What a Twelve-Staff Gym Pays for Software Every Year — Line by Line
Platform, rota, waivers, leave, equipment. Five subscriptions priced from each vendor's own page, totalling $2,232 a year — and the single largest line is the one most gyms should not be buying at all.
A gym's software bill grows a particular way. The platform is chosen once, deliberately, after a demo. Everything after that arrives sideways — a rota tool because the WhatsApp group stopped working, a waiver app because somebody printed the last one badly, a leave tracker because two instructors booked the same fortnight.
Nobody ever sits down and adds them up. This is that addition, itemised, with every figure quoted from the vendor's own pricing page and dated.
The gym: one site, twelve staff — a mix of full-time front desk and part-time instructors — memberships collected by direct debit.
The bill
| Layer | Vendor | Published price | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform | GymMaster Foundation | "USD $89/month", per site, ex. GST (Advanced $129; Professional $209) | $89.00 |
| Rota | Deputy Lite | "$5 per user per month" — 12 staff, above the $30 minimum | $60.00 |
| Waivers | Smartwaiver Basic | "$19/mo" (Starter $55 · Business $155 · Premium $199) | $19.00 |
| Leave | Timetastic Basic | "$1.50 per user per month", no free tier | $18.00 |
| Total | $186.00 |
(All read 2026-07-05 to 2026-07-22 and recorded in the Price Observatory.)
| Per year | $2,232 |
| Over three years | $6,696 |
And that is before the line most gyms are quoted next.
The line that would double the bill
Equipment tracking is sold hard into fitness. *Cheqroom's published price is "Core 184 per admin per month"*** (read 2026-07-05).
One admin on Cheqroom is $2,208 a year — more than the entire four-line stack above. For a gym, that is almost always the wrong purchase, and not because the product is bad.
Cheqroom is a custody system: who has this item, when is it back. A gym's actual problem is a maintenance log — which treadmill was serviced, when, by whom, and what is currently out of order. Those are different jobs. Kit does not leave the building; it breaks in it.
If a rep is quoting you equipment software, ask which of the two problems you have. If the answer is maintenance, a $184-per-admin custody tool is a category error, and a whiteboard beats it until the estate is large enough to need a register.
The line that grows fastest, and why gyms feel it worst
Look at the rota line again. Twelve staff on Deputy Lite is $60/month — double the $30 minimum, because the headcount has passed the floor and the meter is now simply running.
Gyms are the worst possible shape for per-seat rota pricing. A café has six people who are mostly the same six people. A gym has a front-desk core plus a long tail of part-time instructors who each teach two classes a week — and a per-seat meter charges the same $5 for the instructor who works ninety minutes as for the manager who works forty hours.
Add three cover instructors for the January rush and the bill goes to $75/month whether or not they ever open the app. That is not a hidden fee — it is on the pricing page — but it is the line that quietly outgrows every projection you made when you signed up.
Line by line: keep, cut, or own
Platform — this one genuinely depends, and the deciding question is billing
GymMaster at $89/month is $3,204 over three years, and it is the only one of the three commercial platforms you can budget from without a sales call — Glofox and Mindbody publish no usable price at all.
Whether that $89 is well spent turns on one question: is collecting recurring membership payments your core problem? If your revenue arrives as automated direct debits with dunning, retries and failed-payment chasing, a platform that owns that flow is doing real work and self-hosting is the wrong answer. We have written that argument out properly, including the case against our own product: two of three gym platforms will not show you a price — and billing is the real question.
Verdict: read that first. If billing is handled elsewhere — a terminal, a separate direct-debit provider, cash — then what you are paying $89 a month for is check-in, class credits and arrears visibility, and Gymora does that for $59 once.
Rota — own it
$720 a year to record who is teaching what, on a meter that rises every time you add a cover instructor.
A rota has no payment surface and no compliance exposure. The worst outcome of an hour's downtime is a phone call. Verdict: the clearest own-it line on the table. Rostera is $59 once, for as many part-time instructors as you like.
Waivers — own it, but this line has a caveat the others do not
$19/month is the floor, not the tier a busy gym ends on — Smartwaiver's ladder runs $19 · $55 · $155 · $199, and volume, kiosks and integrations move you up it. WaiverForever's published range is $19 to $129 with a free starter plan (read 2026-07-21).
A signed waiver is evidence, and evidence has a custody question that a price comparison does not answer. Waiverly is $39 once — but before switching, read the custody-of-evidence problem nobody mentions, which sets out the four conditions under which you should buy the hosted product instead.
Verdict: own it if the four conditions do not apply to you. If any one of them does, pay Smartwaiver and do not think about it again.
Leave — own it
$18/month for twelve people is $216 a year to record holidays. At twenty staff it is $360, and gyms hire seasonally. Leavora is $49 once for unlimited staff. Verdict: own it.
Equipment — do not buy this
$184 per admin per month for a custody tool you will use as a maintenance log. If you genuinely need to track kit going out — a PT studio lending equipment, a club with a van — Lendra is $34 once. If your equipment never leaves the floor, buy nothing.
The rebuilt bill
| monthly | per year | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform — owned (only if billing is elsewhere) | $0 | $0 |
| Rota — owned | $0 | $0 |
| Waivers — owned (subject to the custody test) | $0 | $0 |
| Leave — owned | $0 | $0 |
| Recurring total | $0 | $0 |
| One-time licences (platform + rota + waivers + leave) | $206 once |
That is the maximal version and for many gyms it is the wrong one. The realistic middle — keep GymMaster because it collects your direct debits, own the other three — is $89/month instead of $186. $1,164 a year saved, and the line doing the hardest work is the one you kept.
What this exercise shows
One of the four subscriptions was clearly worth its price, and it is the expensive one. The three cheap ones — $60, $19, $18 — were the ones with no defence: fixed jobs, growing meters, never reviewed.
And the largest number on this page was for a product nobody in the stack had bought yet. The most expensive software decision a gym makes is usually the next one, not the current ones.
The test transfers to any line you have: does the price grow when you hire? Do you use the paid tier's features? And — the gym-specific one — is the tool solving the job it was designed for, or the job you happen to have?
The honest counterweight
Owning tools means running tools. Backups, PHP updates, a server that is your problem. For a rota, a leave register and a check-in list that is a small responsibility, precisely because none of them touch money or member logins. A waiver archive is different — it is evidence, and losing it is worse than losing a rota. Read your backup is not a backup until you have restored it before you own anything that matters.
And if nobody in the business will run a monthly restore check, own nothing. Cancel the equipment quote, stay on the tiers you have, and you have still avoided the single largest line on this page without buying anything from us.
Next steps
- Open the live Gymora demo — no sign-up, already signed in, resets itself
- Two of three gym platforms will not show you a price — read this before changing platform
- The SaaS Price Observatory — GymMaster, Smartwaiver, Cheqroom and 80 others, quoted from their own pages and dated
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. Payment-processing and direct-debit fees are negotiated per merchant and are not quoted here.