Pricing lessons with the tuition calculator

The tuition calculator is a free public tool at trio.app/tools/tuition-calculator. It answers the two hardest pricing questions a studio faces: what should I charge for a lesson, and should I bill per lesson or as flat monthly tuition? Anyone can use it — it needs no account and no login.

What it compares

The calculator puts per-lesson billing and flat monthly tuition side by side for the same roster and teaching year, so you can see the trade-off in real numbers rather than guessing. Flat monthly tuition charges the same amount every month regardless of how many lessons fall in it; per-lesson billing charges for the lessons that actually happen. The results show the monthly income each model produces month by month, the annual total, and your effective hourly rate.

The inputs

Roster. Add a row for each group of students: how many students, the lesson length (30, 45, 60, or 90 minutes), and the price per lesson. Mixed rosters are fine — add as many rows as your studio has lesson types.
Teaching year. Choose a start month and a break preset — school-year, year-round, or semesters — then adjust the breaks. This sets how many teaching weeks and lesson dates your year actually contains, which is what makes the monthly and annual totals real.
Fine-tune. Model cancellations, add studio fees, pick a payment schedule (twelve months, teaching months, or by semester), or switch to target mode to solve for the price that hits an annual income target. You can also compare your current rate against a new one to see what a rate increase does to monthly tuition and yearly income.

The outputs

For each pricing model the results panel shows the twelve-month income projection, the annual tuition total, fee receipts, and the fee-free hourly rate. Target mode reports the per-lesson price needed to reach your income goal; the rate-increase comparison shows the current-versus-new figures per lesson length.

Sharing a scenario

Every change is saved to the page's web address, so Share copies a link that reopens the exact scenario — the roster, teaching year, and fine-tune settings all restored. Send it to a co-teacher or keep it for your own records. Reset clears everything back to the defaults.

Mapping the result onto a Trio billing plan

Once you have decided on a price and a model, set it up in Trio under Billing Plans:

Flat monthly tuition becomes a subscription plan — one recurring amount each cycle.
Per-lesson pricing becomes a per-lesson plan — Trio bills for the lessons that occur.

Attach students to the plan through enrollments and Trio generates the invoices automatically each cycle.