How fitness influencers build subscription apps: Sweat, MadFit, Chloe Ting and The Sculpt Society

Why look at the big names at all

Most fitness creators will never sell an app for a reported nine figures, and don’t need to. The reason to study Sweat, MadFit, Chloe Ting and The Sculpt Society is that they made the same moves in the same order, at very different sizes. The pattern holds whether you have 16 million followers or 50,000.

This guide sticks to what’s been reported or published by the creators and the app stores. Where figures conflict, it says so.

Sweat: from a PDF to an app, a sale and a buyback

Sweat is the best-documented creator fitness app, so it’s worth taking slowly.

The audience came first. Kayla Itsines was a personal trainer in Adelaide. According to Forbes Australia, she started posting clients’ before-and-after photos on Instagram in 2013.

Then a program, sold as a file. In 2014 she released the 12-week Bikini Body Training Guide as a PDF, at $69.99, on the suggestion of her then partner Tobi Pearce, who could see demand outstripping the clients she could train in person (Forbes Australia).

Then the app. The Sweat with Kayla app launched in 2015, with Pearce as chief executive and Itsines as head trainer. Forbes Australia reports it reached the top of the App Store charts in its first year. It dropped “with Kayla” in 2017 and added other trainers. By the 2021 sale, InDaily reported more than 5,000 workouts and 26 programs, from HIIT to yoga and Pilates, in 155 countries and eight languages.

The numbers at its peak. The company claimed about 450,000 subscribers and $100 million in revenue in 2020 (Forbes Australia). Athletech News reported the price at US$19.99 a month after a seven-day free trial.

The sale. In July 2021, US fitness equipment company iFIT bought Sweat. The reported price varies widely: InDaily reported $400 million, while Forbes Australia puts the deal at about US$150 million, of which US$40 million was cash.

What went wrong. Under iFIT, Sweat’s advertising budget was cut to protect cash flow, which reduced paying subscribers, and subscription revenue fell 14% in the year to May 2023 (Forbes Australia). Layoffs at Sweat and iFIT were reported by November 2022 (Athletech News).

The buyback. In late 2023, Itsines and Pearce bought Sweat back. The price wasn’t disclosed but was reportedly below what iFIT paid. Itsines told Forbes Australia that buying it back was “a no-brainer”.

Two lessons sit in that story. Sweat sold a program people could finish long before it was a piece of software. And when the paid marketing stopped, subscribers fell. An app doesn’t grow itself, however famous its founder.

MadFit: years of free YouTube, then a paid app

Maddie Lymburner launched MadFit on YouTube in 2018. Global News reported it reached about a million subscribers by 2019, gained another million in the first month of the pandemic, and passed 5 million by December 2020, when YouTube named her Canada’s top creator of the year.

The MadFit app followed in 2021. Its App Store listing is built around structured programs of four, eight and 12 weeks, follow-along challenges meant to build a daily habit, a workout library, and recipes filtered by diet. Subscriptions start at US$19.99 a month in the US store, and the app has a 4.7 rating from about 6,100 reviews. The YouTube channel stayed free: the Webby Awards described MadFit as a free resource with more than 10 million subscribers in 2025.

The free channel is the marketing. The app sells structure on top of it.

Chloe Ting: challenges as the product

Chloe Ting’s growth came from challenges. Her two-week programs, assembled from free YouTube videos and laid out as a schedule on her website, went viral on TikTok and YouTube during the 2020 lockdowns, as people with closed gyms posted their own attempts (Wikipedia, citing ELLE).

Entrepreneur reported in December 2020 that her “Get Abs in 2 Weeks” video had more than 272 million views, that her channel had 16.2 million subscribers, and that YouTube ranked her sixth on its 2020 list of top creators.

Her app, Core, follows the same idea. It’s free and ad-supported, with more than 50 programs and 500 videos, team challenges and leaderboards, and a Premium tier at US$9.99 a month or US$99.99 a year that removes ads and adds features, according to its App Store listing. Her website still leads with free challenges: a 2 Week Glow Up Challenge, a Pilates Challenge and a Summer Shred Challenge.

