Recess vs Gymdesk
Gymdesk is simple, cheap, and unusually open about what it charges: a published price by active member count, with every feature on every tier. Free against $75 a month is not the argument here. The argument is what your own app costs, and whether your school runs on memberships and a weekly schedule or on terms, seasons and families.
Every Gymdesk figure below was read on Gymdesk's own pricing page, feature pages 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, do not move to us, and we would say so on the first call.
Both products are sold the same way, which is rarer than it sounds: one version, everything in it, no tier to climb. The difference is the shape underneath. Gymdesk is built around a member on a membership who turns up to a weekly schedule. Recess is built around a program someone enrolls in for a term, and around a parent paying for two children out of one balance.
The rows where the answer is not the same.
Gymdesk can change its prices and features at any time. Everything in their column was read on their own pages on 30 August 2026, and where they publish no figure this page says so instead of guessing.
It is simple, it is cheap, and the price is printed on the website. A school of fifty runs the entire platform for $75 a month with every feature in it, unlimited staff accounts and a gym website included, and nobody has to sit through a quote to find that out. Thirty days free without a card, month to month, no setup fee, no exit fee, and your records export themselves when you go.
That is a real virtue and it is rarer than it should be. If what you want is one small predictable bill and software that does not ask you to think about it, Gymdesk is good at exactly that, and nothing further down this page is going to argue you out of it.
Your own app on the App Store, under your own name, included. On Gymdesk that is the Branded Member App add-on: $100 a month once the app is live, on top of Apple's $99 a year and Google's one-off $25, with your business registering for a D-U-N-S number and an organization developer account at both stores before anything can be submitted. For a school on the $100 plan the add-on doubles the software bill. On Recess it is not an add-on, because there is no version of Recess without it.
Terms, seasons and families are objects in Recess, not things you assemble. Gymdesk's own help center builds a multi-day seminar out of a membership with specific dates, a dedicated sign-up form and an automation that attaches the waiver. That works, and plenty of gyms are content with it. But if your autumn is a twelve week term, if a parent enrolls two children in different programs and pays one balance, if a missed week becomes a make-up credit, and if a class should not be bookable until a child has the prerequisite, you want those to be built in rather than built by you.
Add up both sides honestly.
Gymdesk publishes everything, which makes this section short and makes us respect them for it. The plan is priced by active member count: $75 up to fifty, $100 from fifty-one to a hundred, $150 from a hundred and one to two hundred, $200 from two hundred and one to four hundred. Past four hundred it is Enterprise and no number is published. Visitors, frozen members, cancelled members and prospects are not counted. Each additional location is $50 a month.
Do the fees stack? Yes, and only in ways they tell you about. Card processing sits outside the plan. Gymdesk Payments, their built-in US option, publishes 2.9% plus 30 cents a card transaction, 3.5% on American Express and 1% on ACH. If you bring your own processor instead, Gymdesk adds nothing on top of that processor's rate.
Three things are priced above the plan, and all three are on their own pricing page or in their help center: the Branded Member App at $100 a month, door access at $100 a month for up to three doors and $29 for each door after that with hardware quoted separately, and SMS. Texting is the one where no number is published: a monthly fee for your texting number plus a per-message rate, plus a one-off 10DLC brand and campaign registration and a monthly campaign fee passed through from the carrier. Ask for those figures in writing for your own region before you budget for texting.
Every figure in that card is Gymdesk's own published price. It excludes card processing and it excludes texting, because texting has no published rate. The same school on Recess pays nothing, and its app sits in the same two stores under the same name.
Now the part we would rather say ourselves than have you work out later. If you do not want your own app and you do not text your members, Gymdesk at a hundred members is $1,200 a year. That is a small number, and free is only $1,200 better. Recess earns about 5% from the member at checkout instead, which is a different trade rather than a free lunch: your prices carry a fee your members can see, and processing stops coming out of your revenue. Whether that suits you depends on your volume and on how you feel about the total at checkout. Do the arithmetic on your own numbers before believing anyone, us included.
Two sliders, and their published rates.
Their side uses Gymdesk's published tier table and Gymdesk Payments' published 2.9% plus 30 cents. Only one assumption appears anywhere on this page: a $110 average transaction, used solely to count the 30 cent fee. The percentage is their number, not ours. Texting is left out because they publish no rate for it.
Skip the branded app and that comes down to $5,769 a year. One caveat we would rather put here than bury: that is your side of the ledger only. On Recess your members pay a service fee of about 5% at checkout, and on most volumes that is the larger of the two numbers. The software is free for the studio, not for the transaction, and you should price with that in mind.
