What You're Actually Paying For (It's Not Software)
Everyone asks what Hovn costs. That’s the wrong question.
Welcome to the 5th edition of the Hovn Behind‑the‑Scenes series.
Last week in BTS #4, I shared how we turn your feedback and student behavior into a living platform – not “just another tool” that freezes the day you sign up.
Since I started this series, one question has come up over and over:
“So what does Hovn actually cost?”
Today I’m going to walk you through how we think about pricing infrastructure – what you’re really paying for when you choose Hovn – before we get into the exact tiers and numbers.
Everyone reading this runs (or wants to run) a training business. Whether you ever use Hovn or not, figuring out what problem you’re solving – and how your pricing grows with your business – is something you’ll revisit over and over. I’ll show you how we answered that question for ourselves.
What You’re Actually Paying For With Hovn
The industry is where it is because everyone has been operating off tools.
In the old game – the pull network – tools made sense:
Become an instructor
Get a classroom
Post your availability to Find‑a‑Class
Hope enough students show up
If you were an instructor, you needed:
A way to post classes
A way to take payments online
If you were a TC, you needed:
A way to sell digital cards
A way to receive and file rosters
In that world, a calendar, a payment form, and a portal got you most of the way there. The demand was “out there” on AHA/ARC. Your job was to be catchable.
That’s not where the industry is going.
Right now we’re seeing:
Instructors who can’t depend on AHA as their only source of students anymore – it’s one channel, not the lifeline
PLTPs and larger brands posting to ARC and then routing those leads to instructors under them
Students finding classes through Google, employers, and brand names, not just directories
That’s the early shape of a push dynamic:
Bigger brands and networks become where students discover classes
Instructors and sites want to plug into that demand
Directories are just one channel into a bigger system, not the whole system
In that world, the problem isn’t “give me a registration tool.” The problem is:
“Help me build and run a network that can get found, deliver a clean experience, and keep people current across instructors, sites, employers, and agencies.”
That’s an infrastructure problem.
How We Define “Success”
If we’re going to price against solving that problem, we need a clear success metric.
For us, it’s completions:
A student who registers
Shows up
Gets certified
Lives in a record we can use to drive renewals and convert employers to group training
So when we thought about pricing, we didn’t ask:
“How many features should come in Silver vs Gold?”
We asked:
“How many successful student relationships are we helping you manage, and how many moving parts are we orchestrating to make that happen?”
That’s the core of our philosophy:
Align to success (completions)
Scale price with the parts of the business that actually grow.
How Training Businesses Actually Grow
From watching hundreds of providers, we kept seeing the same growth dimensions:
Student volume – more seats filled, more certs issued
Instructor volume – more people teaching under your brand
Agency integrations – AHA plus ARC/HSI, not either/or
Affiliate connections – instructors and sites buying cards from you, or running under your PLTP
The details vary, but the pattern doesn’t: as those dimensions increase, you naturally move from a solo/small site to a growing site to a true center to a real network.
We designed pricing to map to those patterns. You’re not paying for “more knobs.” You’re paying based on where you are on that curve and which bottlenecks we’re taking off your plate.
What We Saw TCs Already Spending
When we started talking to serious TCs, we didn’t start with, “What will you pay Hovn?”
We started with, “What are you already spending to try to run this like a network?”
Typical answers:
A legacy platform for registrations and card flows
Custom dev and SEO to aggregate classes across multiple sites / instances
Admin staff reconciling coupon codes, rosters, and B2B deals into something that looks like one relationship
SOPs and naming conventions to fake standards the software doesn’t enforce
All in, many were spending well into six figures a year on:
Tools
People
Patchwork
And still didn’t have:
A clean student system of record
Real B2B/employer accounts
True network visibility
A student experience anyone would recommend
Because they were trying to build a network on top of a platform that was built for a different era.
So when we thought about price, we didn’t ask:
“What’s a fair uplift on a ~$500 subscription of legacy software?”
We asked:
“What are TCs already spending to try to solve this, and how do we price Hovn so we only win if we actually solve it better?”
