Gym management software without a subscription
Gym SaaS meters you per member, forever — and some won't even show a price. The honest one-time-purchase alternative, plus what the free field really offers, with today's prices verified and dated.
Independent gyms, studios, and martial-arts schools get squeezed two ways: a per-member SaaS subscription that climbs as you grow, or a spreadsheet that can't tell the front desk whether the person at the door is actually allowed in. Here is the honest case for a gym manager you buy once — and a straight look at what the free field does and doesn't offer.
What gym SaaS actually costs
Prices read on the vendors' own pages on 2026-07-22:
- Gymdesk — from $75/month (Micro), scaling to $100 / $150 / $200 by size (read 2026-07-22, re-read 5 September 2026 — unchanged). The bands are active members: up to 50, then 51–100, 101–200, 201–400, and "Contact us" past 400. Everything is "month to month" with "No contracts".
- TeamUp — from $119/month for up to 100 members (read 2026-07-22). The 5 September 2026 re-read could not surface that entry figure: the page prices through a calculator whose brackets run under 100, then 200, 300, 400, 500 and 501+, and the only card it rendered to us read $189/month for 101–200 customers. The $119 therefore keeps its July date rather than today's. Two things the re-read did add: a Custom Branded App at $99/month on top, and the vendor's own definition of the meter — customers are "only ever counted once, regardless of how many times they attend or purchase".
- GymMaster — Foundation $89, Advanced $129 and Professional $209 per month per site, ex GST, with Enterprise quoted (read 2026-07-22, re-read 5 September 2026 — unchanged). Those tiers are member caps too: 100 current members, then 400, then 1,300, then unlimited. It also publishes AUD and NZD prices beside the USD ones, and offers "Pay yearly and get a 10% discount on your subscription".
- Mindbody prints "Starting at €99 Euro/month per location" with the tiers behind a sales call (read 2026-07-05, re-read 2026-09-03). That line is not reliably there. Read on 5 September 2026, the page showed three tiers — Starter, Accelerate and Ultimate — with "Let's talk" beneath each and no number anywhere; read again on 7 September 2026, the floor was back above the same three tiers. A figure that disappears for two days and returns is not one to budget from, and either way it has never been attached to a tier you can buy. Glofox publishes no price at all (read 2026-08-02, re-read 5 September 2026 — still none; the page offers "Get a price quote" and review-site ratings). When a vendor won't show you the price until they have you on the phone, that is information too — two of three gym platforms will not show you a price is the long version.
At $75–$119/month, three years of gym SaaS runs $2,700–$4,284 — a recurring charge for membership admin.
The free self-hosted field (the honest truth: it's thin)
Unlike invoicing or booking, there is no strong open-source gym-business manager — the free tools in this space (e.g. Wger) are workout and training logs, not membership + billing + front-desk access control. (That project's site could not be re-read on 5 September 2026: it now sits behind an Anubis proof-of-work challenge, a deliberate anti-scraping gate, so our fetcher saw the interstitial rather than the site. The description here rests on the earlier reading — and a gate of that kind is a reasonable thing for a volunteer project to run.) If your need is genuinely just a personal or class workout tracker, Wger is excellent and free. But for running the business of a gym — plans, dues, arrears, and deciding who gets through the door — the free field does not really cover it, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Where a paid, owned tool fits
Gymora is our commercial entry: a one-time $69 purchase with the full PHP source, built for the gym business, not just workouts — member management, flexible membership plans, front-desk check-in guards (the desk instantly sees whether a member is paid-up and allowed in), billing and arrears tracking, class-pack credit tracking, and an ops dashboard — on ordinary shared-hosting PHP. Live demo, no signup. It is one of the four products in the Studio Suite, beside booking, waivers and the visitor sign-in list.
Try the Gymora demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
Honest limits, in plain text before you pay: single location, single-tenant (one staff/admin login per install), so a multi-branch chain with separate per-site logins is not its use case. For one independent gym or studio, that is exactly the scope.
The three-year arithmetic
Against Gymdesk at $75/month, Gymora's $69 one-time purchase breaks even in under a month, and then the meter stops — over three years that is roughly $2,700 rented versus $69 owned, with the member list in your own database. The rent-vs-own three-year math runs the full numbers, and what a twelve-staff gym pays for software every year puts the platform line beside the rota, waivers and leave.
The honest chooser
- Just need a workout/training log, free: Wger.
- Multi-location chain needing per-site logins and heavy integrations: a hosted platform is probably the honest fit — accept the meter.
- One gym or studio that wants member management, check-in control, and billing, bought once, self-hosted: Gymora.
Every vendor figure in this category also lives in the Price Observatory — verified, dated, and source-linked, free to cite — and the calculator turns those figures into your own three-year number in ten seconds. Selected apps can also be hosted for you on Ownware Cloud — the honest trade-off guide covers when that's worth it.