Club Automation Alternative for Racquet Clubs: The Price Is a Phone Call

You want one number. You run four badminton courts and eight pickleball courts, a junior batch on Saturday mornings, and there is a board meeting Thursday where somebody is going to ask what the new software costs. So you open the vendor's site, click Pricing, and land on a form.

Club Automation does not publish prices, and they are upfront about why. Their own 2026 pricing guide says the investment depends on club size, number of locations, required functionality, implementation requirements, and long-term business goals. That is a defensible position for an enterprise platform. Translated into your calendar, it means a discovery call, a scoping call, and a proposal that arrives weeks later with nothing to compare it against.

This page is about when that process is worth your time and when it is not.

What Club Automation is actually built for

Credit first, because the fit question matters more than the sales pitch. Club Automation, now part of Daxko, is a real platform for multi-purpose athletic clubs. Their own materials list court reservations sitting alongside childcare scheduling, aquatics programming, personal training, camps, spa appointments, and retail, all hanging off one member record. That is the building it was designed around, and very few systems hold all of it together.

If you operate a large athletic club where racquet sports are one department among seven, take their demo. You need the breadth, and the scoping call exists because your operation genuinely is complicated. The rest of this is written for the other kind of operator: the one whose entire business is a floor of courts.

Where an athletic club platform stops short on a racquet floor

Courts are the business, not an amenity

In a health club, the court module has to answer one question: is Court 3 free at seven. In a racquet facility, the court is the revenue line. Every hour of every court is inventory you either sell, program, or lose. A platform that treats courts as one amenity among many will handle the reservation correctly and then have very little to say about the hours that stayed empty on Wednesday morning.

Drop-in is a queue, not a class

This is the gap that costs racquet operators the most, and it is not a small one. Class-based scheduling models a session with a roster: twelve people sign up, twelve people attend, the session ends. Open play does not work like that. Thirty people arrive across four hours, they rotate on and off six courts, some leave early, some show up at nine, and the only thing that keeps the night fair is somebody tracking who has sat out twice.

Most clubs run that on a whiteboard, or on a free rotation app on a staff member's phone, standing next to software they already pay for. We built the queue into the platform instead. Players join a live queue, courts rotate fairly, results get confirmed or disputed by the players themselves, standings update from those confirmed matches, and player ratings sync off the same results rather than off a spreadsheet somebody rebuilds on Sunday.

Badminton is usually not in the shape of the product

Enterprise racquet modules were built for tennis and then extended to pickleball, which is where the money went. Badminton gets treated as a generic bookable space. If you are running eight badminton courts with shuttle-rate pricing, family accounts for junior batches, and a drop-in night that is the busiest four hours of your week, you are asking a tennis-shaped product to stretch. It will stretch. You will feel it every day at the front desk.

What published pricing actually looks like

Since Club Automation will not give you a number to anchor on, here is what the racquet-specific market publishes, so at least your Thursday meeting has a range. From CourtReserve's own pricing page as of September 2026, billed annually: Launch is $159 a month and includes eight courts. Advance is $329 and includes sixteen. Momentum is $549 monthly or $499 billed annually and includes thirty-two. Paid monthly instead, Launch is $199 and Advance is $369.

The add-ons are where the real number lives. On Launch, individual integrations run $25 a month each, the flex leagues module is $99 a month, and the branded mobile app carries a one-time $499 setup fee plus a one-year commitment. Bulk marketing email is capped at 5,000 sends a month, then $5 per additional thousand. Build your own line item list before any call, because that is the comparison a custom quote is hardest to make against.

Our pricing is public and flat, there are no per-transaction booking fees on our side, and the agreement is month-to-month. You can walk into the board meeting with a number on the first day rather than the twenty-first.

Facility Presence and Club Automation, side by side

Vendors change plans and features often. Confirm current details with each provider before you decide.

When you should stay on Club Automation

If your courts share a member record with a gym floor, a pool, and a childcare room, do not move. One platform holding all of that is worth real money, and pulling courts out into a separate system would hand your front desk two logins and your accountant two reports. We would rather tell you that now than six weeks into a migration.

The case for moving is narrower. It holds when courts are the whole business, when drop-in is a meaningful slice of your revenue, when badminton is in the mix, and when you have reached the point of paying enterprise money for a court module you use a fraction of.

Questions we get asked

What happens to our prepaid package balances?

They come across. We run the migration ourselves and we do not charge for it: member records, prepaid package and credit balances, family groups, and the bookings already sitting on next month's calendar. You approve the mapping before anything goes live.

How do payments work?

Payments run through Stripe, and Stripe's card rates pass straight through to you. We add no per-transaction fee. Refunds, PDF invoices, and account credits are part of the platform rather than a paid tier.

We run badminton and pickleball on the same courts. Does that work?

Yes. Courts are configured per sport, double-booking prevention runs across the whole floor, and open play sessions are set up per sport with their own queue and rotation. Events carry their own capacity, and guests register at check-in with their contact details captured.

Here is the test worth running before you book any demo, including ours. Write down the five things that decide whether your busiest drop-in night goes well. Then ask each vendor to show you those five things happening on screen, not on a slide. If a platform can only show you three of them and the price is still a phone call, you have your answer. Bring your actual Tuesday schedule to a 30-minute demo and we will go court by court through yours.