Evidence note: Kicksite documents custom belt curricula, rank-linked programs, testing events, eligible-to-promote views, attendance tracking, and recurring billing. One vendor page does not establish that these capabilities are universal, that time-in-grade is calculated identically, or that general gym software cannot support them. Describe the specific rank, attendance, and promotion workflows required by the school and verify them in a trial. Sources: Kicksite martial arts management software official first-party.
If you run a karate, taekwondo, BJJ or mixed martial arts school, you have probably been sold gym software and discovered within a month that it has no concept of a belt.
This is the requirement that separates martial arts software from everything else, and it's the one most platforms simply don't have.
A functioning system needs to hold:
The payoff is not administrative tidiness. It's that a student who is three classes short of eligibility can be told that in week two, when they can still do something about it, instead of in week eight when they're disappointed.
It also makes the parent conversation easy. "He's eleven classes into a fifteen-class requirement" is a very different conversation from "he's not quite ready."
Worth being straight about the trade-off here: dedicated martial arts platforms like Zen Planner, Kicksite and Gymdesk have purpose-built belt and rank modules. Mako tracks attendance, family billing, and retention properly, but rank progression is not a dedicated module. If grading administration is your single biggest pain, weigh that honestly.
Attendance in a gym is a vanity metric. In a dojo it's a prerequisite.
That means check-in needs to be fast — a tablet at the door, students checking themselves in — and it needs to write to the same record that governs testing. If attendance lives in one system and rank lives in a spreadsheet, you have not solved the problem, you have added a reconciliation step.
Look for attendance that's queryable in both directions: who is eligible to test, and who has quietly stopped coming. The second one is your retention system.
Evidence note: Gymdesk’s first-party martial-arts material describes linked household profiles, sibling discounts, consolidated billing, and separate child attendance and rank records. It is vendor-authored BJJ material and does not establish that all schools need the same structure or that all general gym platforms lack it. Specify household, guardian, student, discount, invoice, waiver, and attendance requirements before comparing products. Sources: Gymdesk family accounts and sibling discounts official first-party.
Without this you end up creating three accounts, remembering to discount two of them by hand, and sending a parent three separate charges every month. Every one of those is a small friction, and small frictions on a family plan are how families leave.
This is the fork in the road, and the martial arts industry is unusual in taking it.
Evidence note: The arithmetic is correct: 120 × $130 equals $15,600 monthly gross scheduled billings; annual fee magnitude depends on the quoted percentage. No primary source supports the market-share, percentage, multi-year-contract, agreement-ownership, or perpetuity claims. Remove prevalence language and compare actual quotes, processor costs, cancellation terms, agreement ownership, and transfer rights. Source status: No primary source was found for the earlier universal claim as of 2026-09-01.
There are real reasons this model took hold. Chasing a parent for a failed payment is unpleasant, and instructors mostly didn't want to do it. Outsourcing the awkward conversation had genuine value.
The other cost is control. Ask, specifically: who owns the student agreements? Who owns the payment relationship? If you leave, do the direct debits transfer, or do you have to re-enrol every family? That last question has ended more than one school's attempt to switch.
Evidence note: FTC guidance discusses material-term disclosure, consent records, and simple cancellation for negative-option programs, including business-to-business contexts. Rule status, effective dates, state laws, contract terms, and jurisdiction require current legal review; the guidance is not legal advice for a particular agreement. Tell readers to review the actual agreement and applicable law with qualified counsel before signing or cancelling. Sources: FTC Click-to-Cancel business guidance government.
Evidence note: Mako’s checked 2026-09-01 pricing page publishes Basic at $139, Team at $249, Enterprise at $999, bundled invoicing and payments, and no long-term contracts. The pricing page does not establish automatic retries, card updating, or dunning sequences; prices and included features are date- and plan-sensitive. State the dated plan prices and documented billing bundle; verify retry, dunning, processor, and contract behavior separately. Sources: Mako first-party: Mako pricing first-party documentation.
That is not a reason to fire your billing company tomorrow. It is a reason to know what you're paying them and what you'd be giving up.
Failed payments hit harder here than anywhere else, because one failed card can mean three children stop attending.
Evidence note: Stripe documents Smart Retries, automatic card updates, failed-payment emails, and configurable recovery automations. Stripe documentation does not establish Mako implementation, karate-school outcomes, or that most involuntary churn is caused by expired cards. Describe these as processor capabilities to verify, and measure recovery by failure reason before attributing churn. Sources: Stripe Revenue Recovery official first-party documentation.
Run the comparison that matters. A 120-student school collecting $15,600 a month pays $139–$249 for software on this model. A billing company taking a percentage of those collections costs multiples of that every month, forever, and typically holds your agreements. Do that arithmetic with your own numbers before you renew anything.
Related reading: The Hidden Math of Failed Payments: How 3% Decline Rates Cost Studios $40K/Year; Martial Arts Studio Management: Students, Belts, Revenue.
