Golf course software in Baltimore: the free tee sheet costs a foursome a day, and a municipal one is a government website

A little before seven on a Saturday in October, the first group of the day checks in at a public golf course in Baltimore County. They booked on their phones, through the single booking page that serves all five Baltimore County Golf courses, and each of them paid one of the prices on the course’s 2026 rate card, which at Greystone runs to 52: weekday or weekend, before noon or after, twilight or the two hours after it, senior, junior, college or service member, card holder or not. At a public course somewhere else in the country that pays for its software the other way, some of this morning’s tee times are not the course’s to sell. They are among the up to 124 rounds a month that the course hands to a booking company in place of a software bill, usually sold at a price the company chooses, with the money going to the company.

Both courses would call the thing on the starter’s tablet a tee sheet, and both would be right. But a tee sheet now does three other jobs as well. It is the course’s online store, where green fees, passes, lessons and gift cards are priced, sold and, more and more often, paid for in advance. On a course owned by a city or a county it is a government website, with a federal accessibility deadline that was due this April and was moved to April 2027 four days before it arrived. And for many of the country’s public courses it is also a currency: the course pays for the software with golf.

This guide is for the people who run golf in and around Baltimore: the City’s nonprofit operator and the County’s Revenue Authority, which between them run all ten public courses in Baltimore City and Baltimore County; the County’s fourteen private clubs; the ranges; and the eight simulator and golf entertainment venues we found, from Topgolf near the stadiums to small studios in the County. It is also for anyone deciding what software those businesses should run on. It starts with the market and with what golf software costs, including a common way of paying for it in rounds instead of dollars. Then it works through the rules that come with a public tee sheet, what the cart’s GPS knows, what 34 Baltimore golf facilities and 136 golf course websites across the country show customers and machines, how to sell tee times and simulator bays online, and what we would build.

Golf in Baltimore: two public operators, fourteen private clubs and a game moving indoors

Measured in money and jobs, most of Baltimore’s golf is private, more so than in most of the country. County Business Patterns, the Census Bureau’s count of businesses with paid employees, found 7 golf course and country club establishments in Baltimore City in 2023, with 221 employees and $8.0 million of payroll, and 16 in Baltimore County, with 1,279 employees and $47.6 million. Twelve of the County’s sixteen had 50 to 99 people on the payroll, which is the size of a private club with a clubhouse, a kitchen and a grounds crew, not of a public nine. Maryland had 116 such establishments and the country 10,076, down from 10,711 in 2018. Two groups are largely missing from those figures: courses staffed by government employees, which the series mostly leaves out, and driving ranges, which the Census files with miniature golf and pitch-and-putt courses under all other amusement and recreation industries, industry code 713990, rather than with golf courses.

Our own count is more direct. Between them, Baltimore City and Baltimore County have 34 golf facilities that we could find this week: ten public courses, fourteen private clubs, two driving ranges or golf centers, and eight indoor simulator venues. All ten public courses are run by two operators. The Baltimore Municipal Golf Corporation, which the City describes as “a first-of-its-kind, private, 501(C)(3) non-profit corporation,” has run the courses it calls the Classic Five since 1985: Carroll Park, Clifton Park, Forest Park and Mount Pleasant inside the City, and Pine Ridge, which the City owns but which sits beside Loch Raven Reservoir in Baltimore County. The Baltimore County Revenue Authority, created by the General Assembly in 1955 as an instrumentality of the County and a public corporation, runs the five courses of Baltimore County Golf: Diamond Ridge, The Woodlands, Fox Hollow, Rocky Point and Greystone. We found no daily-fee or semi-private course in either jurisdiction; the closest thing is a nine-hole executive course with a range and miniature golf in Reisterstown. Every private club is in the County.

The money tells the same story from another side. In the 2022 Economic Census, Maryland’s golf courses and country clubs took in $568.5 million, and the 32 tax-exempt establishments among them, member clubs for the most part, took 55.5% of it, against 39.0% nationally. Membership dues made up 46.1% of the state’s golf course revenue and green and guest fees 27.2%. Baltimore County’s 18 establishments took in $113.8 million, 57.4% of it in tax-exempt clubs. For software, that splits the local market in two. A private club buys member billing, dues, minimums, a dining room and a tee sheet its members reach through a portal. A public course sells tee times one at a time, often to people it knows only from a booking account, and the rest of this article is mostly about that second kind of business.

There are also fewer rounds to sell than there were. The National Golf Foundation’s monthly survey had the Washington/Baltimore market down 3.3% in 2025, a year in which the country set another record at 1.2% above 2024, and down another 2.1% through August 2026, with August alone 13.5% below the August before, while the national total for the first eight months was up 1.1%. The NGF does not publish absolute round counts by market, and a wet month can swing these figures, but the direction is the same in both years: courses in the Washington/Baltimore market are filling fewer tee times while the country fills more. The City’s operator, a nonprofit whose tax returns are public, has reported more expenses than revenue on each of its last three returns, for 2022 to 2024.

The growth is off the course. The NGF counts at least 1,500 simulator businesses in the country, nearly triple the number in 2022, with three or four hitting bays on average and memberships at more than three-quarters of them, and it puts the number of Americans who played golf only off the course in 2025 at 19 million, against 29.1 million who played on one. In Baltimore that means Topgolf on Warner Street, Five Iron Golf in Harbor East, two Back Nine Golf locations, two GOLFTEC studios and a couple of independents, with four of X-Golf’s five Maryland franchises in the counties just outside. Five of the eight simulator venues we found in the City and County do not appear in OpenStreetMap at all, and the industry classification system has no entry for indoor golf, so official statistics cannot count them separately yet.

One more caution about the census figures before we use them. Establishment counts are counts of payrolls at addresses, not of courses, and a business with no employees, a course staffed by public employees or a simulator studio filed under some other code will not appear in them. The two Census programs also count slightly differently, which is one reason the Economic Census finds 18 golf establishments in Baltimore County in 2022 while County Business Patterns finds 16 a year later. Use them for scale and direction, and use our own count below for the actual businesses.

What golf course software costs, and what the meter counts

Start with the uncomfortable part: almost nobody in this trade publishes a price. On October 9 we checked the pricing pages of the main tee sheet and point-of-sale vendors a public course in Maryland is likely to meet. foreUP, which runs the online booking for all ten public courses in Baltimore City and Baltimore County, publishes none, and its pricing address returns a 404. Neither do Lightspeed Golf (the former Chronogolf), Club Caddie, GolfBack, Teesnap, Club Prophet, Tee-On or Golf Genius. Private clubs buy from a different shelf, with Clubessential and Jonas among the names, and neither of those publishes a price either. The only published numbers we found are at the edges of the business: pace-of-play tracking, simulator hardware and simulator booking.

Unpublished prices are common in software sold to businesses, and a vendor can have honest reasons for them: a nine-hole municipal course and a resort with a hotel need different things. But golf has a particular reason. Many courses pay for their tee sheet in rounds rather than dollars, and a published cash price would make it easier to compare the two.

