What Gym Software Really Costs: The Sum Most Quotes Leave Out

Wolfpack · Published 2026-11-02

Ask three gym software companies what they cost and you'll get three numbers that can't be compared. One is a flat monthly fee. One is lower, but takes a percentage of your payments. One looks fine until you add the app, the text messages and the website.

The number that matters is what the system costs you over a year, all in. You can work that out on one sheet of paper, and it's worth doing before any demo gets you excited.

A note before we start: we make gym software, so read this with that in mind. The sum works for any provider, including Wolfpack.

The five parts of the real cost

1. The subscription

This is the number on the pricing page, and it's the one to question first. Ask:

• Is the price per gym, per member, per coach or per location?
• What happens to the price when you pass the next member band?
• Is it quoted with or without VAT?
• Is it fixed for your whole term, or can it rise?

VAT catches small gyms out. The UK standard rate is 20%, and if you aren't VAT registered you generally can't reclaim it, so a price quoted "plus VAT" costs you a fifth more. If your taxable turnover is close to the £90,000 registration threshold, talk to your accountant about how that changes your numbers.

2. Card processing

Every card payment has a fee, and on a membership business it adds up quietly because it comes out before the money reaches you.

To give you a real figure to test, Stripe's published UK pricing, checked in November 2026, lists 1.5% + 20p for standard UK cards and 2.8% + 20p for premium UK cards. It also lists Bacs Direct Debit at 1%, with a 20p minimum and a £4 cap, and £20 for each dispute received. Rates change and yours may differ, so always use the rate you've actually been quoted.

Then ask three follow-up questions. Does the software add its own percentage on top? Is there a separate charge for recurring billing? (Stripe, for example, lists a pay-as-you-go Billing fee of 0.7% of billing volume, so ask whether anything like that applies and who pays it.) And is the payment account yours, or the software company's?

Also check how often you bill. Members paying every four weeks make 13 payments a year, not 12, which means 13 fixed fees.

3. Add-ons

Write down everything you assumed was included, then ask whether it is. The usual extras are a branded member app, text message credits, a website or booking widget, extra locations, extra staff logins, marketing tools and better support.

Only count what you'd really use. An add-on you'd never switch on isn't a cost, and neither is it a reason to choose that system.

4. Setup and moving

Some of this is obvious: a setup fee, a charge for importing your members, paid training. Some of it isn't:

• The overlap. You'll probably pay for your old system while you set up the new one. Multiply those months by your old price.
• Leaving fees. Check your current contract's notice period before you pick a move date.
• Members dropping out. If everyone has to re-enter their card, some will take a while, and those payments arrive late. Our guide to switching without losing members covers how to plan for that.

5. Your own time

This is the biggest line for many small gyms, and it never appears on a quote. Count the hours you and your team spend each week on chasing failed payments, checking one system against another, answering "can you book me in?" messages, and updating spreadsheets that sit beside the software.

Be careful here in both directions. Don't accept a salesperson's estimate of the time you'll save. Time your real week, then ask them to show you which of those tasks would actually go away.

A worked example

This gym is made up, and so are its quotes. It's only here to show how the sum works, and none of these figures describes any real provider.

Our example gym has 80 members paying an average of £70 a month, by card, once a month. That's £67,200 a year in takings. It has one quote, including VAT, for £150 a month, plus a £30 a month add-on and a £300 setup fee. We've used Stripe's standard UK card rate as the example card fee.

• Subscription: £150 x 12 = £1,800
• Add-on: £30 x 12 = £360
• Setup: £300, once
• Card fees: 1.5% of £70 is £1.05, plus 20p, so £1.25 a payment. £1.25 x 80 x 12 = £1,200
• Disputes: say two a year at £20 each = £40

Cash cost in year one: £3,700. That's 5.5% of takings, or about £3.85 per member per month. In year two, with no setup fee, it's £3,400.

Now add time. Say admin around payments and bookings takes three hours a week, valued at £20 an hour. That's 3 x £20 x 52 = £3,120, which takes the year one total to £6,820.

Look at what that shows. The monthly price of £150 is about a quarter of the full figure, and the owner's time is the largest line. If a different system took an hour a week off that admin, it would be worth £1,040 a year to this gym, which is a real figure to weigh against a higher subscription. But it only counts if the hour really goes.

Flat fee or percentage?

Here's the comparison that catches people out, again using made-up quotes. Option A is the £150 flat fee, so £1,800 a year. Option B is £50 a month plus 1% of everything taken through cards.

At 80 members, Option B costs £600 + £672 = £1,272, so it's cheaper. At 150 members, on £126,000 of takings, it costs £600 + £1,260 = £1,860, and now it isn't. The two meet at £120,000 of yearly card takings, which is about 143 members at £70.

So a percentage can suit a gym that's small and staying small, and a flat fee tends to suit one that's growing. The point isn't that one model is better. It's that you can only see which suits you by running your own numbers at today's size and at the size you hope to be.

Do the sum yourself

Take each quote and fill in these lines for one year:

1. Subscription: monthly price x 12, with VAT added if it's quoted without
2. Add-ons you'd really use: monthly price x 12
3. Setup and training: one-off costs, divided by the years you expect to stay
4. Overlap: months paying both systems x your old monthly price
5. Card fees: (percentage x your average payment + fixed fee) x payments per year
6. Extra percentages: any platform or billing percentage x your yearly card takings
7. Disputes and failed payment charges: your best estimate from last year
8. Admin time: hours a week x your hourly value x 52

Add lines 1 to 7 for your cash cost. Add line 8 for your full cost. Divide either by your member count and by 12 to get a cost per member per month, which is the easiest number to compare across quotes.

Then run it twice: once at your current size, and once with the member numbers you're aiming for in two years. If the winner changes, you've learned something the pricing page was never going to tell you.

Before you sign, ask for the final numbers in writing. Anything a salesperson said but the contract doesn't say isn't part of the price. Our checklist of contract traps has the questions to ask, and your accountant can check the VAT and tax side for your own situation.