Mindbody's pitch to studios about its marketplace is a good one: list your classes on mindbody.io and the Mindbody app, and consumers will find you, book directly, and pay you. The framing is "free distribution." The reality is that every marketplace booking is taxed — and the studio rarely owns the resulting customer.
This is not a hidden fee in the sense of being undisclosed. It is in every contract and on the marketplace terms page. It is hidden in the sense that most studio owners we talk to underestimate what it adds up to, and almost none of them think of the marketplace as a customer ownership question. Both deserve attention.
How the marketplace fee actually works
When a consumer books a class through the Mindbody marketplace — either the web property or the consumer app — Mindbody takes a percentage of the class price. The rate depends on your subscription tier, your region, and whether the user is a "new" marketplace customer or repeat. Published figures across the EU and US range from 4% on the high-tier subscriptions for repeat customers, up to around 12% for Starter-tier studios with new marketplace customers.
That fee sits on top of payment processing, on top of your subscription, and on top of any discounts you offer on the marketplace to compete with other studios in your area.
Mindbody also runs promotional pricing on the marketplace — "ClassPass-style" discount packs, first-time-user offers — where the discount comes out of your revenue, not Mindbody's. A €20 drop-in advertised at €12 to a new marketplace user nets the studio roughly €10.50 after marketplace and processing fees.
The compounding problem
Marketplace fees compound in ways subscription fees do not. A studio growing 30% year-over-year sees:
- More marketplace impressions, as Mindbody's algorithm favours studios with traction
- More marketplace-originated bookings as a share of total bookings
- Higher absolute marketplace fees, because the rate is on a growing base
- Same flat subscription cost
This is not an accident. The marketplace fee is structured as a growth tax. The more successful your studio becomes on the platform, the more Mindbody earns from each marginal booking. Subscriptions are linear; marketplace fees are leveraged on your revenue.
A worked example
Consider a yoga studio doing 600 bookings per month, of which 100 originate from the marketplace. Average class price is €22.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Marketplace bookings/month | 100 |
| Average class price | €22 |
| Marketplace revenue | €2,200 |
| Marketplace fee at 8% | €176 |
| Payment processing (1.75% + €0.25) | €63 |
| Net to studio | €1,961 (89%) |
Over a year, that studio pays €2,112 in marketplace fees alone — separate from subscription, separate from processing. For comparison, the entire annual Class Booking Pro subscription is €660.
The customer ownership question
The fee is the cheaper part of the trade. The expensive part is whose customer it is.
When a consumer books your studio through the Mindbody marketplace, Mindbody has the email address. Mindbody sends the booking confirmation, the reminder, the post-class follow-up. Mindbody decides what other studios that user sees next time they open the app. The studio gets the booking and the revenue minus fees, but the relationship — the marketing channel, the retargeting data, the lifetime value — sits with Mindbody.
Every marketplace booking is an asset built on Mindbody's balance sheet, not the studio's. The studio gets revenue; Mindbody gets a customer.
This becomes obvious when a studio tries to leave Mindbody. The studio can take its member list, its class schedule, its policies. It cannot take the marketplace user base, because those users never belonged to the studio in the first place. They were Mindbody users who happened to book classes at that studio. When the studio migrates, Mindbody keeps showing those users other studios in the area.
When the marketplace is worth it
Marketplaces are not categorically bad. For a brand-new studio in a competitive market, paying 8-12% on first-time bookings to get warm leads in the door can be cheaper than running paid social. The math works when:
- You are new and have no organic acquisition channel
- Your retention rate is high enough that marketplace-acquired users convert to direct repeat customers
- You can identify which users came via the marketplace and intentionally migrate them to your direct channel
The math stops working when the marketplace becomes the default booking channel for your existing members — at that point you are paying 8% on bookings that would have happened anyway, in exchange for losing the relationship.
Alternatives
Class Booking does not operate a consumer marketplace. We are a platform, not a directory. The trade-off is that we do not drive discovery for your studio — you bring your own acquisition (organic, paid social, referral). What you get in return is a flat-price subscription, your own Stripe account, and a member list that belongs to you.
For studios that already have a healthy direct channel and are mostly paying marketplace fees on existing members, that trade is straightforwardly profitable. For studios that genuinely depend on marketplace discovery, it is more nuanced — and we will tell you that on a sales call.
The point of this article is not that marketplaces are wrong. It is that they are a real cost line, often the largest one after the subscription itself, and they deserve to be counted as such when you compare booking platforms. See the feature list for what is included, or pricing for the flat tiers.