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).
- TeamUp — from $119/month for up to 100 members (read 2026-07-22).
- GymMaster — tiered Foundation / Advanced / Professional plans (from $89/month per site, ex. GST; read 2026-07-22).
- Mindbody and Glofox — quote-gated: no public price at all on 2026-07-22, you have to book a sales call. When a vendor won't show you the price until they have you on the phone, that is information too.
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. 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 $59 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.
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 $59 one-time purchase breaks even in under a month, and then the meter stops — over three years that is roughly $2,700 rented versus $59 owned, with the member list in your own database. The rent-vs-own three-year math runs the full numbers.
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.