The free tee sheet, read from GolfNow’s own contract

GolfNow is the best-known name in the business, and in our national census below it is the most common booking engine on public course websites. Since January 2, 2026, it has belonged to Versant Media Group, the cable-network company Comcast spun off, whose first annual report describes it as a tee time marketplace “offering tee time bookings at 9,000 courses worldwide” that also sells course management software and payment services. The same report describes how part of that business is paid for, in an accountant’s sentence: contracts with “consideration due over the contract term taking multiple forms, including variable amounts tied to the value of specified tee times, which we generally receive directly from the end consumer.” Versant reports that revenue as net, as an agent, and says the golfers who book through its platforms “pay transaction-based fees.”

The plain-language version is in GolfNow’s standard terms and conditions for courses, which are public and worth reading in full before any meeting with any vendor. A “Trade Time” is “four (4) individual 9-hole or 18-hole rounds,” “made available for sale by GolfNow for its own benefit.” On the rolling version of the terms, trade times are released day by day until “a maximum of thirty-one (31) Trade Times (or 124 individual 9-hole or 18-hole trade rounds) have been sold each month,” which is a foursome a day. GolfNow “shall have the ability to sell Trade Times at a price that is at the discretion of GolfNow,” except where the two sides agree otherwise. If a trade time becomes unavailable because of weather, an outing, maintenance or because the course sold that tee time somewhere else, GolfNow may re-post it at another time. Under its rate-parity clause, the course must give GolfNow “tee times and rates at least as favorable” as it gives any other distributor. The course’s “payment to GolfNow, whether cash or provision of Trade Time(s), is a material element” of the agreement, and falling out of compliance on a trade-paid product costs $500 per product, per course, per month. The cash option exists, too; its prices rise each year by the greater of 5% or inflation unless the order form says otherwise.

The most revealing paragraph is in the tax section, under a heading that uses the word the rest of the industry uses: “Barter for or Cash Purchase of GolfNow Services by Client.” It says the value of GolfNow’s services, “including software solutions,” lies “principally in the provision of access to and effective execution within the market created by GolfNow,” and that the part of everything the course pays under the contract that is for software “equals the lesser of twenty percent (20%) of the total remuneration collected by GolfNow from End Users for Tee Times (or cash from Client) under the contract or $2,500,” per account. Where a state taxes software, the tax is computed on that amount. Read plainly, GolfNow’s own allocation never values the software in a barter deal at more than $2,500, however many rounds change hands. The rest of what a course gives up buys access to GolfNow’s audience, which GolfNow puts at more than 3.9 million golfers.

Two more clauses matter for anyone who might leave one day. Personal data that GolfNow collects “directly from GolfNow Account Users on GolfNow-operated sites and services or through the Services provided to Client,” including names, phone numbers, tee times, food orders and “information about other golfers,” is GolfNow’s; the course receives the parts it needs to serve the golfer, and each side then owns its copy. GolfNow may also use aggregated, de-identified data drawn from the course’s use of its services, such as yield, utilization, rates, rounds and pace, as long as the use does not identify the course, “for its own commercial purposes during or after the term”; it promises not to sell the course’s own customer data. The course keeps ownership of the data it supplies itself, but on termination GolfNow has no obligation to keep it and “shall, unless legally prohibited, delete” it. Export first.

Golfers pay too. On GolfNow’s consumer site, prices for “Hot Deals” tee times are set by GolfNow, the deals are “fully pre-paid to GolfNow,” and convenience fees are non-refundable unless the course is closed. GolfNow does not publish its fee schedule, which it says varies by location and is charged per player, per tee time, but its own worked example puts a $40 Hot Deal for one player at 43.49 reward points, “total price with convenience fee,” which implies a fee of $3.49. A golfer who books often can pay $119 a year for GolfPass+, which, according to GolfPass’s sign-up page, waives the fee on 12 bookings (GolfNow’s own FAQ says 10).

None of this is hidden, and none of it is automatically a bad deal. A course that cannot fill its Tuesday afternoons may be glad to turn empty slots into software and an audience, and at least one public body has said so on the record. Minutes of the City of Aurora, Colorado’s golf course advisory committee from August 2022 record that the city’s cost for GolfNow’s services “goes down significantly” if its courses take bookings through GolfNow, which they had begun doing as a trial to fill unsold tee times, and that about $175,000 of revenue had come through GolfNow bookings. The minutes do not say whether Aurora pays in trade times. The trade’s own association has been blunter in the other direction. In 2020 the National Golf Course Owners Association published a 62-page guide called “Beware of Barter,” and its chief executive said the barter economy was “allowing for deep, unnecessary and erroneous discounting of golf.” Barter is not only GolfNow’s model, either: Lightspeed offers “a trade or a hybrid option for every plan,” while Club Caddie and GolfBack market themselves as the alternative.

What a foursome a day would cost a Baltimore course

The arithmetic is simple if you keep it honest about what it measures. Take the rolling cap of 124 rounds a month, and value them at the prices Baltimore County Golf published for 2026, which include $28 for a weekday round two hours after twilight and $99 for a weekend morning at Greystone. Face value is what those rounds would bring if every one of them had otherwise been sold by the course at that price, which is an upper bound: trade rounds may sit in slots that would not have sold, some of the golfers who buy them would never have come otherwise, and the course gets software and marketing in return. The better estimate is the revenue a course actually loses, and the only published model we found for it comes from a competitor, GolfBack, whose barter calculator assumes that 80% of trade rounds sell and that 80% of those golfers would have booked anyway, so the loss is 64% of face value. Treat that as an argument, not a measurement.

Set those numbers against the two figures the industry gives for the software itself. GolfNow’s contract allocates at most $2,500 of a barter deal to software. GolfBack says cash pricing for this kind of system “will typically range from $10,000 to $20,000 per year,” which is a competitor’s claim we could not check, because no one publishes the list. A 2020 guest column on the NGCOA’s site describes the arrangement usually sold as “one, two, or three tee times per day,” so a course on two trade times a day doubles every number in the table. On those assumptions, a course that would have filled most of those tee times anyway pays more in rounds than any cash price we have seen claimed for the software, while a course that cannot fill them may be getting a fair trade. Which one you are is a question your own tee sheet can answer, if you can export it.

Baltimore’s public courses do not pay this way. Both operators run foreUP, and in our census none of the ten public courses sells a tee time on GolfNow; GolfNow has a listing page for nine of them, with nothing for sale. The Classic Five’s rain-check policy still says that “Greens and carts fees pre-purchased online through Golf Now’s Hot Deals are not eligible for Rain Checks,” but we found no Classic Five tee time on sale there this week. The one Baltimore course we did find selling through GolfNow is a private club, Sparrows Point Country Club, at $90 on the day we looked; we do not know on what terms it lists there.

The barter model is also moving indoors. Versant bought the simulator maker Full Swing for about $530 million in cash on August 3, 2026, and said it would be “anchored in Versant’s golf business, supported by Golf Channel, GolfNow and GolfPass.” GolfNow’s separate terms for off-course venues define a trade time there as one unit of inventory that “shall include one to six (1-6) individual reservations,” which reads like a simulator bay. Simulator venues that want cash pricing have it: Birrdi charges by the reservation, X-Golf’s franchisees pay $120 a year for Acuity, and TrackMan bundles booking with the simulator.