The things people email us about Gymdesk.
A service fee of approximately 5% paid by the member at checkout, out of which card and bank processing is covered rather than billed to you on top. There is no plan, no member count, no add-on and no setup fee, and no part of the product is held back for a higher tier. Gymdesk's free offer is a thirty day trial, which is a different thing.
Some of it, honestly. Gymdesk has fewer moving parts because it does fewer things, and there is real comfort in that. Recess carries more surface because it runs terms, camps, families, progression, staff pay and your own app in one place. If your school is fifty adults on a monthly membership turning up to a weekly schedule, that extra surface is weight you would be carrying for nothing, and you should stay where you are.
A member app is included on every plan. Your own listing on the App Store and Google Play under your business name is a separate add-on, published on their pricing page at $100 a month, first month free, billed once the app is live. Their setup article adds Apple's $99 a year developer program, Google's one-off $25 registration, a D-U-N-S number for your business, an organization developer account at both stores, and two to four weeks to launch. On Recess that listing is included and we do the publishing.
It is $50 a month at each published step: passing fifty active members takes you from $75 to $100, passing a hundred takes you to $150, passing two hundred takes you to $200. Past four hundred, Gymdesk publishes no price and points you to sales. Frozen, cancelled and prospective members are not counted, and their pricing page is clear about that. On Recess there is no member count anywhere in the pricing, so growing costs you nothing.
On Recess, nothing extra: two-way text and email are in the product with no per-message fee. On Gymdesk, email and push notifications are included and SMS is a usage-based add-on, a monthly fee for your texting number plus a per-message rate added to your invoice, plus a one-off 10DLC brand and campaign registration and a monthly campaign fee passed through from the carrier at no markup. Gymdesk does not publish those rates and says they vary by region, so ask for yours in writing.
Yes, and better than most. You define a program, style the belts and stripes in your own colors, and set promotion requirements from any combination of sessions attended in rank, hours trained, days in rank, days actually trained and skills, with a promotion report and a notification when someone is ready to test. If ranks are the only reason you are looking around, that is not a reason to move.
Easier than most, because Gymdesk does not fight you on the way out. They charge nothing to cancel and nothing to export, and members, attendance history, payment records, waivers and documents come out self-serve in standard files. Our team runs the migration from there, so nobody at your school ends up managing a project.
No, and there is no monthly fee to justify at that size, which is usually what talks a small school out of better software. The size we are wrong for is the other end, past about a hundred locations.
Every Gymdesk figure on this page was read on Gymdesk's own website and help center on 30 August 2026, not on a review site, in a roundup or from memory. Gymdesk can change its prices, add-ons and features at any time. Verify anything here that matters to your decision.
Sources, numbered as they are footnoted above. 1. gymdesk.com/pricing, for the tier table and its $75, $100, $150 and $200 prices, the 400-plus Enterprise tier, unlimited staff accounts, the included gym website, the $50 a month per additional location, the Branded Member App and door access add-ons and their prices, the thirty day trial, and no setup, contract or cancellation cost with a free data export. 2. gymdesk.com/platform-overview, for their full published feature list. 3. The Gymdesk Payments FAQ in their help center, for 2.9% plus 30 cents a card transaction, 3.5% on American Express, 1% on ACH, and US-only availability. 4. Their Branded Member App Setup article, for the $100 a month billed once live, the two to four week estimate, the D-U-N-S number, the Apple Developer Program at $99 a year and the Google Play one-off $25 registration. 5. gymdesk.com/features/sms, for SMS as a usage-based add-on and the 10DLC fees. 6. Their Staff Payroll Tracking article, for hourly and session rates, manual hour entry, CSV export, and the statement that Gymdesk does not process payroll, calculate taxes, handle deductions or issue payments. 7. Their Gym Programs And Sports article, for belt styling and promotion requirements. 8. Their Seminars and Bootcamps article, for running a multi-day event as a membership with specific dates. 9. Their Family Accounts article. 10. gymdesk.com/features/payment-processors, for the five other processors and the statement that Gymdesk adds no fee on top of a processor's base rate. 11. Their Creating and Managing Discounts article. 12. gymdesk.com/features/booking, for capacity, booking windows and waitlists.
One assumption, used in one place. The calculator counts Gymdesk's published 30 cent per-transaction fee against an assumed average transaction of $110; the 2.9% beside it is Gymdesk's own published rate and not an estimate. Gymdesk publishes no SMS rate and no Enterprise price, so neither appears in any total on this page.