Recess vs Momence
Momence is a broad, modern platform, and its automation is the strongest thing in this category: sequences, a spot filler, and AI agents that hold real conversations with members on text, email and WhatsApp. The gap is not the feature list. It is which tier a feature sits on, what gets billed on top of the plan, and what a household with two children actually costs to run.
Every Momence figure on this page was read on momence.com and help.momence.com on 31 August 2026, and each one is named at the foot of the page.
Recess has no monthly platform fee, no add-ons and no setup cost. It earns roughly 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.
Recess is not built for chains past about a hundred locations. Momence sells to franchise and corporate groups and documents a franchise royalty fee and a corporate dashboard for exactly that. Past that size they are the better answer, and we would say so on the first call.
Who each one suits, plainly. Momence is at its best when the work is outbound: filling a 7am class that still has four spots, chasing an intro offer that never converted, answering a freeze request at midnight. Recess is at its best when the work is a roster: a nine week term billed in installments, an older child in the competition group and a younger one who is not, one account paying for both, and a class that will not let a student book it until they are ready for it.
What is in the plan, and what is billed on top.
Momence publishes its plan prices and its card rates by country, which is more than most of this category manages. What it does not publish is the price of the add-ons, and their pricing page hangs an information icon on every plan card that changes what the card appears to say. Everything below was read on their own pages on 31 August 2026.
Their automation is the best in this category and it is not close. Sequences send the messages, raise the staff tasks and run the logic; Spotfiller texts the right members when a class still has spots; and their Sales Agent and Support Agent hold real conversations on text, email, WhatsApp and in-app messaging, converting a lead, moving a booking, freezing a membership and handling a refund without anybody on your team touching it.
If a real share of your revenue comes out of that machine, staying is a defensible decision and nothing further down this page outweighs it. Recess has a lead agent and sequences of its own, and we would happily put them side by side, but Momence has been building this longer and it shows.
Your own name on the App Store, included, instead of $250 a month. Momence is unusually direct about this price, so we can quote it: a branded app comes "at an additional cost of $250 per month on top of your existing Momence subscription", you request it by emailing support, and their own list of limits says they cannot change the font, the background color, or more than two colors. On Recess every studio gets an app carrying its own name, logo and colors, published to the App Store and Google Play under its own listing, from the first day, at no cost.
And every feature, free, permanently. The information icon on Momence's free Basic card and on its $60 Pro card carries one identical sentence: "No add-ons possible, no phone number, no inbox, no retail products, no reporting/insights, no staff members, no locations." Their help center adds that sending a single email to 75 recipients or more requires the Marketing Suite, activated from the App Store, and that text messaging is sold in tiers you move up and down like a phone plan. On Recess a studio with sixty members runs exactly the same software as one with six hundred, and there is nothing to activate.
Their free plan is their most expensive one.
Start with credit where it is due. Momence publishes its plan prices and its card rates, by country, on a page anyone can read without giving up a phone number. Three priced tiers: Basic at nothing a month, Pro at $60, Custom at $199, plus a quote-only fourth column. For the United States they publish 3.9% plus 30 cents on an online card payment, 3.7% plus 5 cents in person, and 1.8% on ACH.
Do the plan rate and the card rate stack? Yes, and the $199 tier is what proves it. That card's rate line reads "No fee" and its feature bullet reads "No fees on payments", and the same card still carries the line "Standard payment processing fees (see rates below)". The only reading under which all three are true at once is that the percentage is Momence's own take and card processing is charged separately on top. One thing to note about how you find that out: the processing line is not printed on the card. It is the contents of a tooltip behind an information icon, so an owner scanning the page sees "5% on you" and nothing else.
Which makes the cheapest plan the one that takes the most. On a $100 online card sale, Basic costs the studio $5.00 to Momence plus $3.90 and 30 cents to process, so $9.20. Pro costs $2.50 plus the same $4.20, so $6.70, with $60 a month behind it. Custom costs the $4.20 alone, with $199 a month behind it. Our arithmetic on their published rates puts the crossover at roughly $2,400 a month in card revenue, above which the free plan costs more than the $60 one, and roughly $4,000 a month, above which the free plan costs more than the $199 one.
