What a gym website costs, and the software bill underneath it

Five lines, and only two of them are the website

Domain, hosting, or the plan that replaces both

The cheap line, and the one where the price you are shown is not the price you pay. A .com is $10 to $20 a year at list, and $10 to $15 is what one gym-software vendor quotes its own customers — but a name somebody already owns is a separate market, where premium domains start around $50 a year and the same vendor found newyorkcityfitness.com listed at $5,400. Hosting is priced by type rather than by trade: shared is $2 to $15 a month, or under $10 at the plainest end, with WordPress hosting at $19 to $50 and managed WordPress at $20 to $100 and up; a VPS is $30 to $150 and up, and a dedicated or cloud server $150 to $500 and up. HTTPS should be $0 — Let’s Encrypt has issued certificates free for a decade — so a quote carrying $0 to $75 a year for SSL is billing you for the host’s own automation. A builder plan replaces this whole line rather than adding to it: Squarespace publishes $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month on annual billing, which is $228 to $1,188 for the year, and Wix’s free plan carries Wix branding, so the tier a gym actually needs there is Core at $29 a month billed annually. Read across the whole market, the do-it-yourself route is $0 to $50 a month, $0 to $600 a year.

The build

The widest line on the page, because the same market gets described four different ways depending on who is doing the describing. By the clock: a freelance web designer on a US small-business project is $50 to $150 an hour, while the rate quoted to gym owners specifically is $90 to $180 — and one gym-software vendor works an example through, a 30-hour project at $165 an hour, which it rounds to about $4,800, before adding that it costs anywhere between $1,000 and $20,000 to have someone build a website. By the project: $1,500 to $8,000 from a freelancer for a small-business site, or split by task, $1,000 to $5,000 for freelance design, $2,500 to $15,000 and up for a full freelance build, $5,000 to $20,000 and up for agency design and $10,000 to $100,000 and up for an agency build. By tier, from a firm that builds fitness sites: basic $1,500 to $5,000, mid-level $5,000 to $15,000, advanced platform $15,000 to $50,000 and up. By scope, from the agency side: $2,000 to $8,000 for a small-business brochure site, $15,000 to $30,000 and up once booking or ecommerce is in scope, with boutique agencies at $6,000 to $35,000 and up. At the personal-trainer end of the trade the same shape lands lower — $1,000 to $5,000 one-off from a freelancer, $2,000 to $9,000 and up in setup from a general agency with $100 to $300 a month of maintenance attached, and that monthly half is the part that disappears when somebody lays it beside a one-off quote. Those are not four bids on one job. What separates them is whether the timetable is a picture of a timetable or a live one, whether a membership is a printed price or an account somebody holds, and who writes the class descriptions.

The software the timetable lives inside

The line a gym has that a bakery does not, and the useful thing to say about it is that online class booking is rarely a separate purchase — it ships inside the membership software you were going to buy anyway. PushPress publishes its own tiers at $0, $159 and $229 a month, which makes it the firmest figure on this page. Across the named vendors the spread is $30 to $400 and up: Vagaro from $30 a month at base, Kicksite $49 to $199, Gymdesk $75 to $200, MyStudio $79 to $299, GymMaster $89 to $209, TeamUp $119 for nought to a hundred customers, Wodify $179 a month per location, and Glofox reported at $110 to $400 and up. Mindbody sits above all of them and publishes nothing: a third party reports Starter at $99 to $159, Accelerate at $259 to $279 and Ultimate at $499 to $699 a month per location, with a branded member app at $75 to $250 and up and video on demand at $99. A fitness-specific site builder with booking inside it, Fitune, is free to start with 6% taken from every transaction, then $59 a month paid annually and $119 on Plus. If you are not on a gym platform at all, a standalone scheduler is around $10 a month on Calendly or $20 on Acuity. Bolting booking onto a custom-built site is a different budget again: $500 to $5,000 and up to build the integration plus $50 to $300 a month for the subscription behind it, and $1,000 to $10,000 and up plus $50 to $500 a month for a membership or CRM integration. On a Naratake site the Gym & Fitness starting point opens with eight weekly sessions across four class names, each carrying a weekday, a start time, a length, a capacity from twelve to twenty and a level, three coaches with the days they run the floor, three priced personal-training options and a membership pricing table, across four pages. Be precise about what that table is: a priced menu of memberships, printed on the page for somebody who is still deciding. Bookings and online ordering go live on a published site on Storefront Pro at $79 a month or $758 a year; Storefront, at $49 a month or $468 a year, builds and previews them. The pricing page has the rest.

What comes off every membership and drop-in

Every payment a gym takes online has a percentage on it, and the percentage moves with the plan rather than with the payment. PushPress prints all three: 4.99% plus 30¢ on the free tier, 2.89% plus 30¢ on Pro, 2.75% plus 30¢ on Max. Read that as the real price of the free tier. The fixed 30¢ is the same on every tier, so it cancels out and what is left is 2.10% — which means the $159 Pro plan pays for itself at about $7,600 a month of card volume, and above that the free plan is the more expensive one. At $8,000 a month the gap is $168 against a $159 subscription you were avoiding. Fitune runs the same bargain in a sharper form: free to start, 6% of every transaction. Then the line that is not processing at all. When a new client finds a studio through the Mindbody app marketplace rather than through the studio’s own page, Mindbody takes 20% of that booking, with 2.75% to 3.5% of card processing on top. That is this trade’s version of a delivery-app commission, and it is charged on the first visit of exactly the customer your own website exists to win. On a Naratake site the money side is deliberately plain: card payment runs on your own live Stripe keys — both of them, pasted in by you — so it lands in your account rather than passing through ours, and we take no share of it.