On a municipal course, the tee sheet is a government website

Here is the part a golf software price list will not show you, because it depends on who owns the course rather than on what the software does. In April 2024 the Justice Department adopted a rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the part of the law that covers state and local governments. The rule, 28 C.F.R. part 35, subpart H, requires their web content and mobile apps to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.1, at Level AA. It covers content a public entity provides “directly or through contractual, licensing, or other arrangements.” The word golf does not appear in it, but the preamble lists the reasons people use government websites, among them to “reserve public facilities, sign up for recreational activities,” and it names the tools at issue: “calendars, scheduling tools, maps, reservations systems, and payment systems that were developed by an outside technology company.” A public entity “must select third-party content that meets the requirements” of the rule, because it “may not delegate away its obligations under the ADA.” A tee time booking engine run by a vendor is a reservation system for a public facility.

The date is where it gets interesting. Governments of 50,000 people or more were to comply by April 24, 2026. On April 20, four days before that date, the Department published an interim final rule, in effect the day it appeared, that moved the large-entity date to April 26, 2027, and the date for smaller governments and special districts to April 26, 2028, saying it had “overestimated the capabilities (whether staffing or technology) of covered entities to comply with the rule in the time frames provided.” The technical standard did not change, and the Department wrote that it “fully anticipates implementing the regulation at the new deadline” unless circumstances call for more delay, while also saying it would consider reopening the substance of the rule; its regulatory agenda lists the project as deregulatory. The National Federation of the Blind, which has its headquarters in Baltimore, sued in federal court in Baltimore on May 21, 2026, asking the court to vacate the extension. As of the last public docket entry we could see, in July, there was a briefing schedule and no ruling. In the meantime the interim rule itself says that covered entities “have an ongoing obligation to ensure that their services, programs, and activities offered using web content and mobile apps are accessible.”

Both of Baltimore’s public golf operators are on the 2027 date, as we read the rule. Baltimore City (585,708 people in the 2020 Census) and Baltimore County (854,535) are large entities. The Baltimore County Revenue Authority is, under the County’s public local law, “deemed an instrumentality of the county and a public corporation,” and the rule measures an instrumentality by the population of the government it belongs to, so it does not get the later date the rule gives special district governments. The City’s courses are run by a private nonprofit, and there the obligation runs through the arrangement. The Department’s Title II technical assistance manual has said for decades that when a parks department lets a private company run a facility, the department is “obligated to ensure by contract” that the facility is run in a way that lets the department meet its Title II obligations, and the nonprofit separately operates a place of public accommodation under Title III, whose regulation lists a “golf course” by name. We are not lawyers, and we have not seen the City’s contract with its operator, but a reasonable person planning a website for either system would plan for WCAG 2.1 AA by April 2027.

So we looked. On October 9 we ran axe-core, the open-source accessibility engine behind many automated audit tools, including Google’s Lighthouse, against the public landing page of each system’s booking engine. Both are foreUP pages, and both fail the same check: the page’s viewport tag sets maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no, which tells phone browsers to block pinch-zoom on the booking page (Safari on the iPhone ignores it; many Android browsers obey it). Axe rates that critical and maps it to WCAG success criterion 1.4.4, Resize Text. The City’s page also had six pieces of text below the contrast the guidelines require, and the County’s had an image with no text alternative. An automated scan of one page before login finds only part of what a manual audit would; we did not test the tee time listings behind the landing page, the account creation the City’s page requires of golfers without a player card, or checkout. The zoom fix is a one-line change in a page the vendor controls, which is exactly why the contract matters more than the code: the operators need a vendor that will make it, and a document that says by when.

The same rules reach the cart barn. The Department’s Title II regulation treats golf cars, its word for golf carts, as one of the “other power-driven mobility devices” that a public entity must make reasonable modifications to allow, and its 2010 guidance says golfers who need an accessible golf car are protected by the existing rules on reasonable modifications and program access, although no specific golf car rule ever followed; the Department withdrew its equipment rulemaking in 2017. In Des Moines, a 2011 settlement with the Department required the city to buy one ADA-compliant golf cart for each of its three municipal courses; the private company running them said the purchase was not its obligation under the contract, so the city bought the carts. The physical standards are specific, too: the 2010 ADA Standards require that at least 5%, and no fewer than one, of the teeing stations at a driving range let a golf car in and out. None of that is software, but much of it ends up in the booking flow: a way to ask for an accessible car with the tee time, to know whether one is free at nine on Saturday, and to book the range bay a golf car can reach.

Independent ranges, simulator venues and privately owned courses that sell to the public sit under Title III, the part of the law that covers private businesses open to the public. A truly private club is exempt from Title III, although a club that sells tee times or rents its rooms to the public can be covered for those activities. The Department has never adopted a web regulation under Title III; its 2022 guidance says only that its existing rules apply to websites. That has not slowed the lawsuits. A law firm that tracks them, Seyfarth Shaw, counted 3,117 federal website accessibility suits in 2025, up 27% from 2024. For a business without a deadline, WCAG 2.1 AA, the standard the Department chose for governments, is still the obvious yardstick, and the cheapest time to meet it is when the booking page is built.

The cart knows where you are: GPS, pace of play and Maryland’s privacy law

Rent a cart at a Baltimore County Golf course and you are driving a tracked vehicle. The operator’s course policies explain that the carts carry a GPS system, used to keep them on the property and off the turf on cart-path days, to control speed, and to switch on a mode that lets golfers with disabilities drive closer to tees and greens; golfers who need it show a dated doctor’s note or a disability hang tag. Pace-of-play systems go further and follow each group around the course, hole by hole, so a marshal can see which group is two holes behind. Tagmarshal, one of the few vendors in this space that publishes any prices, sells its system on 36- or 48-month contracts, so a decision made this winter will still be running in 2029.

Since July 1, 2026, that data has a name in Maryland law. The Maryland Online Data Privacy Act treats “precise geolocation data” as sensitive data, and Chapter 874 of 2026 rewrote the definition to cover “information derived from technology that can precisely and accurately identify, within a radius of 1,750 feet, the specific location of a consumer, a mobile device, or a vehicle.” Before the amendment the definition spoke only of a consumer. The law does not define “vehicle,” but a golf cart is hard to describe as anything else, and a circle with a 1,750-foot radius covers about 221 acres, roughly the size of a whole 18-hole course. On our reading, GPS coordinates of a rented cart, tied to the name on the tee sheet, are precise geolocation data about the golfer driving it.

What follows depends on who you are. The act applies to businesses that control or process the personal data of at least 35,000 Maryland residents in a year, not counting data processed only to complete a payment, or of 10,000 if they make more than 20% of their revenue selling it. It does not apply to a “body or instrumentality of the State” or of a political subdivision, which on our reading takes the Revenue Authority, the County’s instrumentality, outside it. It has no general exemption for nonprofits, so the City’s operator is covered if it crosses the threshold, and so are private clubs, golf management companies and simulator chains that reach it. We could not find a customer count for any of them; the threshold is the first thing to establish, and our separate post on the act explains why 35,000 is not the same thing as a customer count.

For a business that is covered, the rules on sensitive data are strict. It may collect, process or share it only where that is “strictly necessary to provide or maintain a specific product or service requested by the consumer,” it may not sell it at all, its privacy notice must list it, and processing it requires a written data protection assessment. Keeping a cart off a wet fairway or slowing it near a pond is arguably part of renting the cart. Keeping a hole-by-hole record of every group for a season, attaching it to golfers’ profiles or using it to market to them is much harder to call strictly necessary for the round they booked. The safest design adapts what European privacy regulators recommend for connected vehicles, which we come back to in the Lithuania section: collect location only for the feature that needs it and keep it briefly, which for a golf cart means tying it to the cart rather than the person where you can and deleting it after the round unless there is a dispute.

