Recess vs The Studio Director
The Studio Director has been running registration, auto tuition and recital season for dance, gymnastics and cheer studios since long before most of this category existed, and it publishes its whole price list, which almost nobody else here does. The gap is not registration. It is what your families hold in their hand, what the bill does as your student count climbs, and how much of the follow-up you still do by hand.
Every claim about The Studio Director on this page was read on thestudiodirector.com or in their own help center on 30 and 31 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, and card and bank processing is covered out of that.
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. The Studio Director is a long-running registration and tuition system for youth programs, priced by how many students you have, with a published rate card for the software and a published schedule for the card processing. Recess is one product at one price for a studio that wants the app, the messaging, the lead follow-up and the staff pay in the same place, with no plan to pick and no band to move up.
What is different, and what is not.
Everything in The Studio Director column was read on thestudiodirector.com or in their own help center on 30 and 31 August 2026. Their pricing page carries no revision date, their processing schedule is marked effective 10 April 2024, and their most recent release notes are dated 12 August 2026. Check anything that decides it for you.
Auto tuition. Rate groups per class type, a rate for every hours-per-week or classes-per-week combination a student could take, multi-class and additional-class discount models, tag-based rates, a cap on what one family or one student can be charged, prorating and cancelled-class handling, all recalculated overnight. If your fee schedule is a grid you have been refining for fifteen years, that grid already exists in their software.
Recess prices an enrollment on the program it belongs to and applies sibling and multi-class discounts on top. That is a different shape, and moving a long-standing hours-per-week rate table onto it is real work. Ask us to model your own rate card before you weigh anything else on this page.
Your studio's name on the App Store, and no line for it on the invoice. The Studio Director's branded customer app is offered through a partner, Mobile Inventor, behind a consultation form, with no price on it and no mention of it on their pricing table. Their own surfaces are a web Customer Portal for parents and, for staff, a mobile website their help center tells you to reach by editing the portal link so it ends in m.sd. On Recess every studio gets its own app, published to the App Store and Google Play under its own listing, from day one.
And a bill that does not move when you grow. Their published software price climbs through eight bands between the first hundred students and five thousand, with a ninth line above that saying call, and card processing, a daily batch fee and a monthly PCI fee run alongside it. Their own help center article on leads tells you to keep the family and delete the student record, since students are what the price counts. On Recess a studio with sixty students runs the same software as one with six hundred, and the number is zero at both.
Two numbers move, and both of them are yours.
Credit where it is due first. The Studio Director publishes its whole software price list and a full card processing schedule alongside it. Most of this category will not, and a comparison built on a guess is worth less than one built on their own table.
The software price is banded by student count. On the lower column you get for processing payments with them it runs $39 a month at 0 to 100 students, $79 at 101 to 250, $119 at 251 to 500, $149 at 501 to 1,000, $199 at 1,001 to 2,000, $239, $279 and then $319 at 4,001 to 5,000. Software without their payments runs $65 to $329 across the same bands, and above 5,000 students the page says to call. Every band gets every feature and unlimited users, which is worth saying plainly, because plenty of this category holds features back for a higher plan and they do not.
The card price is published as a schedule rather than a headline. Standard pricing, marked effective 10 April 2024, is 2.50% plus $0.30 a transaction, with a 0.14% card brand network assessment bundled into that transaction fee. Alongside it sit a $0.75 fee for each day you process, a $5.95 monthly PCI DSS program fee, ACH at 1.00% plus $0.30, $30 a chargeback, and a card-not-present surcharge of 1.00% listed as applying where applicable. A different page on the same site quotes card processing "as low as 2.49% plus $0.29" and offers a rate review, so the schedule is their standard rather than necessarily your number.
That is before the software. At the smallest band the plan is $39 a month and the PCI program fee is $5.95 a month, which is $539.40 a year before a single card is charged, and the $0.75 batch fee lands on every day you take money. If the 1.00% card-not-present surcharge applies to online registration then the $2.94 becomes $3.94. We do not know whether it does. Their schedule says "if applicable" and does not define the term, so ask them in writing rather than taking our reading of it or theirs.
Recess is one thing at one price. No plan to pick, no student band, no setup fee, no PCI fee, no batch 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 out of that rather than billed to you on top.
That is not automatically cheaper for you, and we would rather say it than let you discover it. Thirty-nine dollars a month is a genuinely small number, and if your families are price-sensitive and you would rather carry the software cost yourself than have a fee appear at their checkout, their entry band is a reasonable trade. Do the arithmetic on your own volume before believing anyone, us included.
Where your studio lands on their table.
Their side uses the Software plus Payments column from their pricing page, their published standard card rate of 2.50% plus $0.30 with the 0.14% assessment bundled in, and the $5.95 monthly PCI program fee. One assumption is ours and it is marked below: the calculator turns monthly revenue into a count of card charges using an average charge of $100, because they publish a percentage rather than a transaction count. The $0.75 daily batch fee is left out entirely, so their real total is higher than the figure shown, never lower.
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 being able to see both sides of it is the whole point of this page.
The things studio owners ask us about this one.
Yes, and more of them than most of this category. Their pricing page lists a monthly software price for eight student bands, from $65 a month at 0 to 100 students up to $329 at 4,001 to 5,000, with a lower figure in every band if you also process payments through them, $39 to $319. A separate payments pricing page publishes the full card and ACH schedule. Above 5,000 students a ninth line says to call.
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 you on top. Your families see that fee. If you would rather absorb a monthly subscription yourself and keep the checkout total clean, that is a real reason to stay where you are, and their entry band is a small number.
