Two of Three Gym Platforms Will Not Show You a Price — And Billing Is the Real Question

Pricing a gym management platform is harder than it should be, and the reason is on the vendors' own pages.

We first read all three on 5 July 2026, and re-read all three on 5 September 2026:

When this article was written, the shape was: one publishes a real price ladder, one publishes a floor and hides the rest, one publishes nothing. The middle case is no longer stable. On the 5 September 2026 re-read Mindbody's floor was gone — three tiers, Starter, Accelerate and Ultimate, each with "Let's talk" and no figure anywhere. On the 7 September re-read the floor was back above the same three tiers, unchanged at "Starting at €99 Euro/month per location".

The title holds either way — two of three will not show you a price — because the floor has never been attached to a tier: whichever day you read it, you cannot find out what Starter costs. What moved is not the number but whether it is there at all, and a figure that comes and goes inside five days is not one to plan around. We record all three reads rather than the most recent, because the pattern is the finding.

That is the finding, and it is not a small one for a single-site gym owner trying to compare four options on a Sunday evening. A price you cannot see is a price you cannot compare — and it usually means the number depends on facts about you the vendor would like to establish first.

Over three years, for the one vendor you can actually budget from:

But the price is not the decision. Billing is.

The thing that actually decides this category is an argument against self-hosting, and it should be said first: the big gap is payment processing. None of the self-hosted options handle recurring billing, dunning or PCI compliance the way the commercial platforms do — you would typically bolt a payment provider on yourself. If automated billing is core to your operation, that is the main argument against self-hosting, and it should be the first question you ask yourself.

A gym's revenue is recurring by nature. If your business runs on direct debits that collect automatically, retry when they fail, and chase members whose cards expire — that machinery is the product you are buying, and no self-hosted register replaces it.

Be honest about which you are:

• Billing-led: memberships collected automatically by the platform, dunning handled, failed payments retried. Buy a commercial platform. Stop reading.
• Operations-led: members pay by standing order, bank transfer, cash, or a card terminal at the desk — and what you actually need is to know who is in arrears, who checked in, and how many class credits are left.

Only the second one is a candidate for owning outright. The category's marketing does not distinguish these, and it should.

What an operations-led tool looks like

Gymora is self-hosted gym membership software — front-desk check-in, class-pack credits, arrears. $69.00, one time (product page, read 2026-08-20), and one of the four products in the Studio Suite.

Try the Gymora demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.

It states the billing limit itself, in the first person, without hedging:

"Does it charge my members' cards?" — "No. Gymora records payments and shows you who is in arrears. Take payment through your own processor, card terminal, or cash, then mark it paid."

That is a clean rule: if the sentence above is a problem, this is not your product.

Two more scope decisions worth knowing before rather than after:

"Is this a public booking site my members log into?" — "No — Gymora is the staff/owner operations system… There is no public-facing member login to secure or support."

That is a defensible design choice rather than a missing feature. A member portal is an authentication surface, a support burden, and a thing to keep patched. A tool that decides not to have one is smaller on purpose — but if your members expect to book classes from their phones, you need something that does.

"Does it support multiple locations?" — "No — Gymora runs one location per install. Every member of staff gets their own login, with roles, invitation links and two-factor sign-in."

One site. If you have two, this is the wrong tool — and note that GymMaster and Mindbody both price per site anyway, so a second location costs money in every option here.

The part that is specified rather than promised

"Can I trust the check-in logic?" — "The entire membership/check-in core lives in one class and ships with 90 offline test assertions covering the guards, credit decrement, status transitions, expiry, arrears, and revenue math."

Credit decrement and expiry are exactly where gym software goes wrong in ways members notice. A ten-class pack that silently decrements twice, or a membership that expires a day early, produces a conversation at the front desk that costs more goodwill than the software costs money. A published assertion count against those specific behaviors is a more useful claim than any feature list.

Choosing

GymMaster — you want a full platform with published, comparable pricing. Of the three commercial options it is the only one you can budget from without a sales call, and that is worth something on its own.

Mindbody or Glofox — you are large enough that a quote is a normal part of buying, and you need the marketplace reach or class-booking ecosystem they bring. Ask for the number in the first email.

Gymora — single site, payments already handled elsewhere, and what hurts is knowing who is in arrears and how many credits are left. $69 once against $3,204 for the cheapest published commercial option over three years.

None of the above — if you are a personal trainer with fifteen clients. A spreadsheet and a calendar is a legitimate system at that size, and every option here is overhead.

The honest costs

No automated billing. Stated three times because it is the thing people will wish they had read.

No member portal. Members ask you, not the app.

Single site.

Backups are the arrears record and the check-in log. Arrears are money owed to you; check-ins may be your evidence in an insurance or injury question. Test a restore.

Hosting. "PHP 8.1+ with PDO… SQLite for zero database setup, or MySQL for production." For a concrete number from a named provider: Hetzner's own pricing — machine-read on 10 August 2026 from the price API behind its web-hosting and cloud pricing pages — lists web-hosting plans from €1.60 to €16.72 a month and entry cloud servers from €3.99 a month (prices as returned for their German datacenters; confirm current pricing and VAT treatment at checkout). Any comparable host works — the point is that the "own" side of this comparison costs single-digit euros a month.

The short version

Two of the three commercial platforms will not show you a price — one hides everything, one publishes a floor. GymMaster publishes a real ladder and is the only one you can compare against anything.

But the decision is not price. It is whether recurring billing is your core problem. If it is, buy a platform and treat the subscription as the cost of the collections machinery. If your members already pay you some other way, what you are missing is an operations tool — and that is $69 once, single site, with no card processing at all.

Next steps

• Open the live Gymora demo — no sign-up, already signed in, resets itself
• Gymora product page and license options
• What a twelve-staff gym pays for software every year — the platform line beside the rota, waivers and leave
• Gym management software without a subscription — the shorter version, with the free field
• Self-hosted software for gyms and studios
• The SaaS Price Observatory — where quote-gated vendors are recorded as quote-gated

Prices are quoted from each vendor's own pricing page with the date read. GymMaster's figures are ex. GST and per site, as its page states.