Few Baltimore golf businesses mention any of this. Of the 34 facilities in our census, 14 link a privacy policy from the pages we read, and 5 of those mention location or GPS data in some form, which may concern apps and websites rather than carts. All five belong to national operators: two private clubs owned by golf management companies, Topgolf and the two GOLFTEC studios. The County’s policy, for a fleet that is GPS-tracked, does not mention it, though the County may well be outside the act. Two other provisions are worth knowing. The act lets a business charge different prices under a bona fide loyalty or club card program, which covers the player cards and Advantage Cards that run through Baltimore golf pricing, provided buying the card does not require agreeing to the sale of data. And it defines a child as anyone under 13, which matters to any covered business that takes junior registrations online.

Leases, books, water and taxes: the rest of the Maryland layer

The two public operators answer to different kinds of rulebooks, and that shapes what software they can buy and how. The City’s operator runs its courses under a 1985 management agreement, described in the notes to its 2024 tax return, that lets it lease and manage the five courses, their buildings and some equipment at no cost, subject to covenants on maintenance, improvements and promoting golf, on a perpetual lease that renews itself in five-year steps. Since a 1996 amendment it has owed $400,000 a year to the Baltimore City Foundation; the payments for 2022 and 2024 were forgiven. Neither the City nor the County sets green fees by ordinance, and neither operator charges residents less than visitors, which makes the price book simpler than it might be.

The City operator’s return for 2024 is also the clearest public picture of where a public golf operator’s money goes. The nonprofit took in $4.88 million in green fees, $1.14 million in cart rentals, $631,082 at its ranges and $327,349 from its golf academy, and its total revenue of $8.51 million fell short of $8.76 million of expenses; its cash and savings fell to $44,360 by the end of the year. It reported $179,338 of credit card and merchant fees, about 2.5% of its golf revenue, and $3,749 on the line the form calls information technology. Software can hide in other lines, such as office expenses, so the comparison is rough, but it suggests that, for this operator at least, the meter that shows in the accounts is the card processor’s, not the software vendor’s.

The Baltimore County Revenue Authority works under Article 9 of the County Code. It sets its own rates, which “shall not be subject to supervision or regulation by any state, county, or municipal commission, board, bureau, or agency,” but they must cover its operating costs and bond payments. It must have its books examined every year by a certified public accountant and publish a concise financial statement, and contracts to construct, equip or furnish a project above $7,500, or whatever higher amount its members set, go to the lowest responsible bidder after advertisement. Its statement for 2025 shows $18.7 million in cash and $18.0 million of bonds, and it carries a line for a subscription software liability, which governments have had to book since the accounting standard known as GASB 96 took effect. A public operator’s software is a procurement decision and, increasingly, a balance-sheet item.

Water is the oldest data obligation on a golf course. Under Maryland’s water appropriation regulations, anyone using water for a commercial, institutional or municipal purpose needs a permit from the Department of the Environment unless an exemption applies, permits run for 12 years, and a permit for an average of 10,000 gallons a day or more must require the holder to report its use twice a year, month by month, and may require it to cut use in a drought. The Department publishes new applications each month; in 2024, for example, Gibson Island Corporation applied to raise its golf course irrigation allowance from 10,000 to 32,876 gallons a day. We found no Baltimore-area course in the lists we could read, so we cannot say which local courses hold permits, but every one that irrigates from a well or a stream at that scale has a meter reading to collect and a report to file, and that is a scheduled job, not a spreadsheet someone remembers in July.

Taxes we have covered elsewhere. Maryland’s admissions and amusement tax and its sales tax can both reach golf cart and golf club rentals, with a cap that keeps the two together at 11%, which we worked through in our post on family entertainment centers. And Maryland’s 3% tax on software and IT services applies to a custom build, as we explained in a separate post. Where a state taxes software delivered under a barter contract, GolfNow’s terms compute the tax on the software allocation of $2,500 or less, not on the value of the rounds.

Baltimore’s 34 golf facilities, and what their websites show golfers and machines

We built the list from OpenStreetMap and web searches, placed each facility in the City or the County with the Census Bureau’s geocoder, and on October 9 read each one’s website, its booking links, its robots.txt file, which tells crawlers what they may read, its llms.txt file, a plain-text summary some AI tools read, the structured data on its home page and any privacy policy it linked. Miniature golf we counted separately (two standalone businesses and the course at a golf center, all in the County) and left out of the totals, along with stores that have a simulator bay for club fitting, a course whose status we could not confirm and three clubs that golf directories list as closed. Two of the 34 are uncertain: a City driving range whose website was down, and a County simulator venue we know only from a directory listing.

Every online booking for a public tee time in Baltimore City and Baltimore County goes through one vendor’s pages. The City’s “Book a Tee Time” button opens a foreUP booking page that serves all five Classic Five courses and a simulator at Carroll Park, and the County’s booking link redirects to another foreUP page that serves all five of its courses. One supplier for every public course is not a problem in itself, and foreUP is a mainstream choice. It does mean that a single vendor’s choices, such as the zoom setting described above, apply to every public golfer in both jurisdictions at once, and that two operators with opposite policies on cards and no-shows, which we come to below, configure the same product in opposite ways.

Every public course publishes its prices, in two very different forms. The County’s are ordinary web pages: Greystone’s 2026 rate schedule alone is a table of 26 lines with a card-holder price and a public price on each, with prices that differ by course. The City’s are PDF rate sheets, one per course, re-issued several times a season so that the late-afternoon price bands can follow the sunset; the newest set linked from the course pages, for August 10 to September 27, holds 354 prices across five columns of player types, and on October 9 we found nothing newer. A person can read either. A search engine or an AI assistant reads the web page far more reliably than a PDF re-uploaded under a new file name several times a season, and neither operator marks its prices up as structured data, so to a machine both are text that happens to contain dollar signs.

The courses are also visible through other people’s pages. GolfNow keeps a listing page for 23 of the 24 courses we found, public and private, but only one of them, a private club, sells tee times through it. The page for Carroll Park, for example, shows the course’s par, yardage, slope and the year it was built, and a box of “Nearby Tee Times” elsewhere. That is a reasonable business for a marketplace, but it means that a golfer who searches for a Baltimore public course can be shown a page about that course that sells tee times at a different one. None of the ten public courses has structured data, the machine-readable labels that tell search engines what a page is, on its home page, and none has an llms.txt file.

The indoor venues are the least visible of all. Five of the eight are missing from OpenStreetMap, the open map that many apps and some AI tools draw on; one of the three that are there is tagged as a five-a-side soccer venue and another as a golf course. Six of the eight book through a chain’s own system, which keeps the customer relationship with the chain rather than the location. Their prices and fees, which work differently from a course’s, are in the section on simulator bays below.

What 136 golf course websites across the country show

To see whether Baltimore is typical, we drew a national sample. OpenStreetMap holds 16,407 golf courses in the fifty states and the District of Columbia, and 7,006 of them carry a website. Leaving out Maryland, disc golf, mini golf, standalone ranges and links to Facebook pages or directories, those come down to 6,227 distinct course domains, of which we drew 200 at random. On October 9 we read each home page and its booking link, the site’s robots.txt and llms.txt, its structured data and, where we could reach it, its privacy page. In all, 136 sites were readable, from 38 states.

