I researched adding payments to Studio OS. Here's why I'm holding off.

“Can my members pay through the app?” is one of the first questions I get when I show someone Studio OS. The honest answer right now is: not yet — and that’s a deliberate choice, not a gap I forgot about. Here’s how I got there.

I spent a good while researching what it would take to put payments inside Studio OS. Not a vague “add Stripe” — the actual thing studio owners picture when they ask: members paying for memberships and class packs without me chasing anyone. I want to be transparent about why it isn’t in the early release, because the reasoning matters more than the feature.

What I actually looked at

“Payments” isn’t one thing. Once you start mapping it out for a studio, it splits into several quite different problems:

• Card on file & recurring billing — the obvious one. Automatically charging a saved card every month for a membership. Convenient, but it drags in failed-payment retries, expiring cards, and dunning (politely chasing a charge that bounced).
• Direct debit — SEPA in the EU, ACH in the US. Lower fees, popular for memberships, but slower to confirm and with its own rules around mandates and reversals.
• One-off payments — drop-ins and class packs, where a member pays once rather than subscribing.
• Just recording what happened — a lot of small studios take cash or a bank transfer and simply want it logged against the member. No money moves through the software at all.

Each of those is a real, separate piece of work. Lumping them together as “payments” is how a roadmap quietly turns into a six-month detour.

I’m not the first to wrestle with this, either. More than one established studio tool has shipped a payment method, hit the real-world support load and edge cases, and quietly walked it back. When mature products keep landing in the same spot, it’s worth pausing before sprinting down the same path.

Why payments are a trap door, not a feature

The button that says “Pay” is the easy 10%. The other 90% is everything that happens when money is involved:

• Refunds, partial refunds, and disputes — and the support conversations attached to each one.
• Failed charges: cards expire, debits bounce. Someone has to notice, retry, and tell the member without it feeling hostile.
• Payouts, fees, and reconciliation — making the numbers in the app match the money that actually lands in a bank account.
• Tax and VAT, which differ by country and aren’t optional to get right.

None of that is impossible. But it’s a product inside the product, and the moment I take responsibility for moving someone’s money, I’m signing up to support all of it — properly, on day one, for real studios with real members. I won’t ship money-movement until I can stand behind that. Half-built payments are worse than no payments.

What early studios actually need first

When I listen past the initial “can they pay in the app” question, what consistently matters more in the early days is the boring core: scheduling that’s never wrong, attendance that takes seconds, and clear communication with members. At a small scale, plenty of studios already handle money fine — a bank transfer, a card terminal, cash at the door — and just want it recorded cleanly against the right person.

So the highest-value thing I can build right now isn’t a payment processor. It’s making the rest of the day disappear, and letting you record payments without pretending to be your bank.

The decision

Integrated payments aren’t in the early release of Studio OS, and I’m comfortable saying that out loud. It’s on the list to revisit — but only when I can do one method extremely well, support it end to end, and be sure it actually saves you time rather than handing you a new thing to babysit. I’d rather under-promise here and ship something solid later than bolt on a “Pay now” button I can’t back up.

What would change my mind

This is where you come in. If payments are the difference between Studio OS working for you or not, I want to know — and specifically which kind. Recurring card-on-file memberships? SEPA or ACH direct debit? Or honestly just a clean way to record payments you already collect elsewhere? That ranking changes what I build first.

I’m planning to put a proper poll right here so you can vote with one click (and leave your email if you want me to follow up when it ships). For now, the fastest way to weigh in is to tell me directly — every reply genuinely moves this up or down my list.