Unmanned Facility SoftwareNobody at the desk. Everything still works.
Unmanned facility software runs the four jobs a front-desk employee would otherwise do — selling the time slot, taking payment, capturing the waiver, and opening the door — as one connected system. Cinch does all four, which means the door code is issued by the same thing that took the money, so a refund kills a code and a reschedule reissues one without a person in the middle.
- What it replaces
- A front desk, and four separate vendors
- The core four
- Booking · payment · waiver · door access
- Access model
- A code scoped to the reservation window
- Your hardware
- Keep the controller you already own
- Price
- $249/mo flat · no transaction fees · no contract
- Time to open
- About a week, email-first
How it goes together.
- 1
Model your space
Each tunnel, bay, court, or room becomes a bookable resource with its own hours, rate, and turnover buffer. Memberships and peak/off-peak pricing are set once.
- 2
Connect your own Stripe account
About ten minutes. Payouts land in your bank, not ours — we never hold your money. Payment is collected in full at booking.
- 3
Load your waiver
Added to checkout with initials required on the clauses you choose, stored per person and attached to every future booking.
- 4
Wire the door
Cinch connects to your access controller so a confirmed booking issues a code valid only for that window, and a cancellation revokes it.
- 5
Test one real booking end to end
Book it, pay, sign, drive over, punch the code into the actual keypad. Then cancel a second one and confirm that code stops working.
- 6
Open the hours you were never staffing
Your branded booking site goes live on your own domain, and the building starts earning at 6am and 10pm.
What counts as an unmanned facility?
Any facility where a paying customer books, enters, uses the space, and leaves without meeting an employee. Batting cages, golf simulator bays, pickleball and tennis courts, and 24/7 gyms are the most common — usually staffed for part of the day and unstaffed for the rest, rather than never staffed at all.
The model exists because the marginal cost of an extra booking in an already-built, already-heated building is close to zero, while the marginal cost of an employee to supervise it is not. Unstaffed hours are the difference between a facility that earns twelve hours a day and one that earns twenty.
Why do booking software and door access have to be the same system?
Because every change to a booking should change access, and a person is not going to be there to make that happen. If a customer reschedules in one system and the door never hears about it, they are standing in a parking lot at 10pm with a dead code and nobody to call — which is the single most common way unstaffed facilities fail.
The test to run on any vendor: ask what happens to a door code when a booking is refunded. If the answer involves a person, a nightly sync, or a shrug, you have found the seam where your worst customer experience will come from.
What has to be enforced automatically?
Everything a front-desk employee would otherwise judge. Payment in full before the slot is held, a waiver signed before the code is issued, a code that expires so one booking can't eat the next, and reminders that carry the code so the slot isn't wasted.
- Payment up front. Not a deposit, not an invoice. This is the single change that removes no-shows, because there is nobody on site to enforce a policy after the fact.
- Waiver before code. Signed during checkout with initials on the clauses that matter, stored against the person so repeat customers don't sign twice.
- Time-boxed access. Valid from a few minutes before the session until it ends. Then it stops, without anyone remembering to remove it.
- Multi-channel code delivery. Confirmation screen, email, and a calendar invite that puts the code on a lock screen at session time — so a dead signal at the door isn't a lockout. Text messaging on top, once carrier registration clears.
- Remote control of everything. Refunds, reschedules, re-sent codes, and a manual door open — from a phone, because the alternative is a drive.
Can it use the door hardware already on the wall?
Usually, and that's the cheaper path. Cinch generates the per-session code and pushes it to your existing access controller through the controller's API, so the keypad and controller you already paid for stay exactly where they are.
Cinch issues the code. Delivering it to your specific door controller is integration work we scope and confirm before you sign — not a checkbox we pretend is already ticked. Most cloud access controllers (infinias / 3xLOGIC, and others in that class) publish an API for doors, people, and PIN credentials, which is all a per-session code needs. If yours doesn't, we'll tell you that on the first call rather than after the contract.
What does unmanned facility software cost?
Cinch is $249/mo flat, every feature included, with no fee on transactions — you connect your own Stripe account and pay Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢ directly. The alternative model in this market bundles software and processing into a single per-transaction fee, commonly around 3.9% plus a fixed amount per booking, which is the more expensive structure at small ticket sizes.
| Booking | Per-transaction platform (≈3.9% + $2.79) | Flat software + your own Stripe (2.9% + 30¢) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| $35 — half-hour cage or bay | $4.16 (11.9%) | $1.32 (3.8%) | $2.84 |
| $70 — one hour | $5.52 (7.9%) | $2.33 (3.3%) | $3.19 |
| $120 — two-hour court block | $7.47 (6.2%) | $3.78 (3.2%) | $3.69 |
| $300 — team package | $14.49 (4.8%) | $9.00 (3.0%) | $5.49 |
≈3.9% + $2.79 is a representative rate for all-in-one sports-facility platforms that bundle payment processing into one per-transaction fee; check the actual rate on any quote you're comparing. The flat column assumes you connect your own Stripe account and pay Stripe directly. The gap closes as the ticket grows — per-transaction pricing is genuinely reasonable on a $300 package and genuinely expensive on a $35 cage rental.
When is per-transaction pricing actually cheaper?
When volume is low or the season is short. Below roughly 85 bookings a month at a $45 average ticket, a per-transaction platform costs less than a $249 flat fee — and it costs nothing at all in your closed months. Above that line the flat fee wins, and unlike the percentage it never grows again.
| Bookings per month (avg $45) | Per-transaction surcharge | Cinch flat |
|---|---|---|
| 50 | $147 | $249 |
| 85 | $250 | $249 |
| 150 | $441 | $249 |
| 300 | $882 | $249 |
| 600 | $1,764 | $249 |
"Surcharge" is the part of a per-transaction platform's fee that is NOT card processing: roughly 1% + $2.49 per booking once you subtract Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢, which you'd pay either way. At a $45 average ticket the two models cost the same at about 85 bookings a month. Below that, per-transaction is cheaper. Above it, the flat fee wins and keeps winning — it never grows again.
How long does it take to open?
About a week, if your access controller is installed and its API is confirmed. The two things that add time are payment onboarding, which needs your business details, and business text messaging, which requires US carrier registration and takes roughly one to three weeks.
Launching with email and calendar-invite code delivery skips the carrier wait entirely. Texting switches on later without changing anything else about how the facility runs.
Asked and answered.
Is an unmanned facility insurable?+
Do you sell the door hardware?+
What if my controller doesn't have an API?+
Can I run staffed hours and unstaffed hours differently?+
Do I need a separate website?+
What does Cinch cost, exactly?+
What are you running?
The mechanics are the same everywhere — booking, payment, waiver, door. What changes is the ticket size, and the ticket size is what decides which pricing model is a bargain and which one quietly eats you.
Two tunnels, no front desk, and nobody has to drive over.
Bays that sell themselves at 6am and 11pm.
Courts that book, bill, and unlock themselves.
Open twenty-four hours. Staffed about eight.
Built for the hours you were never going to staff.
$249/mo flat, every feature included, no transaction fees and no contract. We wire it to the door you already own.