The first finding is about the links themselves. Twenty-five of the 200 no longer reached the course: 14 domains had stopped resolving, two returned errors, one was a parked page, one now forwarded to a town’s home page, and seven had lapsed and been bought by someone else. Those seven now redirect to gambling or spam sites; the address a map still lists for one Illinois course, for instance, forwards to a sports streaming and betting site. Another 23 sat behind bot walls that refused our requests, and 16 failed for other technical reasons, such as timeouts and server errors. A golfer who taps the website link on a map, and an AI assistant that follows the same link to answer a question about the course, can be sent to a gambling site. A course that lets its domain lapse does not just lose a website; it hands its name to whoever buys the domain next.

Thirty of the readable sites were private clubs with nothing to book unless you are a member, and 19 public courses offered no online booking we could find, only a phone number. Among the rest, the GolfNow family was the most common: 29 sites, 21 of them sending golfers to course booking pages hosted on GolfNow’s TeeItUp platform, six on its older EZLinks system, one to the golfnow.com marketplace and one saying in so many words that its tee times are “powered by Golf Now.” foreUP, the engine both Baltimore operators use, was on 15, Lightspeed Golf on 10 and Teesnap on 5, and 16 more used one of ten other products. Of the 75 sites where we could identify an online engine, GolfNow’s accounted for 29, or 38.7%. A website cannot tell you which of those courses pay in trade times; GolfNow courses that do would mostly be in that row, though Lightspeed also offers a trade option.

Prices tell a story of their own. Sixty-two of the 136 sites published green fees on a web page we could read (we did not open PDFs or images, so this undercounts), none of the 30 private clubs and 62 of the other 106. By engine, 13 of the 15 foreUP courses published their rates and 7 of the 10 on Lightspeed, but only 14 of the 29 in the GolfNow family. We cannot tell from the outside why, and there are innocent explanations, such as rates that move with demand, but a course that leaves its prices off its own site leaves the comparison to whoever does publish them. Only one course mentioned a booking fee, and it was the kind worth copying rather than avoiding: Sandpiper, near Santa Barbara, lets golfers book online up to 30 days ahead and sells days 31 to 60, by phone, for a $40 non-refundable fee per player. The booking window itself is the product.

Machines got less attention than golfers. Twenty of the 136 sites served an llms.txt file, at least seven of them on sites built with Wix and two generated by an SEO plugin. Seventeen marked the course up with the schema.org GolfCourse type, eight of them among the GolfNow-family sites, and 67 used JSON-LD structured data of some kind. Only two blocked AI crawlers by name in robots.txt, one of them a regional park system that blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, the token Google uses for AI training. Of the 36 privacy pages we could fetch, 11 mentioned GPS or location data.

How to sell tee times and simulator bays online: the price book, the hold and the fine print

A golf course’s online store sells an odd product. A tee time cannot be restocked: the 8:10 on Saturday is worth its full price at 8:09 and nothing at 8:11. Its price depends on who is buying, when, for how many holes, with or without a cart, and with which card in their wallet. The same slot is sold through several channels at once, held for some buyers with a card and for others with a name, and refunded, or not, according to the weather. Much of the usual advice about running a web shop does not fit, so here is what the Baltimore operators’ own pages show about doing it well.

A tee time is a perishable product with fifty prices

Start with the price book, because everything else is built on it. Baltimore County Golf’s rate pages list, for each course, a card-holder price and a public price for each combination of weekday or weekend, time of day (open, after noon, twilight and the two hours after twilight), walking or riding, and player type, plus specials for early birds, nine holes, replays, college students and service members; Greystone’s alone has 52 prices. The City’s rate sheets use five columns, adult and senior-or-hero-or-student, each with and without a Player Card, plus juniors, against time bands that change during the season: from March 30 to August 9 the late bands were 4 to 6 p.m. and 6 p.m. to close, and from August 10 they moved to 4 to 5 and 5 to close, as the evenings got shorter. Every price carries a condition the booking page has to know about. A “Player Card Adult” is 25 to 61; a student must be under 25 with a current ID; “Hero” means first responders and active-duty military; and a golfer must be 18 with a driver’s license to rent a cart. The County’s service discount needs a valid ID at the counter.

A store can only sell that consistently if the price book is data. Each price needs its course, dates, days, time band, player type, card requirement, holes and cart status as fields, and the twilight boundary should come from a sunset table rather than from someone retyping a PDF. Then the same record can drive the booking page, the sign in the pro shop, the starter’s screen and the structured data a search engine reads, and a change happens once. It also makes the next step possible, because prices that move with demand need the same foundation. Compass Pointe, a public course in Pasadena, Maryland, that books through GolfNow’s TeeItUp engine, was showing 18 holes with a cart for Saturday, October 17 at prices from $59 to $89 across 32 tee times when we looked. Maryland leaves that alone: its 2026 law against dynamic pricing, Chapter 154, applies only to food retailers and third-party food delivery platforms, and a broader bill that would have required disclosure of prices set by algorithms using a buyer’s personal data, HB 1475, died in committee. Pricing by day, time and demand is ordinary; pricing by who the golfer is, worked out from their data, is where the next Maryland bill is likely to aim.

Same software, opposite rules: the card, the no-show and the rain check

The two public operators in Baltimore run the same booking product with opposite policies. The City’s booking page asks for no card at all and lets each golfer reserve only one tee time a day online; card holders can book 16 days ahead and the public 14, and everyone pays at the course. Its no-show policy charges nothing; it asks golfers to call, and explains that no-shows push green fees up. The County requires a credit card to hold a general public reservation, says in its booking terms that a reservation not canceled 24 hours ahead is subject to a charge of at least half the playing fees, and charges card and pass holders who fail to show $30 per missing player, billed to the card of the golfer who made the booking, suspending the card after eight no-shows in a year. Neither booking page takes payment for the round online. Both choices are defensible. A municipal course that wants beginners and walk-ups may decide that a card requirement keeps out exactly the golfers it exists to serve; a course with a full Saturday may decide that an empty slot at 8:10 is a cost every other golfer pays. What matters is that the rule is a setting the board chose, written down and enforced the same way online, by phone and at the counter.

Rain checks are the other half of the hold. At the City’s courses, a golfer whose round is stopped by weather, though not by darkness, gets a share of the fee back in a rain check based on the holes played, redeemable only at the course that issued it within 60 days and not replaced if lost; fees prepaid through GolfNow’s Hot Deals are not eligible. That is a ledger, not a paper slip: a credit with an amount, an issuing course, an expiry date and a link to the round that created it. Los Angeles goes further and tells golfers not to cancel at all when it rains, because its staff cancel the tee times and refund the deposits themselves. The County’s rules are more generous than the City’s: its rain credits, and the nine-hole credit it offers when the temperature passes 90 degrees before the back nine, are good for 60 days at any of its five courses, and a golfer unhappy with the round who stops before teeing off on the fourth hole gets a full refund.

