2.9% plus 30 cents Stripe rate, and the pricing FAQ answer on transaction fees. 2. arketa.com/features/marketing-automations, for the answer that the marketing automation is part of the Marketing Suite, a paid add-on. 3. arketa.com/features/challenges-achievements, for Challenges and Achievements being available with the Branded App and the Marketing Suite. 4. help.arketa.com/clients/profiles/family-sharing, for shared packages and memberships, parents signing waivers for children, placeholder accounts and the Allow Guest Usage setting. 5. help.arketa.com/schedule/class-vs-event, for classes, events and appointments, events not recurring and not redeeming packages by default, semi-private being treated as an appointment, and the guidance to use Communities for multi-day programs. 6. help.arketa.com/settings/business/sub-management, for the sub request flow and the answer that if nobody accepts, the class stays with the original instructor. 7. help.arketa.com/clients/account/milestones, for milestones counting class attendance. 8. help.arketa.com/settings/account/plan-billing, for the 10,000 emails and 2,500 SMS credits, the pause at the limit and the per country segment rates. 9. arketa.com/migrations, for the dedicated specialist, the live tracker and the data they move. 10. help.arketa.com/llms.txt, Arketa's own index of every help center article, used to check which subjects are and are not documented.
This page contains no estimated Arketa rate. Every percentage and dollar figure quoted for Arketa is one they publish themselves. The $6.20 on a $100 sale, the $93.80 worked example and the calculator are arithmetic on those published rates, on the Individual plan, and they exclude refunds, international cards, add-ons and everything on the Studio plans, whose fees Arketa does not publish. The real figure for a studio is therefore likely to be higher than the one shown, not lower.