How much to charge for a fitness membership: real prices and the maths

What fitness apps actually charge

The quickest way to find your price is to look at what your members already pay for. Here are the published prices for well-known creator-led and boutique fitness subscriptions, in US dollars, checked in October 2026.

Membership	Monthly	Annual	Annual as months of monthly	Where the price comes from
Sweat (Kayla Itsines)	$24.99	$134.99	5.4	US App Store listing
obé	$24.99	$169.99	6.8	US App Store listing
The Sculpt Society (Megan Roup)	$24.99	$229.99	9.2	Its own pricing page
growwithjo	$39.99	$198.99	5.0	Its own join page
MWH (Melissa Wood Health)	$14.95	$134.99	9.0	US App Store listing (unlabelled; we’ve read the lower price as monthly)

A few things stand out.

• $24.99 a month is the common price. Three of the five charge exactly that.
• The annual plan is where they compete. Sweat and growwithjo price a year at about five months of the monthly fee. The Sculpt Society prices it at just over nine.
• App Store listings show more than one price. Sweat’s US listing also shows monthly subscriptions at $19.99 and $13.99, and obé’s shows a $19.99 monthly and a $135.99 annual. These are likely older plans, offers or regional prices, and the listings don’t say which is which.
• Free trials are standard. The Sculpt Society and growwithjo both offer seven days free.

These are big brands with large libraries, live classes and years of content. A creator launching their first membership doesn’t need to match them, but they set the ceiling your members compare you against.

Where a new creator membership should land

For a first membership, a sensible starting range is about $15 to $30 a month in your local currency. Below that, you need very large numbers to make it worthwhile. Above that, you’re pricing against Sweat and obé without their libraries.

Move up the range if you offer:

• New programs on a schedule, such as a fresh four-week block every month
• Live classes, with replays
• Recipes and meal plans alongside the workouts
• You, in the community, replying and running check-ins

Move down if it’s mostly a library of past videos, or if your audience is younger and more price-sensitive.

Monthly, annual, or both

Offer both. Monthly is the easy yes. Annual is the better business.

RevenueCat’s State of Subscription Apps 2025 report found that most apps with cheap annual plans retain up to 36% of users after a year, while high-priced monthly plans retain just 6.7%. It also found that nearly 30% of annual subscriptions are cancelled in the first month, so an annual member still needs a strong first few weeks.

Health and fitness apps did well in the same report: a median revenue per install after 60 days of $0.63, among the highest of any category.

A simple rule from the table above: price the annual plan at six to eight months of the monthly fee. At $19.99 a month, that’s about $120 to $160 a year. Show it as a monthly figure as well, “$12.42 a month, billed yearly”, so the saving is obvious.

One-off passes versus a subscription

Not everyone wants to subscribe. Plenty of people will happily pay once for a defined program. You don’t have to choose.

	Subscription	One-off pass
What it sells	Ongoing access, new content	A defined program or challenge
Typical price	$15 to $30 a month	Often two to three months of your membership
Revenue	Recurring, compounds over time	Spiky, around each launch
Best for	Your core audience	Newcomers and people who hate subscriptions

The two work best together. An eight-week strength program sold as a $59 pass brings in people who would never start a subscription, and gives you a list of buyers to offer the membership to when they finish. A paid challenge works the same way: see how to run a paid fitness challenge.

Tiers

Two tiers are usually enough. Three is the most you can explain in one sentence each.

• Core at around $19.99 a month: the library, a monthly program, the community.
• Plus at around $34.99 a month: everything in Core, plus live classes or a monthly group call with you.

The Plus tier exists partly to make Core look reasonable. Even if only one member in ten picks it, those members are often the most engaged you have. Don’t put anything in a higher tier that a Core member needs to get results.

What comes off the top

The price a member pays is not what you keep. Three kinds of fee come off it.

Card fees

Stripe charges 2.65% + NZ$0.30 per domestic card payment in New Zealand, 3.5% + NZ$0.30 for international cards, and an extra 2% when currency conversion is needed, according to its New Zealand pricing page. In the US the standard rate is 2.9% + US$0.30. On a $19.99 subscription, that’s about $0.83 per payment for a domestic card in New Zealand, roughly 4%. The fixed 30 cents matters more on low prices.

Platform fees

Membership platforms charge in one of three ways:

• A monthly fee. Passion.io’s plans run from US$119 to US$599 a month, billed yearly, and its PassionPayments fee adds 3.9% on the entry plan, falling to 1.9% on its top plan. Kajabi costs US$179 to US$499 a month.
• A share of revenue. Playbook charges no monthly fee and creators keep 80% of revenue.
• Both. Uscreen starts at US$49 a month and adds a fee for every active subscriber on its larger plans.

For a side-by-side of the two main models, read revenue share vs monthly fee.

App store fees

If members subscribe inside your iPhone app, Apple keeps a share. Apple’s developer pages say you receive 70% of the subscription price in a subscriber’s first year and 85% after a year of paid service, or 85% from the start if you’re in the App Store Small Business Program. Google Play, according to its Play Console help, charges 10% on subscription earnings up to US$1 million a year plus a 5% billing fee on the first purchase in the US, UK, Australia, the EEA and Japan, and 15% on subscriptions elsewhere.

Selling memberships on your website and letting members sign in to the app avoids that commission. The detail is in app store fees vs web checkout.

Worked examples

These use New Zealand dollars and Stripe’s domestic NZ card rate. Your numbers will differ with currency and card mix, so treat them as illustrations.

Example 1: 500 members at $19.99 a month

• Gross: 500 × $19.99 = $9,995 a month
• Stripe fees: 500 × $0.83 = $415
• After card fees: $9,580

Now subtract the platform:

Platform model	Platform cost per month	You keep per month
Flat fee of $199 a month (illustrative)	$199	$9,381
10% revenue share	$999.50	$8,580.50
20% revenue share	$1,999	$7,581
All sold in an iPhone app, first year (30%)	$2,998.50	$6,996.50 before platform fees

The flat fee looks cheapest here. That changes at small numbers. At 50 members, a $199 monthly fee is about 20% of gross, and it’s due in the months you have no members at all. A revenue share costs nothing until you sell. Most of the choice comes down to what the platform does for you and how many members you’ll realistically have in year one.

Example 2: mixing monthly, annual and passes

Say in your first year you have:

• 300 monthly members at $19.99, staying on average six months (an assumption): 300 × $19.99 × 6 = $35,982
• 150 annual members at $149: $22,350, paid upfront
• 200 sales of an eight-week program pass at $59: $11,800

That’s $70,132 in the year before fees. The annual members are under a quarter of the people, but they paid about a third of the money, all of it upfront, and they’re the most likely to still be there next year.

Try your own numbers in the membership revenue calculator.

How to test your price

• Ask your audience before you launch. A poll of “Would you pay $15, $20 or $25 a month?” is noisy, but it shows you the floor.
• Launch with a founding price. Offer the first members a lower rate locked in for as long as they stay. Raising prices later for new members is easier than cutting them.
• Change one thing at a time. Move the monthly price or the annual discount, not both.
• Look at retention, not just sign-ups. A price that doubles sign-ups but halves the months people stay hasn’t helped.

Where Voyage fits

Launch with Voyage builds your fitness membership on your own website, with programs, challenges, a workout library and passes, and optionally your own iOS and Android app. There’s no monthly fee and no setup fee: Voyage takes a revenue share, from 10% of sales, agreed before launch, and Stripe’s card fees apply. Members who join on your website pay into your own Stripe account, with no app store commission; members who subscribe inside the app pay through the App Store or Google Play, where Apple and Google take their cut. See how Voyage pricing works.