Maryland has no general rule on how booking or card fees are shown to golfers. No bill on junk fees or drip pricing, meaning fees added late in checkout, was even introduced in the 2025 or 2026 sessions, the state’s total-price rules cover narrow trades such as event tickets, and the Federal Trade Commission’s fee rule covers only live-event tickets and short-term lodging. A Baltimore course may add a per-player booking fee at checkout, subject to the general ban on misleading statements. But golfers book from everywhere, and California, Minnesota, Virginia, Colorado and Massachusetts now require the total price, with every mandatory fee, to be the price a buyer sees. Google’s tee time feed, described below, asks for the base price and the fee per person as separate fields. The simplest design that satisfies all of those laws is one total from the first screen, built from those two numbers, on the website, in the feed and on the receipt.

Cards, passes, points and gift cards

Both operators sell memberships that are really price lists. The City’s Player Card costs $35, or $25 for students, and unlocks the lower column of every rate sheet, a longer booking window and loyalty points worth five cents each; its monthly and annual passes run from $148 a month for weekday afternoons at three courses to $4,347 a year for any time at all five with a cart, tracked, the operator says, because all five courses now share one customer database. The County’s Advantage Card costs $40 and takes $10 off most green fees, its loyalty program earns a point per dollar of green and cart fees, worth two and a half cents each, and its Four-Star annual pass costs $4,659 at peak. Both sell gift cards, and the City sells online range cards with a bonus on top, $65 of balls for $50. Every one of those is a stored value or a price entitlement with an owner, a start date and an expiry, and Maryland’s rules on how long prepaid value must last, which we covered in our car wash post, can reach them whatever the pro shop’s point of sale does with them. A monthly pass that renews by itself is also an automatic renewal under Maryland law since June 1, 2026, which requires a way to cancel that is at least as easy as the way in and available through the same channel.

Limits, bots and who gets Saturday morning

The busiest tee times are scarce, and both Baltimore operators already ration them: one online tee time per golfer per day at the City’s courses, one every eight hours on weekdays for the County’s card holders, and longer booking windows for people who pay for a card. Elsewhere the fight over Saturday morning has gone further. Los Angeles forbids booking with “any computer program, bot, offline reader, and site search/retrieval application,” forbids brokering tee times without the city’s written consent, allows one reservation per person per day and requires the person who books to play, and its answers to golfers explain that it takes a non-refundable deposit on every tee time partly to deter resellers. In 2025 federal prosecutors in Los Angeles charged two brothers who had reserved public tee times and resold them for a fee with failing to report the income; they pleaded not guilty. And California’s legislature took up a bill this year, AB 1954, against third-party platforms reselling reservations at locally owned courses without the operator’s written agreement. We found nothing to suggest a bot problem in Baltimore, and Maryland has no tee time resale bill. A booking store should make those rules properties of the account, so they hold whether the request comes from a person, a script or a phone call to the pro shop.

Simulator bays sell by the hour

Indoor venues sell a different unit. Back Nine Golf prices a bay at $40 an hour at one Baltimore County location and $50 at the other, plus a charge per extra guest per hour, and shows the 6% sales tax on the price. Topgolf prices its bays “by the hour, with the hourly rate varying by day and time” and charges new players a $6 account activation fee. Five Iron Golf sells memberships from $235 a month and charges up to $50 for a late cancellation. The City’s operator runs a simulator at Carroll Park on the same tee sheet as its courses, in 30-minute slots. A bay store needs hourly and half-hour units, guest counts that change the price, member hours that renew each month, leagues that hold the same bay every Tuesday, and food and drink on the same ticket, and it needs a cancellation rule as clear as a course’s. The Lithuania section below has an example of such a rule written in one sentence.

What Google and AI assistants can read about a golf course

Much of what a search engine or an AI assistant can learn about a Baltimore course has to come from somewhere other than the course. As our census shows, the public courses publish no structured data, the City’s prices sit in PDFs that are replaced under new file names two or three times a season, most simulator venues are missing from the map, and GolfNow has a page for almost every course.

Google itself now shows tee times. Its tee time add-on lets golfers check availability inside Google Search, fed by booking providers that upload availability every 30 minutes, with golf courses, driving ranges and indoor simulators all eligible, and its feed format carries a base price per person and a fee per person. GolfNow’s guide for courses says golfers can then choose between GolfNow.com, TeeOff and the course’s own GolfNow booking engine, and a revenue consultancy says a course on those marketplaces has to opt out of them if it wants Google’s button to go only to its own page. We found no announcement of an AI assistant that books tee times on its own yet; Google’s AI Mode can fill in forms and call businesses, with haircuts and car repairs as its examples. The structured data type exists too: GolfCourse is a kind of sports activity location in schema.org, with no properties of its own and no rich result in Google, so its job is simply to tell machines what the page is about.

The fix is unglamorous: a page per course with its address, hours, holes, booking link and current prices in the text and in schema.org GolfCourse markup; prices published as HTML from the same data the booking page uses; an llms.txt that says plainly which booking page is the course’s own; accurate map listings; and a domain that never lapses, so that nobody else can answer for the course.

A note for readers in Lithuania

Part of our team works from Lithuania, where golf is small, young and booked in almost as many ways as there are courses. The Lithuanian Golf Federation lists six courses, five of 18 holes and one of nine, and its website counts more than 4,500 registered golfers, on a counter that carries no date. Published green fees for 18 holes run from €35 at Wolf Golf Links near Druskininkai to €70 at Europos Centro near Vilnius, and National Golf Resort near Klaipėda has already posted €85 for its 2027 season. Handicaps and tournaments run nationally on GolfBox, a Danish platform, but only two courses use it as a public tee sheet. National Golf Resort sends golfers to golf-booking.com, which a Polish company runs; The V Golf Club at Vilnius Grand Resort takes requests through an inquiry form; and Capitals, the country’s first 18-hole course, books by phone or email and takes membership fees by bank transfer. Indoor simulators charge about €30 to €40 an hour and are booked through WordPress plugins, WhatsApp or the phone.

The law points in a direction American golfers would find familiar. EU consumers normally have 14 days to withdraw from a contract made online, but the Consumer Rights Directive excludes “services related to leisure activities if the contract provides for a specific date or period of performance,” and article 6.228¹⁰ of the Lithuanian Civil Code does the same for “laisvalaikio paslaugų” (leisure services) with a fixed date. A tee time bought online cannot be withdrawn from under the 14-day rule, so cancellation is whatever the course’s terms say, and the seller must say before the sale that there is no right of withdrawal. The indoor lounge that Europos Centro runs in a Vilnius shopping center shows what a written rule looks like: cancel at least 12 hours ahead, pay 50% for a later cancellation and the full price for a no-show. Since June 19, 2026, every online shop must also offer a function labeled “atsisakyti sutarties čia,” withdraw from the contract here, which covers the gloves and the gift box in a pro shop’s checkout but not the dated tee time in the same basket. A ten-round package or an undated voucher is a harder case, on which we would ask a lawyer.

Tax and accessibility differ in the details. A green fee from a commercial course carries the standard 21% VAT; the reduced 12% rate that took effect on January 1, 2026, covers accommodation, scheduled passenger transport and admission to arts and culture, not sport, and the 9% rate for sports clubs that Lithuania applied in 2023 expired that June. Sport-related services from nonprofit bodies are exempt. The European Accessibility Act has applied in Lithuania since June 28, 2025, and it reaches online shops and bookings, but it exempts microenterprises that provide services, those with fewer than ten staff and no more than €2 million of turnover or balance sheet, which on those numbers may include several of the courses.

