Your courts are a fixed number. Your software bill is not.
A club has the courts it has, and every hour on them is either sold or gone for good. The software in between is priced on members, players, entries and lessons, which are the four things you are trying to grow.
What a racquet club is usually paying for
The booking system sits in the middle. The rest arrived as the club took on leagues, coaching, guests and a door that unlocks itself.
Priced on members, capped by courts
Count what a club can actually sell: courts multiplied by the hours you open. That number does not move unless you build. Membership does move, and membership is the axis nearly every subscription is priced on, so the bill climbs with the thing you are growing while the inventory behind it stays exactly where it was. A club with a full grid and a club with a quiet one pay the same for the same roll.
Event pricing has its own arithmetic. A league runs weekly for a season, a ladder re-forms every round, and a tournament split into skill bands is several draws across one weekend. When the fee is per player per event, a doubles pair that entered once is charged twice, and a club that puts on more play for the same members pays more each time it does so.
The part that fits worst is your own price list. Court time is priced by member tier, by peak and off-peak, by surface, by whether it is indoors and by how long the booking runs, with guests charged separately again. Rented systems carry a simplified version, so the desk overrides bookings by hand, the real rates live on a card by the till, and nobody can say what an off-peak hour earned last month.
What we build around the court hour
- A booking grid that holds your whole price matrixRate by member tier, peak and off-peak, indoor and outdoor, by surface and by duration, together with how far ahead each tier may book and how many live bookings one member may hold at a time.
- Memberships with a family tier and a freezeOne payment covering several players, joint and junior rates, pro rata joining, and a freeze for injury or travel that ends on its own date rather than when somebody remembers it.
- Open play and ladders with real spotsLimited places, a waiting list that promotes the next name the moment a place is released, and a late-cancellation window that your own rules enforce instead of the desk arguing it.
- Leagues and tournaments by skill bandA doubles entry that is one entry with two players on it, brackets by rating band, draw management, scheduling onto your own courts, and results that feed back into the ladder.
- Coaching against genuine availability, with the splitA coach's calendar drawn from courts that are actually free, clinics with a minimum and a maximum size, and a statement of what each coach is owed under your revenue split.
What we leave rented
- Rating and sanctioning bodiesSkill ratings, sanctioned events and eligibility are run by the governing body, and a rating is only meaningful because every other player is measured on the same scale. We record a player's rating and use it to seed your draws.
- Card processingDues, court fees and event entries are charged through your payment processor at the processor's rate under any system.
- Listing sites that fill empty courtsIf a booking marketplace sends you players for off-peak hours you would not otherwise sell, that is an audience you cannot rebuild. Keep the listing and let those bookings land in the same grid as everyone else's.
The empty court that was already paid for
The most expensive hour in a racquet club is the one that was booked and not played. It reads as revenue on the sheet and it is an empty court on the camera, and it is why open play, ladders and weekend peak slots are the sessions members complain about. Rented booking systems will record the no-show. Very few of them do anything with it, because acting on it means applying rules that are particular to your club and to how forgiving your committee has decided to be.
Owning the system is what turns that rule from an intention into something the software does. A cancellation inside your window releases the court and offers it to the waiting list straight away. A member who misses open play twice in a month loses priority on the next one, or does not, depending on what was decided. Guests are charged at the door instead of argued with. None of it is clever software. It is your own policy, written down once, in the place that takes the bookings.
Questions clubs and organisers ask
Can peak hours be priced differently for each membership tier?
Yes. The rate is worked out from the tier, the time, the court and the length of the booking, and the same rules decide how far ahead each tier may book. Changing a rate for the winter is a change to one rule rather than a morning spent editing every slot in the grid.
Can one family membership cover several players?
Yes. A family or joint membership is a single payer with several players attached, each with their own booking rights, rating and event history. Our price does not count members either, so a family is not several times anything on our side.
How do leagues work with our skill rating system?
The rating stays with the body that issues it. We store each player's current rating on their record and use it to build brackets, seed draws and keep a ladder honest, and anything sanctioned keeps running the way that body requires.
We have a few courts and a spreadsheet. Is custom software overkill?
Very likely, and we will say so. A small club on one modest subscription should stay put. It starts to change when you are paying separately for booking, membership, leagues and coaching, and the coaching tool is taking a share on top. Add a full year of those together in the calculator on this site before you talk to anyone.
From the blog, for pickleball and racquet clubs
- What court booking software has to get right, and how it is billedSeptember 30, 2026 · Member tier, peak and off-peak, guests and no-shows are where booking systems bend. How court software is charged, and the rules to write down first.
Keep reading
Tell us what court booking costs you
The booking system, the membership billing, the per-player event fees, and what the coaching tool takes.
Hiro costs about a tenth of what you pay now, quoted against your own bill. Hosting, fixes and changes included, and no per-seat fees.