Card Fees: Who Should Actually Pay Them — Coach or Parent?

Last updated: 2026-06-02 · payments, pricing, transparency

A coach charges £30 a month for kids’ karate. He has 60 students. He’s worked out — because he’s organised — that 60 × £30 is £1,800 a month. That’s the number he thinks of when he thinks about his income from the club.

It’s the wrong number by about £60.

Card processing fees come out of every payment. At roughly 2.5% plus 25p per transaction, 60 payments of £30 means approximately £60 of fees paid to the payment processor and platform combined — silently, automatically, without a line item that anyone sees unless they go looking. Over a year that’s £720. Enough to replace a full set of pads and helmets. Enough to cover three months of venue hire. Enough to send two kids to a regional competition at the club’s expense.

The coach has never seen this calculation written down. He knows fees exist in the abstract. He does not know what they cost him specifically, per month, per year, compounded across his student list.

This article is about making that calculation visible, and then helping you decide who should actually bear the cost.

Where the fees come from

When a parent pays a club invoice by card in the UK, the money moves through several layers before it reaches the coach.

Stripe, which processes the card, charges 1.5% + 25p for most UK-issued cards. For European cards that proportion changes slightly, and for non-European cards it goes higher — but for a typical local children’s club, the overwhelming majority of payments will be UK card holders.

On top of the Stripe fee, Adminished charges 1% of the transaction. Combined: approximately 2.5% + 25p per payment.

For a £30 payment that works out to: £0.25 (Stripe per-transaction) + £0.45 (Stripe percentage) + £0.30 (Adminished 1%) = £1.00 in fees. The coach receives £29.00.

Now compare that to what competitors charge. Class4Kids charges coaches 6.5% of every transaction — on a £30 payment that’s £1.95, almost double. Spond’s payment product does not charge a percentage fee to the coach in the same way, but payouts flow through Spond’s wallet system with slower settlement rather than direct to bank. GymDesk charges a percentage that varies by plan and is typically in the 1–2% range before card processing fees. The blended effective rate varies by platform, but the key variable across all of them is the same: who ends up bearing the cost?

The round-number problem

Coaches price in round numbers because parents think in round numbers.

£10 a session. £25 a month. £30 a month. £49 a term. These numbers are clean, easy to remember, easy to explain. “It’s thirty pounds a month” is a sentence you can say in the car park without anyone needing a calculator.

The problem is that round-number pricing and fee absorption interact in a way most coaches never quantify. When you set a price of £30 and fees come out the back, you are not actually charging £30. You are charging £30 and silently eating an amount that scales with every payment you ever receive. The per-transaction cost compounds:

60 students × £1.00 in fees per £30 payment = £60/month
Over a 10-month term = £600
Over a year = £720

That’s a haircut on your revenue that you have never consciously agreed to, you just never disagreed with it either. It’s the default.

The alternative is to pass the fee through to the parent. The parent pays slightly more than your headline price, and you receive the headline price.

Two ways to handle it

Adminished has a per-payment toggle that controls which side bears the transaction cost. Here is what each option means in practice.

Coach absorbs the fee.

You set a price of £30. The parent pays £30. You receive approximately £29. The fee is invisible to the parent — they see a round number at checkout, and that round number is what leaves their account.

This is the default for most clubs because it preserves the simplicity of a quoted price. It also has genuine cases where it is the right choice: if you have quoted “all-in” pricing in a brochure or a website and changing the checkout total would create confusion or resentment, absorbing the fee prevents awkwardness. If you are running a promotional intro offer where you want to compete on price and every penny of the advertised number matters for conversion, keeping the checkout total exactly as advertised can matter.

Parent absorbs the fee.

You set a price of £30. Adminished adds the processing cost on top at checkout. The parent pays approximately £30.96 — less than £31 on a typical UK card payment. You receive £30.00.

The psychological reality: most parents who already trust their coach will not register a 96p difference on a monthly payment. A parent who is actively price-comparing is looking at your headline price, which hasn’t changed. The “sting” only exists if the parent is expecting a specific number at checkout based on a quote, sees a higher number, and feels misled.