On the cart, European regulators have said more than Maryland’s law does. The European Data Protection Board’s guidelines on connected vehicles call location data “particularly revealing of the life habits of data subjects,” tell controllers not to collect it “except if doing so is absolutely necessary,” and recommend activating it “only when the user launches a functionality that requires the vehicle’s location to be known, and not by default and continuously.” Its May 2026 summary puts it more bluntly: “You cannot continuously track the vehicle ‘just in case’ it gets stolen.” The guidance is written about cars, but it is the closest thing to a golf cart rule we found in either place, and it describes the design we would build in both: location on for the feature that needs it, off for everything else, and gone after the round.

What custom actually costs, and when it pays

We price every project at a fixed fee, agreed before we start, and publish the starting points on our pricing page. For a golf operator they map onto this article like this.

Most of our projects land between $6,000 and $30,000, and none requires you to replace a tee sheet, a point of sale, a simulator or a GPS fleet that already works; the demos page shows finished work. In Maryland, the state’s 3% tax on software and IT services applies to a custom build, so the Online Store package starts at $6,180 with tax.

When it pays depends on how you pay for software now. For a course on one trade time a day, the table in the pricing section puts the revenue lost to trade at roughly $26,700 a year if the trade rounds would otherwise have sold at $28, and about $45,700 at $48, on GolfBack’s assumption that 64% of their face value is real loss. Leaving barter means paying cash for a tee sheet, which no vendor publishes, so the honest comparison is that annual loss against a cash quote plus a one-time build: a store that starts at $6,180 with tax is worth building if the cash tee sheet and the store together cost less than the rounds you were giving away, and only your own tee sheet export can say whether they do. For Baltimore’s two public operators, which sell none of their tee times through GolfNow, the case is different and smaller: a booking store that is accessible by contract and by design before the 2027 deadline, prices that machines can read, and a customer record they own whichever tee sheet sits underneath.

What we would build for a Baltimore golf operator

If a Baltimore course, range or simulator venue asked us to fix the problems in this article without replacing anything that already works, this is what we would build, roughly in this order.

• A price book kept as data, not as PDFs. Every rate with its day, its time band, its player type and the ID it requires, with twilight bands tied to a sunset table instead of a new sheet each time the sunset moves the bands, card and pass prices beside the public ones, and one source that feeds the website, the booking page, the starter’s screen and the structured data at the same moment.
• A booking store the operator owns. Tee times, bays, lessons, range cards, player cards, passes and gift cards in one checkout on the operator’s own domain, with the full price on the first screen, booking windows and per-account limits by card type, a page that zooms, works with a keyboard and reads aloud, and an export of every customer and booking in a format any other system can load.
• Holding rules the board actually chose. A card on file or not, a no-show fee and the point at which a card is suspended, or no fee and a reminder instead; rain checks issued against the original booking, valid where and for as long as the policy says; weather closures that release tee times and refund prepaid rounds without a phone call.
• Distribution on the operator’s terms. Tee times sent to the marketplaces you choose, at prices you set, with any trade times labeled as such and reconciled each month against the cap in the contract, so that every round on the sheet carries the channel that sold it and the money it brought in.
• Location rules for the carts. Geofencing, speed limits and the accessible mode on the cart itself; a pace-of-play view while a round is on; no record linking a golfer’s name to a cart’s track after the round unless there is a dispute; and a privacy notice that says what the system really does.
• Accessibility written into every contract. WCAG 2.1 AA for every page a golfer touches, an accessibility conformance report (the vendor’s written statement of which WCAG criteria its product meets, often called a VPAT) from every vendor, deadlines for fixes, requests for an accessible golf car inside the booking flow and a flag on the range bays a golf car can reach.
• One set of facts for people and machines. The same prices, hours, policies and booking link on the website, in GolfCourse structured data, in an llms.txt file and on the map listings, a domain that is renewed before it lapses, and a check each season that what an AI assistant says about the course matches the sign at the first tee.

For an operator that already runs a tee sheet and point of sale from one of the vendors above, most of this sits beside what it has. The tee sheet keeps running the day, the point of sale keeps taking cards, the GPS keeps the carts off wet fairways; the price book, the store, the holding rules, the channel records, the location rules and the published facts are the parts we would build and hand over to you to own.

Build, buy, or leave it alone

Most golf courses should buy their tee sheet and their point of sale, and the products in this article do that core job well. A nine-hole public course with a pro shop and a snack bar does not need a point of sale written for it, and nothing we could build would beat a mature tee sheet on price for the basic work of filling a day. If you pay cash for a system whose booking pages are accessible, whose prices you control and whose data you can export, keep it. Ask every vendor for the price list it does not publish, the export format it promises and the date by which it will meet WCAG 2.1 AA, in writing, and compare at least two before you renew.

If you pay in trade times, do the arithmetic from your own tee sheet before your next renewal. Count the trade rounds GolfNow sold last year, the times they were in, the prices they went for and how many of those slots had sold at full price the year before; then read the trade time definition, the rate-parity clause (the promise to give GolfNow rates at least as good as anyone else’s), the non-compliance fee and the data clauses in the terms you signed, and get a cash quote from at least one other vendor and from GolfNow itself. For a course that cannot fill its afternoons, barter can be a fair trade for software and an audience. For a course that fills most of its tee sheet anyway, it can be the most expensive software it ever buys, paid in its own product, at a price somebody else sets.

If you run public golf, the next six months are about contracts more than code. The federal deadline for both Baltimore systems is April 26, 2027, and a lawsuit in Baltimore may yet change it. Put WCAG 2.1 AA, a conformance report, a schedule for fixes and an indemnity, so that the vendor pays if its pages cause a claim, into the vendor agreement now, ask for the zoom setting to be removed this month, publish your rates as web pages rather than PDFs, and add an accessible golf car request to the booking flow. None of that requires leaving a vendor that works.

If you run a simulator venue, the answer depends on whether you are franchised. A franchisee gets its stack chosen for it: X-Golf’s 2026 disclosure document requires Acuity for bay reservations and Square for the point of sale, prohibits using AI in the franchise’s marketing and operation without written permission, and gives the franchisor access to the system data with “no contractual limitation,” subject, the document adds, to applicable privacy laws. Median annual sales were $94,970 per simulator across 114 stores in 2025, as reported from franchisees’ point-of-sale systems, which shows how much revenue runs through the required systems. An independent venue can start with a per-reservation booking tool for very little, and should build only when memberships, leagues, food and drink and lessons make the generic tools fight each other.

Leave alone what is cheap and works: the tee sheet, the point of sale, the GPS hardware, the simulators, the accounting package. Build the few things we have not seen sold to this trade in a form an operator controls: the price book as data, the store on your own domain, the holding rules your board actually chose, the record of which channel sold which round, the rules for what the cart remembers, and one set of facts for people and machines. If you are not sure which of those is costing you money, a one-week prototype on last season’s tee sheet is the cheapest way to find out.

Questions golf operators and golfers ask us

How much does golf course software cost?

