Swim club management software
Swim Ops vs Member Splash
If your board is weighing a Member Splash alternative, here is the honest side by side: what each product is built around, what Member Splash does well, what each costs, and where we think we are genuinely different.
The short answer
Who each one is built for
Member Splash is established club software for swim and tennis clubs. It covers the season a member sees: a member app with push notifications, reservations, front-desk check-in, point of sale for the snack bar, communications, and its own Poseidon AI assistant. If the jobs that hurt most at your club are the daily gate and the summer schedule, it belongs on your shortlist and deserves a proper look.
Swim Ops is built around the part a member never sees: the money and the governance of a member-owned club. Refundable deposits, the yearly renew-or-relinquish decision, resident-priority waitlist offers, refund checks, and an audit trail the next treasurer can actually read. We migrate your real records into a private trial before you commit, we lead with bank payments rather than cards, and we publish an API and an AI connection so your own tools can read your club’s data.
Both products will run a season. The question worth putting to both of us is which one models the way your club governs itself, and which one you can still operate two board handoffs from now.
Take these to both demos
Five questions worth
asking either vendor.
Use the same five with us and with Member Splash. The useful comparison is not the feature list; it is how much work is left on your desk after each answer.
What happens to a member’s refundable deposit, from the day they join to the day they leave?
Ask to see the ledger, not a settings screen. Who approves a refund, what the member sees while they wait, and what the treasurer prints in order to actually pay it.
Show me a renewal that goes wrong.
A partial payment, a household that renews three weeks late, a household that says no. The demo that tells you something is the exception, not the happy path.
Who is next on the waitlist, and who decided that?
Ask whether local-resident priority is a staff decision or an automatic rule, and whether every reorder and every offer is recorded with a name and a time.
What will a year of payments actually cost us, on our own mix?
Ask each vendor, in writing, for the card rate, the bank-payment rate, the fixed fee per payment, any cap, and the fee for a returned payment. Then run your own numbers through the payment-fee calculator — on four-figure dues the rail you collect on usually matters more than the software price.
Can we get our data out, and can our own tools read it?
Ask for the export formats, whether there is a documented public API, and what happens to your records at the end of a term. Swim Ops publishes its API reference and supports AI assistants through MCP; ask every vendor to show you theirs.
Governance: bonds, relinquishment and waitlists
- bond
- A bond is a refundable deposit a household pays when it joins a member-owned club and gets back, minus anything it still owes, when it leaves.
- relinquishment
- Relinquishment is a member’s formal resignation from the club, and it is what starts their bond refund.
This is the thinnest part of the whole category, and it is not a knock on any one vendor: most swim-club software treats bond refunds as a plain member-ID field. When we reviewed the published material from the swim-club platforms on this page in September 2026, none of them published guidance on bonds, relinquishment or resident-priority waitlists.
Swim Ops models that work instead of leaving it in a spreadsheet. Every bond payment, adjustment and refund is a separate line that is never edited after the fact, so the balance a treasurer reports is the sum of things that actually happened. A member who resigns goes through a review step before any money moves, approved refunds become check payables, and the treasurer prints and mails them as one check run, then marks them cleared. Waitlist offers are sent with an expiry, and every reorder and every offer is written to the audit log with the staff member’s name on it.
None of that depends on one volunteer remembering how last year worked, which is the point: this is the part of the job that has to survive the board handoff.
How waitlists and bonds work How a bond refund is paid out Membership and renewals in Swim Ops
Payments: bank payments first
Swim Ops is ACH-first. Dues run through your club’s own connected Stripe account, bank payment is the default offer at checkout, and cards stay available for the households that want them. The money lands in the club’s account, never ours.
Member Splash publishes its own processing approach on its site. We are not going to characterize another company’s fees for it — ask both of us for the card rate, the bank rate, the fixed fee, any cap and the returned-payment fee in writing, then compare them against your own payment mix.
On dues in the low thousands per household, the rail you collect on is usually a bigger number than the software subscription. Put your real figures into the calculator rather than taking anyone’s headline claim, ours included.
Payment-fee calculator How Swim Ops handles dues and billing
What Member Splash does well
Said plainly, because a board deserves a straight answer rather than a sales sheet:
- It is an established, specialized vendor in this exact market, with a long history of running swim and tennis club seasons. Ask them directly for their current club count and retention figures; those numbers are worth hearing first-hand.
- A member mobile app with push notifications, which is often the single thing members comment on.
