The Middle Pin vs Lightspeed Golf · checked 8 October 2026

Lightspeed Golf, or a smaller bill for a smaller course.

Lightspeed Golf, formerly Chronogolf, is one of the best-reviewed golf systems there is, with no long contract. It is also priced for a bigger operation. It publishes its card rates, so this is where the comparison is most exact.

Work out your cost Sign up for free

Monthly fee: $0
A card payment: 5% + 30¢, all in
Contract: None
Companies compared: 7, with sources

Your cost, in two taps

What would you pay?

1What do you use now?

2Card sales in a month

$8,000

3What they charge a month

Fine-tune with your own quote

Average sale $ Their card rate % Plus per sale ¢

The Middle Pin $0 5% + 30¢ a payment · no monthly fee

Them $0

A month, before tax. Cash costs nothing on either side. Hardware is not included. Where a company does not publish a figure, the calculator says so and uses a typical one — put in your own.

Choose Lightspeed Golf if

You do enough card volume that cheaper processing outweighs a bigger subscription (see the calculator).
You want dynamic pricing and a polished, well-supported system.
You have a restaurant that suits Lightspeed’s restaurant point of sale.

Choose the Middle Pin if

Your card sales are modest and a $300-plus monthly bill is hard to justify — ours is nothing a month.
You want memberships with autopay dues in the same place as the register.
You want one price you can see before you talk to anyone.

01 · Side by side

What each one publishes.

Their column says only what Lightspeed Golf or a review site has published, with the source. Where nothing is published, it says so.

Price Quote only. Review sites report a start around $325 a month.^1,2 Free. No monthly fee, no setup fee, no per-booking fee.

How you pay Monthly subscription.¹ 5% + 30¢ on each card or bank payment, and nothing else.

Contract “No long-term contract… cancel at any time.”¹ None. Nothing to sign and nothing to cancel.

Card payments Published: 2.6% + 10¢ in person, 2.6% + 30¢ online. $15 per chargeback.³ 5% + 30¢ a payment, all in: Stripe’s processing is included. Cash and checks cost nothing.

Online tee times Included, with dynamic pricing.¹ Included.

Register (point of sale) Through Lightspeed’s separate Retail and Restaurant point of sale.¹ Included, for the counter or a tablet on the course.

Website Not listed on its golf pricing page.¹ Keep your own, or we build and host one for $99.99 a month.

02 · About them

What Lightspeed Golf does well.

Lightspeed Golf covers the tee sheet, online booking, marketing, events, dynamic pricing and reporting. Retail and restaurant point of sale run on Lightspeed’s own Retail and Restaurant products. Lightspeed Commerce bought Chronogolf in 2019.

Where it is strong

Quality and terms. Lightspeed Golf averages 4.7 from 176 reviews on Capterra, publishes its card rates, and lets courses leave without a long contract. Those are all things we respect, and do ourselves.^2,3,1

What operators say

Reviewers say the retail, restaurant and tee sheet modules “don’t communicate very well”.²
Support is hard to reach by phone.⁵

What our course data shows

922of 12,230 public courses booked online through Lightspeed Golf
188of them are 9-hole courses
63moved off it between 2022 and 2023, 29 back to phone-only booking
174moved 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 company each course used for online tee times: a snapshot, not a live count.

03 · Straight answers

Where we fall short.

We are one of the companies on this page, so here is what we do not do, and the questions people ask.

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 5% + 30¢ is more per card sale than the bigger companies’ published card rates. We charge nothing a month instead, so a course with a lot of card volume can pay less overall elsewhere. The calculator shows where that line is for you.
We are built for small public courses. A private club with a full kitchen and complex member billing is better served elsewhere.

How much does Lightspeed Golf cost?

Lightspeed quotes each course. Review sites including Capterra list a starting price around $325 a month. Its card rates are published: 2.6% + 10¢ in person.

Is Lightspeed Golf the same as Chronogolf?

Yes. Lightspeed bought Chronogolf in 2019 and renamed it Lightspeed Golf in 2020.

When is the Middle Pin cheaper than Lightspeed Golf?

When card sales are modest. With a $40 average sale, we cost less until card sales pass roughly $11,200 a month, because there is no monthly fee with us. Above that, cheaper processing on a subscription can win. Put your own numbers into the calculator.

Nothing a month. Your course.

Sign up and have it running today. It costs nothing to start and nothing to keep — we take 5% + 30¢ when a card is used. Or take a 30-minute walkthrough with the person who builds it.

Sources

Checked 8 October 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.