Your studio's website is on somebody else's domain

The short answer: a studio page on a curriculum or booking platform is a good shop window and a bad home. You do not own the address, the search value accrues to the platform, and you cannot take any of it with you. Getting your own domain costs about $12–15 a year at a registrar; getting a site worth putting on it is the part people put off. We are Freedom35 Web Design: we build the site free, you look at it finished, and it runs from $180 a year with the domain in your name.

How studios end up here

Nobody chooses this. It happens because the platform you already pay for — the curriculum licence, the class-booking software, the franchise portal — hands you a page as part of the package. It is free, it is instant, and on the day you open it is genuinely the right call. Music Together licenses more than 3,000 centres in 40 countries, and Kindermusik passed 5,000 licensed educators several years ago; a large share of those studios are independently owned small businesses running on an address the licensor controls.

Then five years go by. You have three teachers, a waiting list, and a reputation in town — all of it parked at an address you cannot keep.

What it costs you, specifically

• The search value is not yours. Every link, review and mention pointing at a subdomain builds the platform's authority. Move later and you start from nothing, because you are not moving a domain — you are abandoning one.
• You cannot be found for what you actually do. Platform pages are built to be uniform. The classes you invented, the summer camp, the adult beginners group — the template usually has nowhere to put them.
• Your email probably is not yours either. A studio with a professional-looking site and a gmail address on the contact page is a familiar tell, and families notice more than owners think.
• Change the platform and you change your address. Switching curriculum, or dropping the booking software for a cheaper one, means every flyer, sign, review and old email you have ever sent now points somewhere dead.
• You cannot sell it. If you ever hand the studio to a successor, the goodwill attached to that address does not transfer with the business.

To be fair: what the platform page is good at

We are not going to pretend the platform page is worthless.

• It handles registration and payment, which is the hardest part of running classes, and it does it the day you sign up.
• Being listed in the licensor's class locator is real distribution — parents genuinely search those directories.
• It is maintained by somebody else, forever, at no extra cost.

So do not throw it away. The move that works is not "replace the platform" — it is "own the front door, keep the machinery". Your site becomes the address on your signage and the thing Google indexes; the platform keeps doing enrolment behind it, or your own site takes that over if it is worth doing. Both are fine. Only one of them leaves you renting your name.

What moving actually involves

1. Buy the domain in your own name — about $12–15 a year, direct from a registrar, on your card. Not through a designer, not through the platform. Why that matters is on who should own your domain.
2. Build the site that lives there. The pages a studio actually needs are on our music school page: classes with real schedules and prices, teacher bios, a term calendar, and one obvious way to enquire.
3. Point enrolment wherever it already works. If the platform takes registrations well, your class pages link into it. No migration, no risk to the money.
4. Keep the platform listing. It becomes a second route in, pointing at your domain.
5. Move the email last, once the domain is settled.

Nothing in that list breaks a running term, which is the objection we hear first and the reason studios delay for years. You are adding a front door, not rewiring the building mid-semester.

What it looks like finished

Mustard Seed Music and Arts Academy is live at mustardseedmusicandartsacademy.com, and it runs classes on a licensed curriculum — the same shape of business this page is about. Disclosure, because you should weigh it accordingly: it is part-owned by the person who runs this studio, so it is our own build rather than an arm's-length client. It is not a mock-up: real families, real enrolments, real card payments, and staff using the back office every week. Go and click around it.

What it does that a platform page does not: its own class catalogue with live seat counts, family accounts where households manage their own students and sign forms online, an instructor dashboard with rosters and attendance, and a back office the owners actually run the business from. That is the Pro plan shape. Most studios need less, and we will say so rather than sell you machinery you will not use — a studio that mainly needs to be found and enquired with is the $600 Business plan, and sometimes the $180 one.

What this costs with us

The build is free and you see it finished before you decide — that is the whole model, set out on how it works, with the catch stated plainly on the catch. After that it is $180, $600 or $1,200 a year depending on what the site has to do, prepaid, with a 12-month minimum. You buy and keep your own domain. If you leave, you leave with the address that all your signage points at, which is the entire argument of this page.

If you are on a platform page today and it is genuinely serving you, the honest advice is to buy the domain this week anyway — $15 — and point it at the platform for now. Even that much means the address is yours the day you want to move.