How to collect court fees from players without chasing Venmo or Interac

You booked the court. You paid for the court. Now you're the person texting twelve players individually to collect $5 each, tracking who's paid in your head, and mentally writing off the two who always "forget" until you bring it up three sessions later.

This is the actual problem with recurring sports groups. Not the scheduling. Not the headcount. The money.

What this is

Brunchie handles recurring-sports-group fee collection in two ways: manual Interac e-Transfer settle-up via the Expenses section inside the Planning tab (no payment processing, no fees, player trust model), or Stripe Checkout at RSVP time (payment required to hold the slot, line items broken out transparently to players, money in your account before anyone steps on court — flip it on under Settings → Experimental Features and you're in).

The Brunchie recurring sports group guide covers the full system. This post is the money-specific layer: when to use each path, exactly how the Stripe fee works, and how the fee-required flow handles no-shows so you stop eating their share.

The sport doesn't matter here. The pickleball court fee, the badminton shuttlecock split, the hockey ice-time block, the volleyball gym rental — same problem, same fix.

Why the Venmo / Interac chase is a structural problem

The chase isn't a people problem. It's a timing problem.

When someone RSVPs for free and pays later, the payment is optional. There's no moment of friction, no confirmation that they're committed. When the court costs $40 and twelve people said "I'm in" and eight showed up, four people have an easy excuse: they didn't make it so they don't feel like they owe.

But you paid for twelve slots. The court doesn't care who bailed.

The chase is the consequence of decoupling RSVP from payment. Fix the decoupling, fix the chase.

Spreadsheets don't fix this. A court-fee tracking spreadsheet doesn't notify anyone, doesn't enforce commitment, doesn't link payment to the RSVP act. It just gives you a more organised picture of who you still have to chase. The chase doesn't go away.

The two paths in Brunchie

Path 1: Free hangout + manual Interac settle-up

When to use it: Your group trusts each other. People have a track record of paying. The sessions are casual, the stakes are low ($5–8/player), and you'd rather not deal with payment processing overhead. Most established friend groups running pickup volleyball or badminton land here.

How it works:

1. Create the hangout with no fee set. Players RSVP for free.
2. After the session, open the Planning tab and go to the Expenses section. Add one line item: "Hillcrest court rental — $50." Mark yourself as payer. Set the split across confirmed attendees (Brunchie auto-populates the confirmed list; you adjust for no-shows if you want to).
3. Each confirmed player sees what they owe and your Interac e-Transfer address (available in your wallet under additional payment methods). They send it. You see the balance drop.
4. Anyone who hasn't paid by the end of the week shows as outstanding — you have visibility without having to text anyone.

No processing fees. No platform fee. Just the math, done, with an outstanding-balance view that replaces the mental tracking you were doing anyway.

What it doesn't fix: The no-show problem. If someone RSVPs and doesn't show, you still have to decide whether to chase them. For low-stakes groups this is fine — social pressure handles it. For groups where the court fee is significant ($180 ice time split across 16 skaters) or where you've been burned before, Path 2 is the right call.

Path 2: Paid hangout with Stripe Checkout at RSVP time

When to use it: The court fee is high enough that no-shows are a real financial problem (ice time, reserved tennis, multi-court badminton). Your group has some turnover (new players, occasional guests, players you don't know personally). You want RSVP to mean committed.

How it works:

Set a per-player fee when you create the hangout. The fee-required toggle is gated behind an experimental flag — open Settings → Experimental Features, flip on "Stripe Checkout at RSVP," and the option appears in your hangout wizard from then on. Opt-in per event, default off. Existing free events are unaffected. When it's on for your hangout:

1. Players click the RSVP link and land on the Brunchie RSVP page.

2. Before confirming, they see the fee breakdown:

   Line item	Amount
   Court slot — 1 player	$8.00
   Stripe processing fee	$0.52
   Platform fee (5–10%, host-paid)	$0.80
   Total charged	$9.32

3. They pay through Stripe Checkout. RSVP confirms. Slot is locked.

4. Money lands in your connected Stripe account (typically 2-business-day payout).

No-show after paying? They still covered the court. The host absorbs nothing.

Waitlist + payment: Players can join a waitlist when the session fills. When someone declines, Brunchie auto-promotes the head of the waitlist — no host action required. When a waitlisted player is promoted, they pay at the moment they claim the slot — no free hold period that could be exploited. If the waitlist is empty when a spot opens, Brunchie automatically notifies pending invitees that the slot is available.

