How to Sell Tickets for a Fitness Class, Yoga Session or Workshop
The fastest way to charge for a fitness class or yoga workshop: create a free event page, connect your own Stripe account (once, ~2 minutes), set your price, and share the link to your WhatsApp group or Instagram bio. Attendees pay as they book — no app, no account — and the money lands directly in your Stripe account. On Who's In this costs a flat 2.7% per ticket and nothing else.
You don't need studio-management software for this. Mindbody starts at ~$99/month; you're running two classes a week in a rented room or a park. Here's the lean version. (New to selling tickets entirely? Start with the full walkthrough: how to sell tickets online in 2026.)
Who this guide is for
You teach yoga in a hired hall, run a Saturday bootcamp in the park, coach a small-group strength session, lead a dance class above a pub, or you're planning your first paid workshop. You have an audience — a WhatsApp group, an Instagram following, a mailing list of past attendees — and you need a clean way to turn "I'm in!" messages into paid, confirmed spots. What you don't have is a front desk, and you shouldn't have to pay for software designed around one. If you run a full studio with staff and memberships, skip ahead to Studio; everyone else, read on.
What you actually need (and don't)
Instructors get oversold constantly. The studio-software pitch assumes you have a front desk, a payroll run and a retail fridge. For a weekly class or an occasional workshop, the real requirements list is much shorter:
You need
- A booking page people can pay on — card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, in one tap
- A capacity limit — your room holds what it holds, and the page should respect that
- Payments to your own account — direct to your Stripe account, never held by the platform
- A waitlist that fills cancellations for you — automatically, with payment
- Automatic reminders — so people who booked on Monday remember on Thursday
- A way to know who showed up — attendance history, not memory
You don't need (yet)
- Memberships and recurring billing
- Class packs and credit systems
- Payroll and instructor scheduling
- A branded app
When you do — multiple instructors, rooms, recurring billing — that's Studio, from $15.83/month. Until then, the free Events product does everything in the left column.
Set up your first paid class (10 minutes)
- Create the event. Name it like a human ("Sunset Rooftop Flow — Thursday 6:30pm"), add a real photo of your class — a phone shot of an actual session beats stock art every time — and set the location. Specifics sell: "60 minutes, all levels, mats provided" does more work than any adjective.
- Cap it. Your room fits 14 mats? Capacity 14. The waitlist switches on automatically and fills any cancellation — the person promoted pays automatically, you do nothing. A visible "Sold out — join the waitlist" is also the best advert your next session will ever get.
- Connect Stripe and price it. You connect as an individual — no LLC or registered business needed. Check local drop-in rates; $15–25 is the typical community range. At 2.7%, your fee on a $20 spot is 54 cents (Eventbrite would take $2.53). Run your own numbers in the fee calculator.
- Make it recurring if it's weekly — set it once, and each session gets its own page, its own attendee list and its own ticket sales. No copy-pasting Thursday's event every Monday morning.
- Share one link. WhatsApp group, Instagram story and bio, a QR code on the studio door. People book in one tap — no account creation, which matters enormously on a phone, mid-scroll. Every forced signup between "I want to come" and "I've paid" costs you bookings.
The fee math for a real instructor
Take a typical weekly class: 12 attendees at $18 — that's $216/week, roughly $935/month gross. Here's what each option charges you on that revenue:
| Who's In (2.7%) | Eventbrite (3.7% + $1.79) | Mindbody (subscription) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly platform cost | $25.25 | $127.55 | $99–139 fixed |
| Annual platform cost | ~$303 | ~$1,531 | $1,188–1,668 |
That difference is a month of room rental. Card processing (~2.9% + $0.30) applies equally everywhere and is excluded. Note what the Eventbrite column is really showing: the $1.79 per-ticket component is brutal at community price points, which is why so many yoga teachers have moved off it — the free Eventbrite alternative yoga teachers are switching to covers that move in detail. Full platform pricing is at whos-in.app/pricing.
Absorb the fee or pass it on?
You'll be asked this at setup, and at 2.7% it stops being a dilemma. Absorbing the fee on a $20 spot costs you 54 cents — most instructors consider that the price of a clean "$20, all in" number on the booking page, which is what we'd recommend for community classes. Passing it on at checkout is fine for higher-priced workshops where buyers expect a booking fee. The reason this question feels fraught on other platforms is the size of the number being passed around: nobody wants their $20 class to read "$22.53 incl. fees" on a phone screen.