Upkeep, and the bill that does not stop

Two recurring lines, and the second one is larger than the site. First, edits: a maintenance plan for a small-business site is $50 to $500 a month, $600 to $6,000 a year, and the general-agency version quoted to fitness studios is $100 to $300 a month on top of a $2,000 to $9,000 and up setup. Ask what one change costs before you sign rather than after — a class that moved to Thursday and a membership price that went up in January are both edits, and a timetable nobody wants to pay to change is a timetable that lies to the person reading it. Second, the whole recurring bill: one published figure puts running a small-business website at $1,100 to $5,000 a year, all in. For a gym that only holds while the software line is near the floor of its range, because $30 a month of class software is $360 a year and $400 a month is $4,800 — the software alone can consume the entire $1,100-to-$5,000 budget before the domain renews. Two exits are worth knowing about if you would rather stop paying a subscription and keep what you have: Storefront Pro includes the site source download, and the desktop LocalSite Studio is a one time payment with no monthly fee that exports the project as often as you like. Either way the test is the same — can you move a class to a different evening yourself, on a phone, between sessions?

Three routes to the same timetable

A builder subscription

One plan, one bill, hosting and the certificate inside it. Squarespace publishes $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month on annual billing, so $228 to $1,188 for the year, and Wix’s free plan carries Wix branding, which puts a gym on Core at $29 a month billed annually; read across the whole market, the do-it-yourself route is $0 to $50 a month. Naratake works this way too: 40 industry starting points, of which the Gym & Fitness one opens with eight weekly class sessions each carrying a capacity from twelve to twenty and a level, three coaches with the days they run the floor, three priced personal-training options and a membership pricing table, across four pages — plus 15 design styles, 111 components and 66 color sets to make it yours. Every cloud plan connects one custom domain, and published sites are served over HTTPS with nothing for you to install. What no website builder settles on its own is the roll: a timetable on a page is a published schedule somebody reads, not a live count of who is in the 6am strength class, and that count lives in the membership software. The other trade is that the platform sets the ceiling, so read what your plan covers before you commit; ours is on the pricing page.

Hiring a freelancer or an agency

You are buying judgment and hours, and $1,000 to $100,000 is the distance between mostly hours and mostly judgment. Priced by the clock it is $50 to $150 an hour for a US small-business project and $90 to $180 when the client is a gym, and one vendor’s worked example — a 30-hour build at $165 an hour, rounded to about $4,800 — is a useful sanity check on any quote: divide the number by the hourly rate and ask whether that many hours of work is genuinely in front of you. Get two numbers, never one: the build fee, and the price of moving a class, adding a coach or changing a membership price afterward, because a gym does all three in a normal quarter. A general agency working with fitness studios prices that second half openly, at $100 to $300 a month on top of a $2,000 to $9,000 and up setup. Then three questions before the deposit: whose name the domain is registered in, who holds the hosting login, and whether the site comes with you if you leave. The answers should be yours, yours, and yes.

Renting the site from your gym software vendor

A large part of this market never sells you a website at all — it rents you one, from the company that already holds your class schedule. One gym-software vendor publishes both halves: a done-for-you gym website at $149 a month plus a one-time $499 startup fee, the startup fee waived if you sign a one-year contract, and a website add-on to its own platform at $99 a month, sitting alongside a branded member app at $39, a marketing product at $249 and card readers at $39. The convenience is real and so is the arithmetic. $149 a month is $1,788 a year, so the first year with the startup fee is $2,287 — already past the bottom of the $2,000-to-$8,000 range an agency quotes for a brochure site — and three years is $5,863, at the end of which you own nothing. Two questions decide it: what happens to the site, the domain and the member records on the day you stop paying, and whether the design is yours or shared with every other gym on the same platform.

Four lines you can take off the quote

• A booking platform’s free tier, once real money is moving through it. PushPress prices card processing at 4.99% plus 30¢ free and 2.89% plus 30¢ on Pro at $159 a month; the fixed part is identical, so the 2.10% difference pays for Pro at about $7,600 a month of card volume and everything above that is money handed over for nothing. Fitune’s free tier is the same trade in a sharper form at 6% of every transaction. Free is a genuinely good place to open and a bad place to stay — put a note in the calendar to redo the arithmetic once the memberships are running.
• The marketplace, switched on for every class. Mindbody takes 20% of a booking made by a new client who found the studio through its app, with 2.75% to 3.5% of card processing on top. That is a fair price for a Tuesday morning strength class with six empty spaces and a terrible one for the Saturday session that was already full. Switch it on for the sessions with gaps, and price it against what a full class is worth rather than against zero.
• A tier priced for a chain, at a single room with one squat rack. The named-vendor spread runs from $30 a month at Vagaro’s base to $299 at MyStudio’s top, $400 and up on Glofox, and $499 to $699 a month per location on Mindbody’s reported Ultimate tier. Multi-location pricing exists because multi-location problems exist. Start at the bottom, and buy the next tier when a real constraint appears — a waitlist you cannot run, a second site you cannot keep separate — rather than when a demo describes one.
• Charges that should not be on the quote at all. An SSL certificate as its own line at $0 to $75 a year, when the host’s certificate has been free and automatic for a decade. A premium domain: $5,400 was the asking price on newyorkcityfitness.com, and a name nobody has to remember, because they found you on a map, is $10 to $20. And a guaranteed search ranking: nobody controls the results, so nobody can promise a position. What actually gets a gym found is duller than any package makes it sound — a Google Business Profile with the right opening hours, the timetable written on the page as text rather than baked into an image, and a join button that works on a phone.

Questions people ask about the price