Chasing lapsed dues
Memberships expire quietly. Someone has to compare the wall chart to the bank feed, then send awkward texts. Studios we talk to spend most of a working day each month on renewals that should have charged themselves.
Membership software for community ceramics studios
Sell the seat, book the wheel, and keep the kiln queue honest
KilnSeat holds your memberships, wheel reservations, class rosters, shelf assignments and firing schedule in one place your members can read for themselves. The clipboard by the kiln stops being the source of truth, and you stop answering the same question eleven times a week.
- Running in 168 US studios
- 41,900 firings tracked in 2025
- Live in under a week
What the floor actually costs you
The studio runs fine. The paperwork around it does not.
You know your clay bodies, your cones and your regulars. What eats the week is the admin that grew one sticky note at a time: who paid, who has a shelf, whose bowls are in the bisque load, and who is standing at the counter asking.
Wheels that sit empty
A no show on a Saturday wheel block is a seat nobody could buy. With eight wheels and a paper sign up sheet, the average studio loses roughly nineteen paid sessions a month to bookings that were never released back to the floor.
Where is my mug
Every studio manager knows the count. Between the front counter, email and Instagram messages, that is the number of firing status questions in a normal week, and each one interrupts something else you were doing.
Shelf disputes
Two people assigned the same shelf, or a shelf still holding work from a member who left in March. It sours the room fast, and on average it costs a studio two memberships a year that simply do not renew.
How it works
From sign up to a cool shelf, in four honest moves
Nothing here asks you to change how you fire. KilnSeat records what your studio already does and puts it where members can see it.
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Set the studio up once
Enter your wheels, handbuilding tables, shelf bays, glaze area capacity and open studio hours. Import your current members from a spreadsheet with their renewal dates and shelf numbers intact.
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Sell memberships and class seats
Members pick a plan on your own page and pay by card. Renewals charge on schedule, class sessions fill from a waitlist when a seat opens, and every sale writes to the same member record.
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Book wheels and shelves against real capacity
Members reserve wheel time inside the hours their plan allows, and each shelf bay is assigned to one person with an end date. Nobody double books, and abandoned shelves surface on a list instead of in an argument.
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Load the kiln and let the queue speak
Scan or tick pieces into a bisque or glaze load, set the cone and the target unload date, and the queue updates for everyone. Members get a text when their ware is cool and ready to collect.
Built for the way a studio really runs
Six things you stop doing by hand
Each of these came out of a studio floor, not a product roadmap workshop. If a feature did not save an owner an hour or an argument, it did not ship.
Wheel and table booking
Members reserve a specific wheel or handbuilding table for a block of hours, limited by what their plan includes. Cancellations release the slot back to the floor automatically, so a Saturday morning no show becomes somebody else's studio time.
Transparent kiln queue
Every load has a cone, a type, a load date and an expected unload date, and every piece in it is tied to a member. Your members check the queue on their phone instead of asking you, and the front counter gets quiet again.
Shelf allocation with end dates
Bays are numbered, assigned to one member and given an expiry that matches their membership. When a shelf goes past its date, it lands on a clearing list with the member's contact details already attached.
Recurring membership billing
Monthly and annual plans charge on their own schedule through your merchant account, with retries and a card update link when a payment fails. Lapsed dues become a short list you review, not a reconciliation project.
Class registration and waitlists
Six week wheel throwing, one night handbuilding, kids' camp: each session has a seat count, a roster and a waitlist that promotes the next person the moment somebody drops. Instructors see their roster on their own phone.
Clay, glaze and firing charges
Bags of clay, glaze fees and per piece firing charges post to a member's running tab and settle with the next membership charge. You stop keeping a cash tin honest and start seeing what materials actually earn.
What changes in the first quarter
Numbers studios report after one season on KilnSeat
These come from 168 operating studios, measured against their own figures from the three months before they switched. We publish the method with the numbers because you are right to ask.
Renewals collected on time
Cards charge on the renewal date and failed payments retry twice with a self service update link. The old average across the same studios was 71 percent collected in the renewal month.
More paid wheel hours
Released cancellations and a visible open studio calendar put previously dead blocks back on sale. Studios with six or more wheels see the largest lift, because their gaps were the least visible.
Faster ware pickup
Automatic pickup texts move finished work off the shelf faster, which frees bays for the next member instead of storing mugs somebody forgot about since February.
Admin returned each week
Renewals, roster edits, firing status replies and shelf bookkeeping stop being manual. Owners tell us the reclaimed time mostly goes back into teaching and into actually making work.
Studios on the record
Three owners, three very different floors
"I ran ninety members on a whiteboard and a shoebox of index cards. The first month on KilnSeat I found four people who had not been charged since the spring. That paid for the year in one afternoon."
"The kiln queue changed the mood in the room. People stopped hovering. My glaze loads run fuller because I can see what is waiting instead of guessing at eight o'clock on a Thursday night."