Where the money actually goes
This is the part worth understanding before you commit to any platform. On Who's In, payments run on Stripe Connect: an attendee books, the money lands in your Stripe account straight away, and Stripe pays out to your bank on its standard rolling schedule (typically 2–3 business days). Who's In never holds your money, and there's no waiting until after the event for a payout — which matters when the hall hire is due before the class happens.
You also don't need a registered business. Stripe onboards individuals in most countries: your class, your name, your bank account. Ticket income is still income — export your sales CSV and ask a local accountant where the thresholds are — but there's no paperwork standing between you and charging for Thursday's session.
Cut the no-shows (this is where the money leaks)
Free RSVPs no-show at 20–40%; paid bookings drop that into single digits — charging is the first fix. Someone who has put $18 on a card has made a small promise to themselves, and people keep promises they've paid for. If you've been running free classes and watching half the list evaporate, the price tag is the intervention, not the reminder copy.
Then let automation do the rest. Every booker gets a confirmation, a 7-day reminder, a night-before nudge and a morning-of ping (email + WhatsApp), and their ticket sits in Apple or Google Wallet, surfacing on their lock screen as the class approaches. A wallet pass can't be "lost" the way a buried email can.
Published research puts the no-show reduction from automated reminders at 29–38%; wallet passes keep the ticket on the lock screen. For a 14-mat class, that's the difference between teaching to a full room and teaching to the gaps.
Workshops: same playbook, higher stakes
For a $45–90 half-day workshop the principles hold — capacity cap, prepaid bookings, automatic reminders — but the numbers are bigger and the room is usually rented, so three additions matter:
- Sell early, not just often. Open sales 3–4 weeks out; your reminder sequence handles the rest. A workshop announced a week before is competing with everyone's existing plans; one announced a month out gets the calendar slot first.
- Set a realistic minimum. Know your break-even headcount before you commit to the venue. If you must cancel, one-click full refunds (platform fee auto-refunded too) protect your reputation — the worst outcome isn't a cancelled workshop, it's a cancelled workshop where people had to chase their money.
- Use the waitlist as a pricing signal. Waitlisted 8 people at $45? Your next workshop is a $60 event or a bigger room. Demand data beats guesswork — and the waitlist collects it for free. (More on turning demand into revenue: how to fill every spot and maximise event revenue.)
And write your refund policy on the page before you sell ticket one. The common community standard — full refund up to 48 hours before, then no refund but the spot is transferable — is fair to both sides and stops every cancellation becoming a negotiation. Because refunds on Who's In return the platform fee too, honouring the policy never costs you more than the ticket itself.
Door time
Phone out, scan wallet passes, done. QR check-in works offline — useful in a basement studio with no signal — flags duplicate scans, and writes your attendance history automatically. No clipboard, no printed list, no asking people to spell their surname while the room waits.
That attendance history is the quiet payoff. Three months in, it tells you exactly which time slots and price points fill, who comes every week, and who booked once and never returned. That data is how a side-hustle class becomes a calendar that pays rent.
It also powers the rebooking loop: after class, everyone who scanned in can get a follow-up with the link to next week's session while the endorphins are still doing your marketing for you. Your fourth session sells faster than your first because by then you have a list of people who have already paid you once — the warmest audience any instructor will ever have.
Questions instructors ask
Do I need insurance to run paid classes?
Almost certainly yes — public liability insurance at minimum — and it's a reason to charge, not a reason not to: $18 tickets fund the insurance that protects you. Requirements vary by country and discipline, so check with your instructor association or governing body before your first paid session.
Can people pay cash at the door?
Keep a couple of door spots if you like, but online-paid bookings are the ones that actually show up. Cash-at-the-door attendees are the most likely to flake, and they leave you guessing on headcount. Most instructors go fully prepaid within a month of their first paid class.
What if I refund someone?
One click. They get their money back, the 2.7% platform fee is refunded to you as well — you're only ever charged on money you keep — and the waitlist automatically promotes the next person into the freed spot. No DMs, no manual transfers, no empty mat.
When do I outgrow this?
When you're juggling multiple instructors, multiple rooms, class packs or monthly memberships, that's the point to move to Studio — Who's In's studio-management product, from $15.83/month. Your attendee history comes with you, so three months of class data isn't lost in the upgrade. See Studio.
Run your first paid class this week
Create the event free, connect Stripe when you're ready to charge, and share one link. Flat 2.7% per ticket, money straight to your account — here's how ticket sales work.