This is the freemium end of the market: a very large free audience, a low price, and revenue from ads as well as subscriptions. It works at Chloe Ting’s scale. With a smaller audience, a free tier rarely pays for itself.

The Sculpt Society: a premium, class-led app

Megan Roup built The Sculpt Society around dance cardio and sculpting classes. When the app launched, she told Create & Cultivate it meant her community could “workout with me around the world”.

The App Store listing now offers more than 1,000 on-demand classes, several live classes a week, prenatal and postnatal programming, and offline downloads, at US$27.99 a month or US$259.99 a year. Fitt Insider describes the business as serving about 300,000 members, with annual pop-up tours since 2021.

That price is well above Chloe Ting’s. It shows the other way to build: fewer, more committed members, live classes and a strong community, and a premium price.

What creator apps charge

Prices from each app’s US App Store listing in October 2026, except Sweat.

App	Creator	Monthly	Yearly
Core	Chloe Ting	US$9.99	US$99.99
MadFit	Maddie Lymburner	From US$19.99	From US$99.99
Sweat	Kayla Itsines	US$19.99 (reported 2023)	Not reported
The Sculpt Society	Megan Roup	US$27.99	US$259.99
growwithjo	Johanna Devries	US$39.99	US$198.99

Every one of them leans on the yearly plan. Their yearly plans cost between five and ten months of the monthly price. We look at setting your own price in how much to charge for a fitness membership.

The common pattern

1. Audience first, app second

Itsines had been posting on Instagram for two years before Sweat. Lymburner had three years and over 5 million subscribers before MadFit. None of these creators launched an app to find an audience. They launched it to serve one that was already asking for more.

2. A program people can follow

The thing that sold was never “access to workouts”. It was a 12-week guide, a two-week shred, a four-week beginner plan. A program has a start, a finish and a promise, which makes it easy to buy and easy to talk about. Itsines sold hers as a PDF before any app existed, which is a useful reminder that the program matters more than the software.

3. Someone who owns the product side

Reporting rarely says who wrote the code. What it does show is that each creator had a business behind the face. Sweat had Pearce as chief executive from the start, and since 2022 a chief executive, Adam Koch, who has talked about re-platforming its code (Forbes Australia). The store listings also show that every app here is published by the creator’s own company, not by a platform: Wholesome Influence Inc for MadFit, EYC Media for Core, The Sculpt Society LLC, and Dasilva Digital Empire LLC for growwithjo. Owning the listing means owning the reviews, the downloads and the relationship with members.

4. Challenges as launches

A challenge gives people a reason to join on a particular day. Sweat’s write-up of its Sweat Challenge, published in February 2020, reports 35,000 women in 178 countries completing more than 150,000 workouts over 28 days. Chloe Ting’s challenges built her audience in the first place, and both MadFit and Core build challenges into the app. A paid challenge with a fixed start date is also the simplest thing to sell before you have a full membership. See how to run a paid fitness challenge.

5. Marketing that keeps running

Sweat’s subscriber numbers fell when the advertising budget was cut. Organic content builds the audience, but steady growth in members usually needs paid acquisition, email and regular launches as well.

Applying it at a smaller scale

You don’t need millions of followers for the same pattern to pay. Here’s an illustrative example, with assumptions rather than benchmarks:

• 80,000 engaged followers across Instagram and YouTube
• A four-week paid challenge at US$39, bought by 0.5% of them: 400 × US$39 = US$15,600
• A membership at US$19.99 a month after the challenge, joined by 40% of challengers: 160 members, about US$3,200 a month
• Two challenges a year, each adding members, and a membership that grows from there

Your own numbers will differ. Our membership revenue calculator lets you test them.

Start on the web. A membership website works on every phone, costs far less than an app, and proves the program sells. Add the app when members ask for it; our guide to creating your own fitness app compares the ways to do it.

Where Voyage fits

Launch with Voyage partners with established fitness creators on steps three to five. We design and build your website and membership on the Voyage membership platform, with day-by-day programs, challenges sold with their own pass, and a workout library, and launch it under your name. There’s no monthly fee and no setup fee; we take a revenue share from 10% of sales, agreed before launch, and members pay into your own Stripe account. Your own iOS and Android app and a growth team that runs your marketing are optional extras. See how it works for fitness creators.