When I started building LeagueReady, the first real decision was not a feature. It was a number: what percentage of registration fees should we take? The whole industry has an answer, and the answer is “a few percent of everything.” We decided to take zero. This is the reasoning, the trade-off we accepted, and the math worked out for a real league so you can check it against your own.

How most youth-sports platforms actually charge you

Almost every registration platform built for youth sports earns money the same way: it sits between the parent and the league and keeps a slice of every payment. It is usually framed as a convenience or processing fee, and it is usually one of two shapes:

A platform fee on top of card processing. Stripe or the card networks take roughly 2.9% + $0.30. The platform adds its own cut on top, commonly another 3% to 7% and sometimes more, so the real deduction on a registration can land anywhere from 6% to 10%.
A “passed to the parent” fee. The league shows a $150 fee, the parent is charged $159 at checkout, and the extra is the platform’s. It feels free to the admin because the league still nets $150, but the family paid more, and the higher sticker price quietly costs you registrations.

Either way, the platform’s revenue is a function of how much money flows through your league. The more kids you sign up, the more it earns, without doing anything more for you.

The math on a real league

Numbers make this concrete. Take a mid-sized rec league: 150 players, a $150 registration fee. That is $22,500 in registrations for the season.

At a 7% platform cut, the platform keeps $1,575 every season. Run spring and fall and that is $3,150 a year out of money parents paid for their kids to play.
At LeagueReady, the platform fee is $0. The league pays a flat subscription, $49 or $99 a month depending on size, and registration money is untouched.

For that league, the difference is on the order of $1,000+ per season kept inside the league instead of skimmed out of it. That is a set of uniforms, a chunk of the field-rental bill, or scholarship spots for families who could not otherwise afford to register.

The registration money was never ours to take a cut of. It belongs to the league and the families who paid it.

Why we chose a flat subscription instead

A percentage cut has a property I genuinely dislike: it scales with the league’s success. A league that doubles its registrations pays us twice as much, even though our cost to serve it barely moves. That is backwards. The league did the work of growing; the platform should not automatically collect more for it.

A flat subscription fixes the incentive. We charge a predictable monthly price for the software. If your league grows from 80 players to 300, you pay the same. You just get more value from the same bill. Our job is to earn the renewal by making the software genuinely worth it, every month, not by quietly riding your growth.

It also keeps the pricing honest for the people who actually run these leagues. Volunteer-run rec leagues operate on thin margins and a lot of unpaid evenings. A percentage skim is least visible exactly when it hurts most, at the biggest and busiest leagues. A flat number is something a volunteer treasurer can put on one line of a budget and understand completely.

The trade-off we accepted

This model is not free of downsides, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. A flat subscription means a very small league pays proportionally more than a very large one. A 30-player league on the $49 plan is paying a higher effective rate per player than a 300-player league on the $99 plan.

We thought hard about this and accepted it for two reasons. First, even for a small league the flat price is low enough to stay well under what a percentage model would have taken once you run two seasons a year. Second, a percentage would punish the leagues that grow, and growing leagues are exactly the ones we want to keep. We would rather under-charge a 300-player league than tax it for succeeding.

How the money actually moves: Stripe Connect

“0% platform fee” only means something if the plumbing backs it up. It does. LeagueReady runs registration payments through Stripe Connect. In plain terms:

Your league connects its own Stripe account during setup. It takes a few minutes and the account belongs to the league, not to us.
When a parent pays a registration fee, the money goes directly into your league’s Stripe account. Standard Stripe card processing applies (that is Stripe’s fee, not ours), and LeagueReady adds no application fee on top.
We never hold, route, or take a cut of registration money. We could not skim it even if we wanted to; the funds simply do not pass through us.
Refunds work the same way: issued from your account, back to the parent, on your terms.

The only thing LeagueReady charges is the league’s own monthly subscription, billed separately to the admin. Registration and subscription are two completely separate money flows, and only one of them involves us.

What this means when you are choosing software

If you are comparing youth-sports platforms, do not stop at the headline price. Ask the question that actually moves money:

Does the platform take a percentage of registrations, or a flat fee?
If there is a “processing” or “convenience” fee, what is the total deduction once you add the platform’s cut to Stripe’s, and who pays it, the league or the parent?
Multiply that percentage by your real registration volume across a full year. That is the number to compare against a flat subscription, not the monthly sticker price alone.

For some leagues a percentage model will still come out cheaper, usually very small ones running a single short season. For most leagues running two seasons a year with a hundred-plus players, a flat subscription with a true 0% registration fee keeps real money inside the league. We built LeagueReady for that league.

The bottom line

We take 0% of registration fees because that money belongs to the league and its families, and because charging a percentage would mean earning more every time a league succeeds without us doing more to earn it. A flat subscription is less money from big leagues than a cut would be, and we are fine with that. It is the honest version of the deal.

The pricing page has the current plans, and the FAQ covers how registration payments and refunds work for your league in practice.