- Is it really free for small operations?
- Yes. If you have 30 or fewer new registered students in a calendar month, you pay $0 in per-student fees, no matter how students pay. The only other charge is the $1 per-payment fee on payments made online; manual and in-person payments never have a per-payment fee.
- How does the per-student fee work after I exceed 30?
- Your first 30 new registered students each calendar month are always free. Each registration beyond 30 is $0.33. Example: 50 new students = 20 billable × $0.33 = $6.60. The free tier resets at the start of each month.
- What about Stripe’s processing fees?
- Stripe charges its standard processing fees (typically 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction) separately. Our $1.00 per-payment fee is in addition. You connect your own Stripe account, and money flows directly to your bank.
- Where does the money go?
- Directly to your bank account via Stripe Connect. Students pay you, not us. CertClass never holds your funds. Payouts follow your Stripe account’s normal schedule.
- Do I need a new website to use CertClass?
- No. You can drop the embeddable registration widget onto your existing website, or use your hosted CertClass booking page if you don’t have a site. Either way, students register and pay online without you rebuilding anything.
- Can I export my data?
- Yes. Students, class rosters, and pass/fail records export to CSV anytime, including the roster format certifying bodies ask for. Your data is never locked in.
- Does it work for two-day classes and retakes?
- Yes, that’s the core design. Multi-session classes get per-session attendance and pass/fail tracking, and students who don’t pass can be tracked through a retake. No single-day workarounds needed.
- Do I have to use SMS?
- No. SMS is completely optional at $0.03 per message. Email notifications are included free. Many customers run their entire communications on email only.
- Is email really free?
- Yes. All transactional and bulk email — confirmations, reminders, and messages you compose — is included at no charge. Generous fair-use limits (about 1,000 emails per day) exist purely to protect deliverability for everyone; a legitimate training operation will never notice them. Need more? Contact support and we’ll raise your limit.
- Can I pass CertClass fees to my students instead?
- Yes, with an optional setting: Pass Booking Fee to Students (off by default, in Payment Settings). It adds a flat $1.33 booking fee to the student’s online checkout, shown next to the class price before the payment step. The fee is charged once per registration, on the first online payment. For those registrations you pay no $1.00 fee on that payment and no $0.33 per-student fee, even past the free 30. Cash and in-person registrations are unaffected and bill as usual.
- How do fees work with deposits?
- The $1.00 fee applies per online payment. If a student pays a deposit online and later pays the balance online, that’s two payments, so two $1.00 fees. Balances collected in person have no CertClass fee. If you pass the booking fee to students, the student’s fee applies only to the first payment (the deposit), never the balance; the balance payment carries the standard $1.00 per-payment fee.
- How are organization-billed and free classes billed?
- Each registration counts toward your 30 free registrations for the month, and each one beyond 30 is $0.33, the same as any other class. No student payment runs through CertClass for these classes, so there is no $1.00 per-payment fee and no booking fee. For organization-billed classes you invoice the organization from your own Stripe dashboard or invoicing tool and record the invoice status on the class page.
- What happens to fees if I refund a student?
- Refunds return the class price to your student through Stripe. The $1.00 per-payment fee is not returned (Stripe likewise keeps its processing fees on refunds), and the registration still counts toward that month’s free tier. If you pass the booking fee to students, fully refunding a payment automatically returns the student’s booking fee as well.
- Are all features really included on every plan?
- Yes. Custom branding, certification expiration tracking, document storage, the embeddable widget, instructor logins, multi-session classes. Everything is included for everyone. There are no upgrade tiers and no locked features.