"We teach two hundred students a term alongside the membership floor. Waitlists that promote themselves and rosters my instructors can pull up on their phones took a whole job off my desk."
168US studios running on KilnSeat
41,900Firings logged in 2025
96%Studios still with us after year one
Pricing
Priced against your member count, not your ambition
One flat monthly figure covering every staff login, every class and every kiln. Card processing runs on your own merchant account at your own rate, and we never take a cut of your dues.
Small Studio
$39
per month, up to 45 active members- Membership plans and recurring billing
- Wheel and table booking for up to 6 stations
- Shelf allocation with expiry dates
- Kiln queue with member facing status page
- Class registration with waitlists
- Email support, replies within one business day
Studio
$85
per month, up to 160 active members- Everything in Small Studio
- Unlimited wheels, tables and kilns
- Clay, glaze and per piece firing charges on account
- Pickup texts and automated renewal reminders
- Instructor logins with roster only access
- Google Calendar, ICS and QuickBooks Online sync
- Phone and email support, same business day
Studio and School
$169
per month, unlimited members and students- Everything in Studio
- Term based course catalog and multi session enrollment
- Second and third location support under one login
- Scholarship, work exchange and comp seat tracking
- Read and write API plus Zapier connection
- Kiln maintenance and element hour logs
- Named onboarding contact and quarterly review call
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time from your billing page. No setup fee, no contract, and no charge for the import of your existing member list.
Questions owners ask us first
Straight answers before you book a call
Plans are $39, $85 and $169 per month and they are sized by active members, not by staff seats. Every person on your team can have a login on any plan, because a studio manager who cannot log in is no help on a Saturday. Class students who are not on a membership do not count toward the tier. If your member count moves across a tier line for two months running, we move you and tell you first.
Most studios open bookings within four to six days. You send us your current member list as a spreadsheet and we import names, plan types, renewal dates and shelf numbers. Setting up wheels, handbuilding tables, class sessions and firing types is an afternoon of work, and we sit with you on a call for the first pass. The longest part is usually deciding your own shelf policy, not the software.
You do. Your member records, class rosters, firing logs and payment history belong to your studio and you can export all of it to CSV at any time from the settings screen without asking us. We do not sell member data, we do not rent it to advertisers, and we do not use it to train anything. If you close your account we delete production data within thirty days and confirm in writing.
Yes. Card payments and recurring membership billing run through Stripe or Square using your own merchant account, so the money lands where it already lands. Class sessions and open studio hours publish to Google Calendar and to any ICS feed, and QuickBooks Online picks up daily revenue summaries. There is also a read and write API and a Zapier connection for the studios that want to push firing data into their own spreadsheets.
You can cancel from the billing page in two clicks and you keep access until the end of the month you already paid for. There is no contract, no cancellation fee and no exit call to sit through. Before your last day you can export every member, class, firing and invoice record as CSV files. If you come back within a year we can restore your old configuration so you are not rebuilding shelf numbers from memory.
The paper list is not what they like, the visibility is. What frustrates people is putting a mug on the shelf and hearing nothing for eleven days. KilnSeat gives every member a page that shows their pieces, which load they are in, and the date that load is scheduled to come out cool, and it texts them when the ware is ready for pickup. Studios that made the switch report the wall list traffic drops in the first month, and most keep a printed queue by the kiln anyway because ceramicists like paper.
Kiln Report
Studio notes from the people who load the kiln
Kiln Report is our magazine for community studio owners. Every piece starts from a question an owner actually asks, then works through the numbers behind the answer.
numbers and benchmarks
How much should I charge for an open studio membership in my first year?
Membership price has to cover rent per square foot, kiln electricity, clay and glaze use, staffed hours and shelf space. Here is how to build the number from those parts instead of copying the studio down the road.
regulation and compliance
What do OSHA and my local code actually require for silica dust in a studio?
Respirable crystalline silica is the one health rule a clay studio cannot hand wave. This walks the federal general industry standard, exposure control, wet cleaning and what inspectors look for in a teaching space.
comparison
Should I fire cone six electric or invest in a gas reduction kiln for my studio?
The choice sets your glaze palette, your utility bill, your permit path and how much staff time each firing takes. A side by side look at what each kiln really demands from a membership studio.
Book a walkthrough
Bring your worst admin week and we will run it through the software
Tell us how many members you carry, how many wheels you keep and how your kiln schedule is written down today. We will get on a call for thirty minutes, put your own numbers into KilnSeat and show you exactly what the first month looks like. If it is not a fit for the way your studio works, we will say so on the call.
- A working setup with your members, not a canned demo studio
- A straight answer on migrating from spreadsheets, Square or a paper binder
- Your import handled by us at no charge, whatever tier you pick
We reply within one business day, and we never pass your details to anyone else. Prefer plain email? Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.