Fee per event, not per series. The default for any new hangout is fee_required: false. When you set up a recurring series with a fee, each generated session inherits the fee. You can override it per session — if the court is half-price one week because the facility gave you a credit, adjust that session's fee without touching the rest of the series.

Stripe vs Interac — the decision framework

Situation	Right path
Established friend group, $5–8/player, everyone pays	Interac via Expenses section in Planning tab
Mixed group (friends + strangers), $5–8/player	Stripe at RSVP — payment locks commitment
Ice time or expensive court ($150+), any headcount	Stripe at RSVP — no-show protection worth the fee
One-off session vs recurring group	Either — recurring groups benefit more from Stripe
Players without Canadian banking (visitors)	Stripe — works on any card
Group prefers not to share card details	Interac — no card required
You've been burned by no-shows before	Stripe — RSVP = paid = committed

The platform fee — what it is and why it's transparent

The Brunchie platform fee is 5–10% of the per-player fee (specific rate shown at event creation, host-paid). It appears as a named line item in the Stripe Checkout flow. Players see exactly what they're paying and why. The fee covers:

• Stripe Connect infrastructure (the sub-account system that lets money route directly to you without Brunchie touching it)
• Platform features: waitlist, open-spot notification, recurrence, posts, itinerary, expenses
• The RSVP confirmation and notification system

This isn't hidden in a service charge or baked into a "convenience fee" that obscures the split. If a player asks why the court slot costs $9.32 when the fee is $8, you can point to the Stripe Checkout breakdown. Transparency is the policy.

Want to test the paid-hangout flow before it's fully public? Flip on "Stripe Checkout at RSVP" under Settings → Experimental Features — no waitlist, no DM, no cohort to join. If you have feedback on the fee structure or the payout timing once you've tried it, that's the kind of note the founder actively wants — but you don't need permission to start.

For pickleball specifically: the open-play vs reserved-court split

Calgary and Vancouver pickleball organizers deal with a fork: open-play drop-ins (city-run, no organizer cost, players just show up) vs reserved-court blocks (organizer pays the venue, splits across confirmed players).

Brunchie is built for the reserved-court block organizer — the person who took on the liability of paying for the court. Open-play drop-ins managed entirely by the city need no organizer tool.

The hybrid case — you reserved a block for your regular group but post it as open to friends-of-friends — is where Stripe Checkout earns its keep. Someone you don't know joining a reserved session and not paying is a real risk. The fee-required RSVP removes it.

For Vancouver badminton and Calgary pickleball the multi-court math is in those posts. This post is the payment-decision layer that sits above both.

Personal notes from the founder

I ate the no-show cost in my own badminton group three times before I got serious about it. The fourth time I decided it was an engineering problem, not a social one. The RSVP-as-payment path was the design I kept coming back to: the moment someone confirms is the moment the commitment needs to be real. Everything downstream — waitlist promotion, open-spot ping to pending invitees, session headcount — only works if RSVP actually means something.

The Stripe Connect path is shipping behind an experimental toggle so organizers who want it can opt in deliberately, not so we can gatekeep — anyone can flip it on under Settings → Experimental Features today. The fee structure is set conservatively (5–10% platform, transparent line items) and will likely stay that way — the goal is to be the cheapest possible infrastructure for organizers who don't want the fee-chasing job, not to build a payment-processing margin business on top of recreational sports.

Stop being the group-chat janitor. Start at brunchie.app/hangouts/new, set the fee, flip the fee-required toggle if you want Stripe at RSVP, share the link.

TL;DR

Question	Answer
Does it work for Interac-only groups?	✅ Expenses section in Planning tab, manual settle-up, outstanding balance visible
Does it work with Stripe?	✅ Checkout at RSVP time, opt-in per event, behind an experimental toggle you flip on under Settings → Experimental Features
Does the platform fee show up in checkout?	✅ Named line item, transparent to players
Is fee-required on by default for new events?	❌ Default off — you opt in per event
Do existing free events get changed?	❌ Never — retroactive fee is off limits
Can I adjust the fee per session in a series?	✅ Per-session override, doesn't affect the rest
Can I test it now?	✅ Toggle on in Settings → Experimental Features — no waitlist

For the recurring-group system behind this: Run a recurring sports group on Brunchie. For multi-sport Canadian context: Recurring pickup game app for Canada. For Javelin fee comparison: Javelin alternative for multi-sport Canada.