Recess vs DanceStudio-Pro
DanceStudio-Pro, now trading as Studio Pro, has run dance registration, costume season and recital week for a long time, and it is good at it. The difference is what you pay for everything that is not registration. Recess has no plan, no add-on and no charge for your own app, and it earns its money at the checkout instead.
Every DanceStudio-Pro claim on this page was read on their own website and help center on 30 August 2026, and is footnoted at the bottom.
Recess has no monthly platform fee, no add-ons and no setup cost. It earns roughly 5% paid by the member at checkout, with card and bank processing covered by Recess out of that fee.
Recess is not built for chains past about a hundred locations. If that is you, this is the wrong page, and we would say so on the first call.
Who each one suits, plainly. DanceStudio-Pro is a dance incumbent with a genuine costume and recital workflow behind it, and a flat published plan that starts at $49 a month. Recess is one product with nothing priced above it, including a native app carrying your studio's name. Both will run a nine month season. They charge for it very differently, and the gap widens in June.
Twelve rows, and only some of them are close.
Everything in the DanceStudio-Pro column was read on gostudiopro.com or on their Zendesk help center on 30 August 2026. They can change any of it without telling us, and some help center articles are older than others, so check anything that decides your answer.
Costume season and recital week are theirs. The Costume Console assigns a costume to a class, lets parents enter their own sizes, turns that into the order list you hand the vendor, and prints the labels. The Recital Wizard sets who is in the show, emails each dancer her act details and gives you the program list. Ticket-Pro sells assigned seats off a real venue chart with tiered pricing by row and section. All of that is on the $49 plan.
Recess bills costume fees and recital fees to the card the family already has on file, once for each class the dancer is performing in. It does not have a costume ordering console and it does not have a seating chart. If your June is two shows in a nine hundred seat theatre with a costume vendor deadline in March, that gap is the whole decision, and nothing further down this page outweighs it.
Your studio's name on the App Store, and no line item for it. The Portal and Manager apps that come with every Studio Pro plan are Studio Pro's apps. Their own help center puts it plainly: you can use them at no extra cost, "but it will not be branded for your studio." A studio-branded native app is a separate product, MyApp-Pro, built by their partner MobileInventor, and their published fee schedule lists it at $69 a month plus a $169 development fee, on top of the $99 a year Apple charges for the developer account. That is $997 in the first year and $828 in every year after, before the plan. On Recess every studio gets its own listing on the App Store and Google Play, under its own name, from the first day, at no charge.
And nothing sitting on a higher plan. The tools a dance studio reaches for second are the ones priced above Essentials on their own published breakdown. Two-way messaging with families and per-user permissions start at Premier, $79 a month. Lead capture, landing pages, trial to enrollment automations and the two-way texting inbox start at Elite, $165 a month, which is three and a third times the entry price. On Recess a studio with forty dancers runs exactly the software a studio with six hundred runs, and the number at the bottom does not move.
Where the money actually goes.
Studio Pro publishes all three plan prices, which is more than most of this category does, and they deserve the credit for it. Essentials is $49 a month, Premier $79 and Elite $165. The price is flat rather than per student, unlimited students are included on every plan, and their help center documents adding further locations inside a single account, so the plan price does not obviously scale with your size.
The plan fee and the card fee stack, and they say so themselves. Their payment processing page publishes a starting rate: fees start at 2.66% plus $0.25 for US merchants on their own Stripe-powered Merchant Services. If you would rather keep the Stripe, PayPal or Authorize.net account you already have, Studio Pro charges a tech fee of 1.35% per transaction and your own processor's rate applies on top of that. They state that the 1.35% is the only fee they add in that case, and that the third-party rate is yours to negotiate. Tap to Pay runs at the same 2.66% plus $0.25, and the M2 reader is $55 plus tax.
They also publish a per-ticket fee, and it reaches further than most owners expect. Ticket-Pro is $1.00 a ticket. Their help center states that the fee applies to all ticket transactions, that a ticket set to sell at $0.00 still carries it because the system is still creating and distributing the ticket, that a free ticket made with a promo code carries it too, and that it applies to tickets sold in person for cash or a check. It appears on your balance on the 1st of the following month, and you can turn on a convenience fee to recover it from the buyer.
