The Middle Pin vs foreUP · Checked 20 September 2026

foreUP, or one price with the register already in it.

foreUP is a well-liked cloud system that serves around two thousand courses, from state parks to private clubs. It has historically been sold in modules. For a small course, that is the difference worth understanding.

Choose foreUP if

You run a busy course with a restaurant and want deep food-and-beverage and billing tools.
You want a large vendor with a big installed base and integrations.
Your staff already know it, which counts for a lot.

Choose the Middle Pin if

You are a small or 9-hole course and want one published price, not a set of modules.
You want memberships with autopay dues in the same place as the register.
You want to leave any month.

Side by side

	foreUP	the Middle Pin
Price	Not published today. Its last public price list (2023) showed modules from $70 to $130 each: tee sheet $120, point of sale $130, food and beverage $120.^1,2	$39.99 a month, or $99.99 with a website we build and host. Published, the same for every course.
How you pay	Cash, card, tee-time trades, or a mix.¹	A monthly subscription. No tee times traded.
Contract	Not published.²	Month to month.
Card payments	foreUP Payments; rates not published.³	Stripe’s 2.9% + 30¢, plus 2.1% to us: about 5% of card sales. Cash and checks cost nothing.
Online tee times	Included.⁴	Included.
Register (point of sale)	Point of sale module.¹	Included on both plans, for the counter or a tablet on the course.
Website	Websites available.⁴	Keep your own, or we build and host one on the $99.99 plan.

What foreUP is

foreUP covers the tee sheet and online booking, point of sale, food and beverage, billing, email and text marketing, a branded app, websites and tournaments. It is owned by Xplor Golf & Club, formed when Xplor Technologies and Clubessential merged in April 2026.

Where it is strong

Operators like the tee sheet and say staff pick it up quickly. It averages 4.6 from 160 reviews on Capterra and 4.5 on G2, and it publishes a page specifically for 9-hole courses, which most vendors do not bother to.^8,9

What operators say

Courses reported outages between July and October 2024, and slow support.⁵
A reviewer called it “expensive on the payment processing”.²
An industry tracker counted a net loss of at least 68 courses between January and April 2025. That tracker is run by a site that reviews vendors, not by foreUP.⁶

What our course data shows

1,238of 12,226 public courses booked online through foreUP
166of them are 9-hole courses
102moved off it between 2022 and 2023, 23 of them back to phone-only booking
243moved onto it in the same year

From the 2022–23 dataset of public golf courses in the US and Canada we work from. It shows which vendor each course used for online tee times; it is a snapshot, not a live count.

Where we fall short

We are a small, young company. The companies on these pages have been doing this for years, with far bigger teams.
We have no network of discount golfers to fill empty tee times the way GolfNow does.
No handicap (GHIN) integration and no dynamic pricing yet.
Our card fee is higher than the bigger vendors’ published rates. A course with a lot of card volume can pay less overall on a big subscription with cheaper processing. The calculator on the comparison page shows where that line is.
We are built for small public courses. A private club with a full kitchen and complex member billing is better served elsewhere.

Questions

How much does foreUP cost?

foreUP does not publish current prices. Its last public price list, from 2023, sold modules separately, from $70 to $130 each, so the total depends on which modules a course takes.

Who owns foreUP?

Clubessential bought foreUP in 2021. Clubessential merged with Xplor Technologies in April 2026, and the combined business runs as Xplor Golf & Club.

Is the Middle Pin cheaper than foreUP?

On the subscription, yes: $39.99 a month with the register included. On card fees we are higher than the big vendors’ published rates, so a course with heavy card volume should run the numbers.

Other comparisons

See it on a course like yours.

Twenty minutes, real screens, your questions. Or start on your own: month to month, nothing to sign.

Book a demo Start a free trial

Sources

Checked 20 September 2026. Prices and terms change, and most of these companies do not publish theirs, so ask each one for a written quote. If anything here is wrong or out of date, email kevin@themiddlepin.com and we will correct it. Company names are trademarks of their owners and are used only to identify them.