One line on the free plan is never explained. Underneath "5% on you", Basic also lists "4% on the client". That row appears on Basic only; Pro and Custom publish a business-side rate and no client-side charge. Nowhere on momence.com or in their help center is there a sentence saying what the client-side 4% is, when a member meets it, or whether they see it. We are not going to guess on their behalf. Ask them.
Three more things carry a price, and only one of them is published. A branded app is $250 a month. Texting is sold in tiers billed in Twilio segments, where running out drops your messages to email until you upgrade, where upgrades and downgrades take effect immediately, and where, in their words, "no refunds are provided" for segments you paid for and did not send. And the add-ons in their App Store, which is where the Marketing Suite and Belt Tracking and Tuition Ledgers live, have no published prices at all.
On the consumer app, their own two pages say different things, so here are both. Momence's homepage says the Momence app is "strictly a booking app", that a customer only sees your business if it is the one they have visited, and that "customers cannot search for other businesses on the Momence app". Their help center says that if you are on the Custom plan your business is discoverable, and that a new customer sees nearby custom studios and can search for one. Whichever is current, this is a smaller thing than a marketplace, and Recess has no consumer app of any kind.
Read the leaving terms, because they are not on the website. No terms of service is published on momence.com; the footer links a privacy policy PDF. What their billing article does say is that an account with no active contract can be cancelled straight away from a self-service portal, that an account with an active contract can only request cancellation after the date written into its terms, and that an individual app may have "a set number of months remaining" before its deactivate button even appears. Ask for the term length and the exit terms in writing before you sign.
Recess is one thing at one price. No plan to choose, no seat count, no setup fee, no exit fee, and 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 a trade and not a free lunch, and you should see both halves of it. Your members carry a fee they would not carry on a monthly subscription. If you would rather absorb the cost yourself and keep the checkout total clean, that is a legitimate reason to pick a subscription instead. Do the arithmetic on your own volume before you believe anyone, us included.
All three of their tiers, against nothing.
Every figure below is built from Momence's own published rates. Processing is their United States online card rate of 3.9% plus 30 cents, on an assumed average sale of $60. Basic and Pro carry no location multiplier because their own tooltip lists no locations on either tier. The branded app, the SMS tiers and every App Store add-on are left out because their prices are either extra or unpublished, so the real gap is wider than what you see here rather than narrower.
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 the other half of the trade, and it belongs on the page next to the number above rather than in a footnote nobody reads.
The seven that actually settle it.
The catch is at the checkout, and it is the only one. Recess earns a service fee of approximately 5% paid by the member when they pay you, and card and bank processing is covered by Recess out of that fee rather than billed to you. There is no plan, no seat count, no setup cost, no add-on and nothing waiting on a higher tier. If you would rather your members paid nothing extra and you carried a monthly bill instead, that is a real and reasonable preference, and a subscription platform serves it better.
You will lose their particular version of it, and that is the honest answer. Momence has been building sequences, Spotfiller and their two AI agents for years and it is the strongest part of their product. Recess runs sequences, campaigns, audiences, tags, pop-ups and referral rewards, and an AI lead agent that answers inquiries and books trials on its own. Ask us to run your own follow-up scenario in a demo rather than taking either company's word for it.
Read the tooltip on their pricing page before you assume the free one. The information icon on Basic and on the $60 Pro card says the same thing about both: no add-ons possible, no phone number, no inbox, no retail products, no reporting or insights, no staff members, no locations. If you need staff accounts, reporting, a second site or anything from their App Store, the tiers that carry them start at $199 a month. That is worth pricing honestly before comparing anything to zero.
Their free Basic plan lists "4% on the client" directly beneath "5% on you". That line appears on the Basic card only; Pro and Custom publish a business-side rate and nothing on the client side. What the 4% is, and whether a member ever sees it, is not explained anywhere on their site or in their help center, so we will not characterize it for them. On Recess the member fee is about 5% at checkout, it applies on every plan because there is only one, and we say so on every page.
Yes, and it is one of the better things they have built. Their Tuition Ledgers group a season's semesters and courses, bill them in installments, apply discounts by number of children or number of bookings or hours a week, cap the total, charge a registration fee per child, and re-prorate automatically when somebody joins late or drops a class. Two things to check on their own pages: the ledger is an app you switch on from Apps and Integrations, and their pricing tooltip says no add-ons are possible on Basic or Pro.