- Reservations, front-desk check-in and point of sale for the snack bar: the daily gate operation, covered.
- Poseidon AI is built into the product as a headline feature.
- A self-guided demo you can try on your own before you talk to anybody.
- Published plan pricing with a setup option, laid out on their own comparison page.
- An active publishing habit: they answer common club questions on their own site, regularly and recently.
Migration: what actually moves
- quiet mode
- Quiet mode is the state every new club starts in, where no member-facing email or text leaves the platform until staff approve go-live.
We start from the export your current provider can give you. Households, contacts, membership status and balances come across, and we review them with you before anything is applied. Saved payment details never transfer between providers — members re-authorize them once, in your club’s own payment account.
Your club then spends its trial in quiet mode, Swim Ops’s term for the rehearsal period when no member-facing email or text can leave the platform. You look at your own households, run a renewal, run a refund, and decide with real data in front of you. Nothing reaches a member until you approve go-live.
Task by task
What each one covers
The same evidence as the full comparison of eight alternatives, narrowed to these two products. “Not confirmed” means the sources we reviewed do not establish the capability; it does not mean the vendor cannot provide it. Ask them.
| What you need to run your club | Swim OpsClub operations + AI | Member SplashSwim & tennis clubs |
|---|---|---|
| Membership & money | ||
| Membership renewals & dues | Documented | Documented |
| Online billing & payments | Documented | Documented |
| Member / parent self-service | Documented | Documented |
| Registration & waitlists | Documented | Documented |
| Refundable bond balances | Documented | Bond fees |
| Programs & pool life | ||
| Swim lesson registration | Documented | Documented |
| Camp registration & rosters | Documented | Not confirmed |
| Lap swim reservations | Documented | Documented |
| Facility / party bookings | Documented | Documented |
| Guest visits & charges | Documented | Documented |
| Daily operations | ||
| Club website builder | Documented | Documented |
| Email communications | Documented | Documented |
| Merchandise sales | Documented | Documented |
| Member support ticket inbox | Documented | Not confirmed |
| Bond refund check runs | Documented | Not confirmed |
| Automation & AI | ||
| Workflow automation | Documented | Club workflows |
| AI assistance | Documented | Poseidon AI |
| Documented API access | Documented | Not confirmed |
| Native MCP for your AI client | Documented | Not confirmed |
| Agent-assisted managed service | Optional service | Not confirmed |
| Competitive swimming | ||
| Competitive meet entries & results | Outside scope | Not confirmed |
Published by Swim Ops. Vendor sources reviewed September 13, 2026 for the feature table above; click a marker for its source. This compares selected club tasks, not every feature either product has. Confirm availability, pricing and service scope with each provider.
Published prices
What each one costs
| Item | Swim Ops | Member Splash |
|---|---|---|
| Software, first year | $1,800 founding offer | Essentials $2,000 per year; Premium $3,500 per year |
| Setup | No setup fee; guided migration included | Hands-On Setup $500 with Essentials; $1,500 with Premium |
| Payments | Your club’s own Stripe account, bank payments first; rates confirmed in your proposal | Confirm the current processing terms with the vendor |
| Try it first | 60-day private trial with your own records | Self-guided demo published on their site |
The Swim Ops founding offer is a bounded first-cohort price, and renewal pricing is confirmed in your proposal; see Swim Ops pricing for what it includes. The Member Splash figures above were read from that vendor’s own published plan table on the date in the sources block. Pricing pages change, so confirm the current numbers with the vendor before you decide anything.
Show your work
Sources reviewed
Every price and vendor claim on this page was read from the pages below on that date, by us. Where a page did not show a figure, we say so rather than publishing a number. Vendors change their pricing and their products; check the current pages before you decide.
- Member Splash plan comparison
The published plan table: annual price $2,000 (Essentials) and $3,500 (Premium), with Hands-On Setup at $500 and $1,500.
- Member Splash Essentials plan
Plan feature descriptions. No price was visible in the page we retrieved, so the figure above comes from the plan comparison page.
- Member Splash Premium plan
Plan feature descriptions. No price was visible in the page we retrieved, so the figure above comes from the plan comparison page.
- Member Splash product site
The product claims summarized under “What Member Splash does well”, including the member app, reservations, check-in, point of sale and Poseidon AI.
- Swim Ops pricing
Our own founding-offer price and what it includes.
See it on your own records
Do not take our word
for any of this.
We migrate a real export from your current system into a private trial, with member email and text switched off, and you decide with your own households in front of you.