Arketa is a modern, well-designed platform for yoga, Pilates, and boutique studios — on-demand video, memberships, and a booking flow that looks like it was built this decade. Mako is the business platform underneath a studio: bookings, memberships, payments, and the financial reporting that tells you whether the timetable is actually profitable. The headline prices look far apart. Once you work through how each one charges, they are not.
Arketa: $49/month paid annually, plus a 3% transaction fee on payments processed through the platform — that is on top of card processing, not instead of it.
Mako: Pulse is free. Basic at $139/month — the complete platform with three team members. Team at $249/month — fifteen team members, advanced reporting, QuickBooks sync. Enterprise at $999/month — unlimited members. Roughly 20% off annually, no contract, and no percentage of revenue at any tier.
A percentage fee is not a price, it is a tax on growth. Run the arithmetic on your own numbers:
The crossover is around $3,000 in monthly revenue — below that Arketa is genuinely cheaper, above it the fee takes over. A studio doing $20k a month pays Arketa roughly $4,800 more per year than Mako Team, for reaching the point where software should be getting cheaper per class, not more expensive.
And the fee scales with your best months. Every January signup surge, every retreat, every workshop — 3% of it.
Hosting, libraries, and hybrid class delivery are native. If a meaningful part of your revenue is digital content, Arketa is built for that and Mako is not.
Genuinely good-looking, and students book without friction. That is worth something real for a boutique brand.
Under $3,000/month in revenue, $49 plus a small percentage is the cheaper answer, plainly.
Your software bill does not grow because you had a good month. Flat tiers, period.
Profit per class after instructor pay and room cost, cash-flow forecasting, and unit economics. The 6am class fills every week — does it make money after you pay the teacher? Arketa reports revenue and attendance; it does not answer that.
Per-class rates, per-head rates, splits, tips, timesheets and payouts handled natively, at the rate that applied on the day.
Product sales with margin, plus free Pulse retention benchmarking that imports from other platforms and compares your churn against market averages.
Pick Arketa if:
Pick Mako if:
Your studio is a business. Not a hobby, not a side project, not a calendar with a cash register. It deserves software that treats it accordingly. If your platform cannot tell you whether you are financially healthy, it is not doing its job. And in 2026, you have better options.
See Mako in action — no sales call required
Mako is built for independent studio owners who would rather spend their time on students than on demo calls. Open the live demo, poke around, and see exactly how booking, payments, and financial intelligence come together in one place.
Try the demo: https://app.makocrm.so/demo
Self-serve. Instant access. No forms, no calendars, no "talk to sales."