The migration is automated and our team runs it, so your students, their ranks, their attendance history and your billing details come across without you managing a project. The list of systems we move studios off is not limited to Momence; Mindbody, Mariana Tek, Jackrabbit, PushPress and others are routine. Before you leave anywhere, check the contract you signed for a term length and a notice period, since Momence publishes neither on its website.
No. Independent single-site studios and schools are exactly who Recess is built for, and at that size there is no monthly fee to justify to yourself every month. The end we are wrong for is the other one, past about a hundred locations, where centralized franchise tooling matters more than we can serve. We would tell you that on the first call rather than after you had moved.
Every Momence claim on this page was read on momence.com and help.momence.com on 31 August 2026, not from review sites, roundups, app store ratings or summaries. Their pricing page carries no asterisk, no footnote and no small print, so the figures quoted here are the whole of what it says. Momence changes its product and its packaging, so verify anything that decides it for you.
1. momence.com/pricing, for the four cards, the $0, $60 and $199 prices, the rate lines "5% on you", "4% on the client", "2.5% on you" and "No fee", the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada processing rates, and the two tooltips: "Standard payment processing fees (see rates below)" on all four cards, and "No add-ons possible, no phone number, no inbox, no retail products, no reporting/insights, no staff members, no locations." on Basic and Pro. The same block appears on their homepage. 2. Retreats, Tiers, Semesters, Workshops FAQ's, for semesters, courses, workshops, retreats, payment plans, ticket tiers and pro-rating. 3. Tuition Ledgers Overview, for installments, discounts by children, bookings or hours, the tuition cap and the per-child registration fee. 4. Child Account Setup / FAQ's. 5. Customer Onboarding / FAQ's, for the child's own confirmed email address and the subscription sharing condition. 6. Belt Tracking, Customer Rankings, or Challenges, for auto promotion, mass promotions, item variants, labels and the ranking report.
7. The momence.com homepage feature list, for Sequences, the Inbox, Reporting, on-demand and LMS, recital and costume management, workouts, spot scheduling and the rest. 8. Spotfiller. 9. Momence AI Agents FAQs, for what the Sales Agent and Support Agent do and the channels they work on. 10. Customer Communication FAQ's, for the SMS tiers, Twilio segments, the fallback to email, the immediate effect of an upgrade or downgrade, the words "no refunds are provided", and the 75 recipient email limit that requires the Marketing Suite. 11. Request a Branded App (Custom Mobile App), updated 21 August 2026, for the $250 a month, the email request and the customization limits. 12. The momence.com homepage Mobile app block, for "strictly a booking app" and customers not being able to search for other businesses, alongside Customer mobile app FAQ's, which says a Custom plan business is discoverable and searchable. 13. How do I Get Help from Momence Support?, for support being available 24 hours a day Monday through Friday UTC. 14. Where to find your contract, your billing history + how to add or remove apps, for the self-service cancellation, the active contract condition and an app's remaining months. 15. Momence Policies and Procedures, last updated June 2026, which names "data migration calls" among the channels its code of conduct covers. 16. The "Switch to Momence" link in their own navigation, which points at the homepage anchor named migration, where the content is "Meet our specialists" and a Book a Demo button.
What is our arithmetic rather than theirs. The $9.20, $6.70 and $4.20 figures for a $100 online card sale are calculated from Momence's own published rates; Momence never states a combined number. The crossover points of roughly $2,400 and roughly $4,000 a month are ours too. The calculator assumes an average sale of $60 to turn revenue into a count of 30 cent transaction charges, and leaves out the branded app, the SMS tiers and every App Store add-on, so its totals are floors rather than quotes.
Where this page says something is not published, that is a statement about their website and help center rather than about their software. Their help center publishes its own index of every article; it listed 268 English articles when it was read on 31 August 2026, and a search of it for the word surcharge returns nothing at all. Nothing in it explains the client-side 4%, prices an App Store add-on, or sets out a migration process or a contract length. No terms of service could be located at momence.com/terms, /terms-of-service or /legal/terms, and momence.com/sitemap.xml returns a 404. Momence may well answer all of these on a sales call. Ask them, and ask for it in writing.