Seven hundred seats is two ordinary shows in a mid-size theatre. The figure does not change if you comp a row to the grandparents or take a payment at the door in cash, and it lands on your account whether or not you passed the fee to the families. You may well decide that is worth paying for assigned seating and a Recital Wizard. It is simply not a number that appears anywhere on the pricing page.
Recess is one thing at one price. No plan to pick, no seat count, no setup fee, no per-ticket fee, and nothing behind a paywall inside the product. Recess earns a service fee of approximately 5% paid by the member at checkout, with card and bank processing covered out of that.
That is not automatically cheaper for you, and we would rather say it than let you discover it. Forty-nine dollars a month is a small plan fee by any standard, and if your families are price-sensitive and you would rather carry the cost yourself than have it appear at the checkout, a flat subscription is a genuinely different trade rather than a worse one. Run the arithmetic on your own season before believing anybody, us included.
Your season, in their published fees.
Their side uses the Essentials plan at $49 a month, their published starting processing rate of 2.66% plus $0.25, and the published Ticket-Pro fee of $1.00 a ticket. One assumption here is ours rather than theirs: an average transaction of $100, which is what turns your monthly revenue into a count of card charges.
Your families pay a service fee of about 5% at the 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 whole point of putting it on the screen is that you can weigh both halves of it.
What dance owners actually ask us about this one.
Yes. dancestudio-pro.com now redirects to gostudiopro.com, and the company brands itself Studio Pro across its pricing, feature and support pages. The DanceStudio-Pro name still appears in places on their own site and throughout their help center, which is why both names are used on this page.
The catch is where the money comes from. Recess earns a service fee of approximately 5% paid by the member at checkout, and card and bank processing is covered out of that rather than billed to the studio on top. There is no plan to choose, no per-student pricing, no setup fee and nothing waiting on a higher tier. If you would rather absorb that cost yourself than have it appear at the checkout, that is a fair reason to prefer a monthly subscription.
Yes, and we are not going to soften that. Recess bills costume fees and recital fees to the card the family already has on file, once for each class the dancer is performing in, and recital tickets bill the same way with no per-ticket fee attached. What Recess does not have is a costume ordering console with parent-entered sizes and printed labels, or a venue seating chart with assigned seats. If your recital week runs on those, stay where you are.
Not on any plan. The Portal and Manager apps included with every Studio Pro subscription are Studio Pro's own apps, and their help center says of them that it will not be branded for your studio. A studio-branded native app is a separate product, MyApp-Pro, built by their partner MobileInventor, listed in their own published fee schedule at $69 a month plus a $169 development fee, and it needs an Apple Developer account at $99 a year. On Recess a branded app on the App Store and Google Play is part of the product from the first day.
On Studio Pro, Robo-Texter is on all three plans, sends one way from the studio out to parents, and costs $0.02 a message with a $1 minimum per send. The two-way SMS Conversations inbox sits on Elite at $165 a month, in the United States and Canada only, and includes 3,000 messages a month with $0.02 each beyond that. On Recess messaging, sequences and campaigns are part of the product and nothing is metered per message.
Yes, and this is one to be fair about. Their help center documents a default hourly rate and alternate rates per staff member, paying a teacher by class instead of by hour, a special rate on one individual class, special season rates, a mobile time clock a teacher opens from a link with no login at all, administrator approval before payroll runs, and a staff report showing who was paid how much. That is a real payroll workflow rather than a checkbox, and anyone telling you otherwise has not read their documentation.
No. Independent single-location studios are exactly who Recess is built for, and there is no monthly fee to justify at ninety dancers. The end of the market we are wrong for is the other one, past roughly a hundred locations.
Every DanceStudio-Pro claim on this page was read on their own website or their own Zendesk help center on 30 August 2026. Nothing here comes from a review site, a roundup or a summary. They can change prices, plans and features without telling anyone, and some help center articles were last updated more recently than others, so verify anything that decides your answer. Where a fee below carries a date, that is the date their own article was last updated.
1. Plans, prices, tier breakdown, unlimited students, the 30 day trial and the free student import: gostudiopro.com/pricing.