In that shape, yes, and we are not going to soften it. Their auto tuition engine holds a rate for every hours-per-week or classes-per-week combination a student could take, grouped by class type, with multi-class discount models, tag-based rates and a maximum tuition cap per family, recalculated overnight. Recess prices an enrollment on the program it belongs to and applies sibling and multi-class discounts on top. Ask us to model your own rate card before you decide, because that is the piece of the move that takes real thought.
Not in the subscription. Their feature list places a custom branded app under Integrations, powered by their partner Mobile Inventor, downloadable from the App Store and Google Play, and the page for it asks you to book a consultation and publishes no price. It does not appear on their pricing table. Their own parent-facing surface is a web Customer Portal, and their own staff surface is a mobile website. On Recess your own app is included from the first day.
On Recess, two-way text and email are included and nothing is metered per message. On The Studio Director, their Text Messaging article, updated 10 July 2025, says the feature is available only to non-US customers and is not working for customers in the US. Where it does run you buy a phone number and pay a monthly number fee plus a per-message fee, listed at $1.00 a month and $0.05 a message on their US and Canada line, families have to opt in, and messages cap at 160 characters. Their release notes through 12 August 2026 do not mention it returning, so ask them where it stands today.
Yes, and this is one to be fair about. Skill charts are created and assigned to a class or a group of classes, instructors record skills from the floor including on the mobile website, and student report cards carry achievements, scores and notes back to the family. Recess covers the same ground with belts, stripes, skills, levels, milestones and a progress view the parent opens inside your own app. It is a difference of shape rather than of presence.
The migration is automated and our team runs it, rather than an import tool you have to drive. We move students, families, enrollment and attendance history, skill records and billing information across, and we do the same from Jackrabbit, iClassPro, DanceStudio-Pro, Akada and others. The part that needs a conversation is your tuition rate table, because their model and ours are shaped differently. That is the first thing we work through on the call.
No. Independent single-location studios are exactly who Recess is built for, and there is no monthly fee to justify at ninety students. At that size their entry band is $39 a month with payments, which is a small number, so run the calculator above on your own card volume rather than on the plan fee alone. The end of the market Recess is wrong for is the other one, past about a hundred locations.
Every claim about The Studio Director on this page was read on thestudiodirector.com or in their own help center at support.thestudiodirector.com, on 30 and 31 August 2026. Nothing here comes from a review site, a roundup or a summary. They can change any of it without telling us, their pricing page carries no revision date, and some help center articles are more than a year old, so the dates are given wherever we have them. This page is about The Studio Director at thestudiodirector.com, which is a different company from DanceStudio-Pro, now trading as Studio Pro.
1. The eight priced student bands, the software-only and software-plus-payments columns, the call for pricing line above 5,000 students, no setup fee, the 30 day money back guarantee, month to month billing, free support and training, and the customer portal being included: thestudiodirector.com/pricing.
2. The standard card schedule marked effective 10 April 2024, the 0.14% card brand network assessment bundled into the transaction fee, the $0.75 batch fee, the $5.95 monthly PCI DSS program fee, the 1.00% card-not-present surcharge listed as applying where applicable, ACH at 1.00% plus $0.30, the $30 chargeback fee, the terminal fees and the Klarna rate: thestudiodirector.com/payments-pricing.
3. The "as low as 2.49% plus $0.29" figure, the complimentary rate review, and PaySimple as the processor behind it: thestudiodirector.com/payment-processing.
4. The full feature breakdown, including skill charts, student report cards, instructor timesheets, costume management, the event timeline, marketing automation and targeted email, promotions, website widgets, data importing from any source, and the custom branded app listed under Integrations powered by Mobile Inventor: thestudiodirector.com/product-features.
5. The branded app being a partner offer reached through a consultation form, with its feature list and no price published: thestudiodirector.com/lp/custom-mobile-app.
6. The Customer Portal address that parents log in to, and the widgets that embed parts of it in your own site: help center, "Customer Portal Links for Online Registration" and "Set Up Widgets".
7. Texting being available only to non-US customers, the per-country monthly and per-message fee table, the opt-in requirement, the 160 character limit and delivery not being reported back: help center, "Text Messaging", updated 10 July 2025.
8. Drip email campaigns: help center, "Drip Email Campaigns".
9. The documented lead workflow, and students being what the price counts: help center, "Identifying and Tracking Leads", updated 13 January 2025.
10. Skill charts, assigning skills to a class or a group of classes, and recording them per student: help center, "Skill Charts", "Assign Skills to Classes" and "Record Skills for Classes and Students".
11. The staff mobile website reached by editing the portal link so it ends in m.sd, and recording attendance and skill achievement from it: help center, "Access Studio Director on Mobile", updated 25 April 2025.
12. A help center search for payroll returning three articles, none of them about paying staff. Searched 31 August 2026. This is a statement about what they publish, not about what their software can be made to do.
13. Their own team loading your existing information from any system free of charge, and unlimited users: thestudiodirector.com/faq.
14. Auto tuition rate groups per class type, a rate for every hours-per-week or classes-per-week combination, the multi-class and additional-class discount models and the nightly recalculation: help center, "Auto Tuition Rates and Rate Groups", updated 13 January 2025. The maximum tuition cap and tag-based rates are separate articles in the same section.
15. The most recent release, and the fact that nothing in it changes the texting position: help center, "9.7.0 Release Notes", dated 12 August 2026.
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 charge of $100, because The Studio Director publishes a percentage and a per-transaction fee rather than a transaction count; a studio billing tuition in larger amounts pays less in the per-transaction part than the calculator shows, and one taking many small payments pays more. The $0.75 daily batch fee is left out of the calculator entirely, so their real total is higher than the figure shown. Whether the 1.00% card-not-present surcharge applies to online registration is not defined on their schedule and we do not assert it either way. Where this page says their help center carries no article on a subject, that is a statement about what they publish rather than about what the software can do.