Gym software pricing: real ranges, and what a quote hides

For an independent gym with fewer than 150 members, budget $0 to $200 per month. Published paid entry plans across the market sit between $99 and $159. The tiers salespeople actually steer you toward, the quote-only ones, land between $250 and $700 per location per month. If you are being quoted more than that and you run one room, something in the deal is not for you.

The reason every search ends at “request a quote” is not that the pricing is complicated. It is that the price is negotiable, and a negotiable price has to stay hidden until the seller knows how much you can pay. Your member count, your city and how urgently you need to replace a spreadsheet all move the number.

What the market actually charges

Two numbers matter and only one is ever advertised: the price you sign, and the price in month thirteen. Ask about the second one before you care about the first.

The three ways they bill you

Flat subscription, banded by member count

The simplest model. You pay a fixed monthly fee and cross into a higher band as you grow. The trap is where the band sits. A platform whose first tier stops at 50 members knows most gyms hit 60 within a year, and the jump to the next tier is rarely 20%. Before you sign, find the cap of the tier you are buying and count how many active members you added in the last twelve months. If you will cross it inside a year, price the tier above instead.

Per location

You pay the full subscription again for each room, each site, each studio. Two locations means double, not double minus a discount. This is the single biggest cause of a bill that looks reasonable in the demo and painful in year two, and it is why Mindbody's $99 headline tells you almost nothing about what a two-site operation pays. If you plan to open a second space, ask what the second one costs before you ask what the first one costs.

Commission on bookings

Some platforms run a consumer marketplace app and take a cut of anyone who books you through it, commonly around 20%. Do the arithmetic on your own numbers rather than accepting it as a marketing channel. Thirty marketplace bookings a month at 500 THB a class is 15,000 THB of revenue and 3,000 THB of commission, every month, forever. That is more than most subscriptions cost, and it recurs on members who would have found you anyway after the first visit.

Card processing is separate and unavoidable, but check who owns the account. If the platform processes payments and marks up the rate, that markup is a second subscription you never see on the invoice. Card payments in MoveMembers run through Stripe on your own account, so you pay your country's normal card rate and nothing else. Expect roughly 3% to 4% in most of Southeast Asia.

The modules that are not in the headline price

The advertised tier is almost never the setup you saw in the demo. These are the items most often carved out:

• Branded member app, typically $80 to $100 a month on top.
• Messaging and CRM, often an entire tier up rather than an add-on, sometimes $300+.
• SMS or WhatsApp credits, billed per message on top of the subscription.
• Door access and hardware, around $50 a month plus the reader itself.
• Onboarding or setup fee, a one-off $200 to $1,000 that never appears in comparison tables.
• Data migration, quoted separately and per hour more often than you would expect.

Rebuild the quote yourself: entry tier, plus every module you actually watched during the demo, times the number of locations, plus the setup fee spread over twelve months. That figure is your real price. It is usually double the headline.

What a quote hides

A quote is a price for you specifically, which means someone with your member count is paying something different. Send these five questions by email before you book any call, and keep the reply:

1. Is this per location or per account, and what does a second location cost?
2. What is the maximum renewal increase, in writing? “We review annually” is not an answer.
3. Which features from the demo are in this tier, and which are add-ons? Ask for the list, not a reassurance.
4. Is there a setup fee, a minimum term, or an early exit penalty?
5. Do you take a percentage of anything: bookings, payments, retail?

A vendor who answers all five in a single email is worth a call. One who insists on a call to answer question one has told you what question two's answer is. If you are still comparing, the alternatives round-up sets out what each of the main platforms publishes, what it keeps quote-only, and where it takes a commission.

What you should be paying at your size

• Under 20 active members. Zero. Free tiers at this size are genuinely usable, and paying $99 to manage a room this small is money that belongs in mats or marketing.
• 20 to 200 members. $50 to $120 a month. This is where automated reminders start paying for themselves, because chasing renewals by hand is the first thing that slips when the room gets busy.
• 200 to 300 members. $100 to $250 a month. Above $300 for one location, ask what you are getting that a $150 platform does not have.
• Multiple locations. Ignore the headline entirely and price the multiplier. It decides everything.

What we charge, and what we do not do

MoveMembers is $0 for up to 20 active members, $99 for up to 200, and $199 for unlimited. In baht: 2,490 and 4,990. Annual billing is ten months paid, so two are free. Automations start at Pro, and up to 3 sites run from one account on Max, at that same $199, with no per-site multiplier. Payments run through your own Stripe account, so we never take a cut of what you collect. Every price is published, in your currency, with no call in between.

Now the part that decides whether the price is relevant to you. There are things we do not do, and if one of them is essential, a more expensive platform is the correct answer:

• No native app on the App Store or Google Play. The member portal is an installable web app, which means no push notifications either.
• No direct debit or SEPA. Cards through Stripe, plus cash and transfers recorded at the desk.
• No automated migration from a competitor. You import a file of up to 5,000 rows, and attendance and payment history do not come across.
• No accounting sync. You export CSV and hand it to your bookkeeper.
• WhatsApp and SMS are outbound only. Meta's 24-hour rule makes real two-way WhatsApp fragile, so we do not pretend otherwise. LINE and email are two-way.
• No ClassPass integration, no custom domain, and on multiple locations, no separate accounting or stock per site.

Take the number you now have for each shortlisted platform and put it next to that kind of list from each vendor. The cheapest software that does the six things you actually do every day beats the complete one you use a fifth of. And do not book a demo until you have the price. A vendor who will not give you a number before the call is telling you the number depends on how the call goes.