Most vendors will not say in public. On October 9, 2026, none of the main tee sheet and point-of-sale vendors we checked, including foreUP, Lightspeed Golf, Club Caddie, GolfBack, Teesnap, Club Prophet, Tee-On and Golf Genius, published a price, and GolfNow publishes its standard terms but puts prices on each course’s order form. Published prices exist only at the edges: Tagmarshal’s optional pace-of-play modules at $2.90 per unit a month (the base system is quoted) on 36- or 48-month contracts, simulator booking from $0.25 to $1.00 per reservation at Birrdi, and a single commercial TrackMan simulator bay from about $23,995. GolfBack, a competitor of GolfNow, says cash pricing for a course system typically runs $10,000 to $20,000 a year, a claim we could not check.

What is a GolfNow trade time, and is GolfNow free for golf courses?

A trade time is how many courses pay GolfNow without cash. Under GolfNow’s standard terms, one trade time is four 9-hole or 18-hole rounds that GolfNow sells for its own benefit, at a price GolfNow chooses unless the parties agree otherwise; on rolling terms it releases them until 31 trade times, or 124 rounds, have sold in a month. The software is not free; it is paid for in rounds instead of dollars. GolfNow also offers cash pricing, which under its standard terms rises each year by at least 5% unless the order form says otherwise, and its contract allocates no more than $2,500 of a deal to software for tax purposes, describing the rest as access to its marketplace.

How much does barter cost a golf course?

It depends on how many trade times a course gives and how full its tee sheet would be without them. One trade time a day, at the rolling cap of 124 rounds a month, comes to 1,488 rounds a year; at a $48 green fee their face value is $71,424, and on the assumption in GolfBack’s calculator that 64% of face value is real lost revenue, about $45,700. At $28, the loss on the same assumption is about $26,700. A course that cannot fill those slots loses much less, and a course on two or three trade times a day loses more, so the honest answer comes from your own tee sheet: which slots the trade rounds took, and whether they had sold at full price before.

What booking system do Baltimore’s public golf courses use?

foreUP, for all ten. The Baltimore Municipal Golf Corporation’s five Classic Five courses (Carroll Park, Clifton Park, Forest Park, Mount Pleasant and Pine Ridge) share one foreUP booking page, and Baltimore County Golf’s five (Diamond Ridge, The Woodlands, Fox Hollow, Rocky Point and Greystone) share another. In our October 2026 census none of the ten sold tee times on GolfNow, although GolfNow keeps listing pages for nine of them. Neither operator’s booking page takes payment for the round online; the County’s requires a credit card to hold a general public reservation and the City’s does not.

How do I book a tee time at Baltimore City’s golf courses?

Through the “Book a Tee Time” button on the Classic Five website, classic5golf.com, which opens the operator’s foreUP booking page. Player Card holders can book 16 days ahead and the public 14 days, only one tee time per day can be reserved online, and you pay at the course. A Player Card costs $35 for adults, seniors, first responders and active-duty military, and $25 for students. Green fees for 2026 are published as PDF rate sheets on each course’s page (the newest set we found ran to September 27), with five player types and price bands by time of day; a weekday morning round with a cart runs from $33 at nine-hole Carroll Park to $63 at Pine Ridge for the public.

What is the Baltimore County Golf Advantage Card?

A $40-a-year card for Baltimore County Golf’s five courses that takes $10 off green fees and $7 off twilight rates, lets the holder book up to 16 days ahead, with tee times opening at 5 a.m., and enrolls the holder in a loyalty program that earns points on green and cart fees. Holders may book one tee time every eight hours on weekdays. A junior version costs $15. The card also brings the County’s no-show rule: a card holder who neither cancels more than 24 hours ahead nor shows up is charged $30 per missing player, and a card is suspended after eight no-shows in a year.

Do I get a rain check if weather stops my round in Baltimore?

At the City’s Classic Five courses, yes: if weather, though not darkness, stops your round, you get a rain check for a share of your playing fees that depends on how many holes you played, redeemable only at the course that issued it and valid for 60 days. Lost rain checks are not replaced, and fees prepaid through GolfNow’s Hot Deals are not eligible. At Baltimore County Golf’s five courses, also yes: a round stopped by rain earns a credit based on the holes you completed, valid for 60 days at any of the five courses, and a nine-hole credit is offered if the temperature passes 90 degrees before you start the back nine. Its cancellation policy asks for 24 hours’ notice and says it will be understanding about weather that changes within that window if you call the golf shop.

Do municipal golf course booking websites have to be accessible under the ADA?

If a city, county or other public body owns the course, yes, on a schedule that just moved. The Justice Department’s 2024 rule requires state and local governments’ websites and apps, including those provided through contractors, to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. An interim rule published on April 20, 2026, moved the deadline for governments of 50,000 people or more, which includes Baltimore City and Baltimore County, from April 24, 2026, to April 26, 2027. The National Federation of the Blind is challenging that extension in federal court in Baltimore. Privately owned courses open to the public and simulator venues have no federal web regulation but still face lawsuits (truly private clubs are exempt from this part of the ADA); 3,117 website accessibility suits were filed in federal court in 2025.

Is golf cart GPS data personal data under Maryland law?

Often, yes. Since July 1, 2026, Maryland’s Online Data Privacy Act defines precise geolocation data as information that locates a consumer, a mobile device or a vehicle within 1,750 feet, and treats it as sensitive data. On our reading, a rented cart’s GPS track tied to the golfer on the tee sheet fits that definition. The act applies only to businesses that process data of at least 35,000 Maryland residents a year, or 10,000 if they earn over 20% of revenue selling data, and not to government bodies or their instrumentalities. A covered business may use the data only where strictly necessary for the service the golfer asked for and may never sell it.

How much does a golf simulator business make, and what software does it need?

The best public numbers come from franchise disclosures. X-Golf’s 2026 disclosure document reports median annual sales of $94,970 per simulator across 114 stores in 2025, requires franchisees to use Acuity for bay reservations at $120 a year and Square as the point of sale, and charges a technology fee of $1,500 a quarter. The National Golf Foundation counts at least 1,500 simulator businesses in the US, averaging three to four bays, most of them selling memberships. An independent venue needs bay booking by the hour, memberships, leagues, guest charges and cancellation rules; one per-reservation tool, Birrdi, charges $1.00 to $0.25 a booking depending on volume, plus a one-time setup fee.

Can a golf course in Maryland add a booking fee at online checkout?

Yes. Maryland has no general all-in pricing law: no junk-fee or drip-pricing bill was introduced in 2025 or 2026, the state’s total-price rules cover narrow trades such as event tickets, and the Federal Trade Commission’s fee rule covers only live-event tickets and short-term lodging, not tee times or simulator bays. A fee must not be misleading under Maryland’s general consumer protection law. Golfers in California, Minnesota, Virginia, Colorado and Massachusetts are protected by laws that require the total price, including mandatory fees, to be shown up front, so a course that sells to visitors is safest showing one total from the first screen. Maryland does not ban card surcharges, but card networks cap them.

How much does it cost to build a tee time booking system or a golf course app?

With us, a one-week working prototype on your own tee sheet and rate sheets costs $3,500; an online store for tee times, bays, passes, gift cards and lessons, accessible from the first release, starts at $6,000; and a custom staff app or an operations system that ties the tee sheet, shops, range and bays together starts at $12,000. Most projects land between $6,000 and $30,000, at a fixed price agreed before work starts, plus Maryland’s 3% tax on software and IT services. None of it requires replacing a tee sheet, point of sale, simulator or GPS fleet that already works.