What You’re Actually Paying Us For
That’s why Hovn prices the way it does.
We charge based on:
The number of successful student relationships we’re helping you manage (completions we’re responsible for), and
The level of business you’re really running across those growth dimensions (students, instructors, agencies, affiliates)
We’re not in the business of taking a cut of your payments. Our job is to help you drive students and relationships you own.
With Hovn, you connect your own Stripe Standard account—not a sub‑account under us. Stripe sees you as the business.
Practically, that means:
You have full access to Stripe’s platform and data
You can plug other tools into Stripe as you grow
At high volume, you can negotiate your own processing rates directly with Stripe
Any savings from that go to you, not us
We wire Hovn into your Stripe once. As you go from solo → site → center → network, that same pipe and data model keep working harder. You’re not throwing away your stack every time you grow; you’re compounding on a foundation.
If you’re an instructor or small site:
You’re mostly paying on student volume. Maybe a few other instructors help you and you have a couple of agency integrations, but you’re not running affiliates or big B2B yet.
For you, Hovn is a foundation:
It gets you off the DIY stack
It turns your classes into pages Google can actually see and rank – real programmatic SEO built-in
It turns every completion into a student record you can serve again
That programmatic SEO piece is important. It’s the kind of thing most people end up paying an agency or dev team thousands of dollars to custom‑build. With Hovn, it’s just part of the platform.
If you’re a TC or network:
You’re paying for infrastructure that can model how you operate across brands, regions, and agencies:
Locations and sites across multiple regions
Instructors and affiliates under different business units
B2B/employer relationships across multiple states with varying certifications
Multi‑agency pipelines (AHA, ARC, HSI)
Routing demand to the right classes and instructors
Making your real inventory visible to Google and students
For most networks we talk to, that ends up being a low single‑digit percentage of revenue – less than what they’re already spending (and wasting) on:
Legacy registration tools
Custom builds and maintenance
Coordinators and SOPs acting as a fake operating system
Missed bookings because classes are invisible or hard to buy
You’re not paying for a prettier registration app. You’re paying for:
Fewer tools
Fewer people as glue
Fewer dead‑end searches and empty classes
More completions you can actually see, support, and grow
Today’s Action Step: Price the Problem, Not the Software
If you want a quick reality check on your own setup, don’t start with “what’s our software bill?” Every platform solves some pieces. The point of this exercise is to see what it really costs you to make the whole thing work.
1. Tools
List every tool you pay for that touches:
Registrations and scheduling
Payments
Email/SMS and reminders
Class pages / websites
B2B/employer management
SEO / ads
Anything you use to move data into/out of agency portals
Add it up.
2. People
Estimate coordinator/admin time per week spent as glue:
Moving data between systems
Fixing errors, resending links, chasing students
Manually building rosters and uploads
Reconciling employers, coupons, invoices
Multiply by $30–$40/hour × 52 weeks.
3. Missed opportunities
Pick one honest number:
Classes that don’t fill because they’re hard to find on Google
Employers you say “no” to because you can’t support the complexity
Renewals that slip because you can’t see who’s coming due
You don’t need perfect math. You just need to be honest.
Now add:
Tools + People + Missed Opportunities
That’s your actual cost.
That’s the number that matters a lot more than a single subscription line – and it’s the number you should compare any “software price” against, including Hovn.
This week I’d like you to do one thing:
Run that Tools + People + Missed Opportunities calculation for your setup.
Then hit reply and tell me:
Which bucket surprised you the most, and
Whether you’ve ever actually priced your infra that way before.
Paying the right price for the right problem is more important than getting the lowest software bill.
What do you think?
Thanks,
Jon & Shubs
Co‑founders, Hovn
If you missed any of the earlier posts in this series, here they are:
Next week: We’ll break down where Hovn actually fits with the tools you already use – Enrollware, booking apps, and custom builds – and how to think about your stack in terms of Marketing, Operations, and Data. I’ll also share a simple way to score your own setup so you know exactly what to change (and what to keep) before you ever hop on a call with us.
Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.