2. The 2.66% plus $0.25 starting rate, the 1.35% tech fee on third-party processors, Tap to Pay and the $55 M2 reader: gostudiopro.com/payment-processing and gostudiopro.com/feature-payment-processing.
3. Customized apps offered through their partner at extra cost: gostudiopro.com/mobile-apps.
4. The published add-on fee schedule, including MyApp-Pro at $69 a month plus a $169 development fee and a $99 annual Apple Developer account, Robo-Texter at $0.02 a text and Ticket-Pro at $1.00 a ticket: help center, "What are your fees?", updated 20 July 2026.
5. The included apps not being branded for your studio: help center, "What is the Studio Pro Studio Manager App?"
6. Costume Console, assigning a costume to a class, parents entering sizes, the order list and printed costume labels: help center, "Studio Pro Setup Guide: Costume Console", "How do I assign a costume to class", "Can I have parents enter the sizes for their costumes", "How do I know what costumes I need to order" and "How do I print costume labels".
7. The Recital Wizard, act details emailed to dancers and the printed program list, plus assigned seating and tiered pricing by row and section: help center, "How do I manage my recital", "Can I email students their act details from the Recital Wizard", "How do I download a list of recital students for my printed program", "What is Ticket-Pro?" and "How do I set up Ticket-Pro?"
8. The $1.00 per ticket fee and the option to pass it on as a convenience fee: help center, "Studio Pro Learning Lab: Ticket-Pro", updated 15 January 2026.
9. The fee applying to $0.00 tickets, promo-code tickets and tickets sold in person for cash or a check: help center, "Do I get charged if I sell free tickets?" and "How do I let parents buy tickets with cash or check?"
10. The fee being collected on the 1st of the following month: help center, "How do I pass on Ticket-Pro fees to the customer?", updated 31 July 2026.
11. The Lead Center being available only at the Elite subscription level: help center, "Studio Pro Elite - Lead Center & Leads".
12. Robo-Texter being one way on every plan at $0.02 a text with a $1 minimum: help center, "How is SMS Conversations different from Robo-Texter?"
13. SMS Conversations being Elite tier in the United States and Canada, with 3,000 messages included: help center, "What is Studio Pro SMS Conversations?", updated 19 February 2026, and the pricing page footnote.
14. Default and alternate hourly rates per staff member: help center, "How do I enter multiple hourly rates for a Staff Member?"
15. Paying by class rather than by hour, a special rate on an individual class, and special season rates: help center, "Can I pay a Teacher per Class instead of per hour?", "What if I pay teachers a different amount for certain classes?" and "Can I have separate rates for certain classes?"
16. The mobile time clock, the no-login access link and administrator approval before payroll: help center, "How to Let Teachers Log and Track Their Own Hours (Mobile Time Clock Setup)".
17. The staff payroll report: help center, "How do I see Payroll History for my Staff?" and "How do I enter hours for teacher payroll?"
18. Skills and Abilities tracked per student, and class goals: help center, "How do I track student Skills and Abilities?"
19. Required skills blocking online enrollment: help center, "How do I make a certain skill required to register for a class?"
20. Teacher report cards shared to the parent portal: help center, "What is the Class Manager?" and "How do I show Report Cards on the Parent Portal?"
21. Administrator, Manager, Super User and Normal roles, and pay rate data being hidden behind a Payroll Detail permission: help center, "What do different users get to see?" Individual user permissions starting at Premier is from the pricing page.
Assumptions, marked here because they are ours and not theirs. The calculator converts monthly revenue into a count of card charges using an assumed average transaction of $100; Studio Pro publishes no such figure. The first-year MyApp-Pro total of $997 is their published $169 development fee plus twelve months at $69 plus the $99 Apple charges for a developer account, and it excludes the plan itself. The $749 recital example uses a seat count we chose, not one they publish, and stops before card processing.
One thing we deliberately left out. Their pricing page lists a dedicated studio phone number as an Elite feature, while a help center article updated in March 2026 says every studio in the United States and Canada now receives a unique texting number at no additional cost and that this was previously an Elite-only feature. Both statements are theirs and we are not going to use the gap between them as an argument, so no claim on this page rests on it.