If you communicate clearly — “card payments incur a small processing charge” — the vast majority of parents will accept this without question. It is normal. Almost every other online payment experience they have includes this behaviour. Booking a train ticket, buying event tickets, paying an invoice from a tradesperson: the processing fee appearing at checkout is standard.

The maths you should actually run

Take your current total monthly revenue from card payments. Multiply by 0.025 and add £0.25 per payment. That is approximately what you are currently paying in fees.

For a club with 60 students paying £30/month by card:

Revenue: £1,800
Fees at 2.5% + £0.25/payment: £45 (percentage) + £15 (per-transaction) = £60/month

Flip the toggle. Now each parent pays £30.96 instead of £30. You receive £30.00 per payment. The difference:

Your monthly income: £1,800 (unchanged)
Parent’s per-payment cost: +£0.96
Your annual gain: £720

The £720 is not the coach’s profit in the sense of windfall. It is the restoration of the revenue you were already pricing in. The mental model of “£30 × 60 = £1,800” was always aspirational — the fee was always being taken. The toggle makes the reality match the mental model.

When NOT to flip the toggle

There are genuine cases where absorbing the fee is the right call.

You have already quoted all-inclusive prices. If parents have an email or a letter from you that says “membership is £30 a month, that’s it,” and you have been charging exactly £30 for two years, adding a surcharge at checkout will feel like a hidden fee even if it technically is not. The resentment risk is real. For those existing parents, consider absorbing the fee and applying the toggle only to new enrolments, or raising your headline price at the next renewal cycle and absorbing the fee against the new number.

You are using introductory pricing specifically to compete. A trial session or introductory month at a promotional rate is a conversion tool. The experience of checkout matters here. If your promotional page says “first month free” or “£15 for your first month,” the checkout number should match. Fees can come out of the promotional margin; treat them as part of the acquisition cost.

Your students are in a price-sensitive demographic where 50p genuinely matters. Some coaches running clubs in lower-income areas have parents for whom £0.96 per payment is not trivial. Know your audience. If you run a community programme where affordability is part of the mission, absorbing the fee is a values decision, not just a financial one.

What other platforms do

Spond — the same pass-through toggle exists and defaults to ON (parent pays). Spond’s default choice is the opposite of Adminished’s: they have decided that passing fees through is the normal expectation, and coaches who want to absorb fees must actively choose to. Neither default is objectively correct; it reflects different assumptions about what feels “standard” to the clubs using each platform.

Class4Kids — charges 6.5% to the parent, always, with no toggle. This is partially how they fund a free-to-coach model. The effective rate is significantly higher than Adminished’s combined fee, and there is no option for the coach to absorb.

GymDesk — lets you configure fee handling per product, which gives more granularity (absorb for memberships, pass through for drop-ins) but requires more setup.

Adminished defaults to coach-absorbs because the most common first experience is a coach setting up who already has parents on a verbal pricing agreement and doesn’t want checkout to feel different from what was discussed. The toggle exists for exactly when you are ready to flip.

Making the change

The toggle lives on the invoice or payment plan settings screen. For new payment plans, you set it when you create the plan. For existing plans, you can edit the settings — the change applies to future invoices generated after the edit, not to already-issued invoices.

A straightforward approach: when you next do a pricing review or send the new-term fee communication, include a sentence noting that card payments include a processing charge. Most parents will not ask a follow-up question. The ones who do will appreciate that you have been transparent about it rather than quietly absorbing it and rounding up your headline price at the next opportunity.

For a technical walkthrough of how the fee calculation works and how to configure it, see /help/transaction-fees.

Adminished charges 1% per transaction on top of Stripe’s own fees — lower than most dedicated club management platforms. The pass-through toggle is available on all paid plans. Try it for a month: the maths will either validate your current setup or show you what you have been leaving on the table.

Written by the Adminished team · More guides →