Gym Billing Software: The Cost Nobody Puts on the Pricing Page

Every gym owner shopping for billing software does the same thing. Opens four pricing pages in four tabs, writes down four monthly numbers, picks the lowest one that looks like it will work.

Then twelve months later they are paying thousands more than the gym down the street running the "expensive" platform.

Here is why. Your billing software has two prices. The subscription, which is on the pricing page in large type. And the processing rate, which is usually in small type, sometimes on a different page, and occasionally not published at all.

For almost every gym doing real revenue, the second number is bigger. Often much bigger. A gym processing $20,000 a month pays somewhere between $600 and $1,050 in processing depending on the platform. The subscription is $0 to $229.

So the thing gym owners compare hardest is the thing that matters least.

This is a post about the whole bill. What gym billing software actually does, what it really costs, where the money goes, and the revenue you are probably already losing to failed payments without knowing it.

What gym billing software actually does

"Billing" sounds like one job. It is closer to six, and the differences between platforms show up in the messy edges, not the happy path.

Recurring memberships

The core job. A member signs up, the card gets charged on the same day every month, nobody thinks about it again. Every platform does this.

Prepaid packs and class packages

Ten sessions, twenty sessions, punch cards. The billing system has to track remaining balance, expiry, and what happens when a pack runs out mid-month.

Proration

A member joins on the 17th. Do you charge them full price, charge a partial month, or push their first bill to the 1st? Getting this wrong creates awkward conversations at the front desk. PushPress handles it with pro-rated billing, which lets the member pick a start date and then aligns everyone onto a consistent billing day.

Holds and pauses

Somebody is traveling for six weeks, or injured, or deployed. A good billing system pauses without cancelling, because a cancelled member is a member you have to sell again. PushPress supports holds, and on Pro and Max you can run one without touching a menu. Ask the AI Assistant built into Core: "Pause Em's unlimited plan for two weeks starting today." It confirms the change and the resume date before anything happens.

Drop-ins, appointments, and retail

One-time charges through the same system, so the money shows up in one report instead of three.

Family and linked accounts

Common in martial arts. One card, four members, and the billing has to make sense on the statement so the parent does not call the bank.

If you are evaluating platforms, this is the list to test. The demo will always nail recurring memberships. Ask them to show you a mid-month proration on a family account with one member on hold.

The subscription is the small number

Here is where the market sits for a single-location gym. Every figure below came off PushPress's and each additional vendor's own published pricing page on August 25, 2026.

Two things jump out of that table, and neither is the number in the second column.

The cheapest headline price is not a flat price. Gymdesk's $75 covers up to 50 active members. At 150 members you are on their $150 tier. Zen Planner works the same way. So "starts at $75" and "costs $75" are different sentences, and the gap between them grows as your gym does. PushPress Core Pro is $159 whether you have 40 members or 400.

Only two of the six publish what you would actually pay. PushPress and Pike13 list every tier. Gymdesk and Zen Planner publish tier structures. Wodify lists a starting figure and routes all three tiers to a demo. Mindbody publishes a floor of $79 per location and does the same.

What almost nobody publishes

Here is the part that matters more, and it is the reason this post exists. Of those six vendors, only PushPress and Pike13 put a processing rate on the pricing table itself.

Wodify is the near miss. It does publish rates, but in an FAQ below the plan grid rather than in the plans, phrased as "as low as," and its own feature comparison lists "Our Lowest Processing Rates" as a benefit of the top tier only. So the published number is a best case, not a typical one.

The other three publish nothing. Zen Planner's pricing page lists payment processing with an asterisk reading "additional charges and/or fees may apply" and tells you to "check with our team for details on current pricing." Mindbody's own FAQ states plainly that your total is "your base plan, premium add-ons, and any transaction-related fees" without naming a rate for any of the three. Gymdesk has built-in payments and no published rate.

That is not an accident. Processing is the larger number, so it is the number that gets a phone call instead of a web page.

Two of the six also charge onboarding or setup fees they do not publish. Wodify confirms "a small onboarding fee" in its FAQ without a figure. Pike13 confirms a one-time branded app setup fee, also without a figure. Neither appears in any plan price.

Those subscription figures are all knowable in an afternoon. The rest takes actual math.

The processing rate is where your money goes

Every time a member pays you, the processor takes a percentage plus a flat fee. The percentage is what compounds.

PushPress runs payments through Stripe, whose own US card pricing is published publicly, and passes those rates through without a gateway markup. Ours are published too:

Now run a real gym through it. Say you process $20,000 a month across 200 transactions, all credit card.

The free plan is the most expensive option by $261 a month. That is $3,132 a year, paid for the privilege of not paying a subscription.

This is not a PushPress quirk. It is how every free tier in this category works. Free plans are subsidized by processing, always. The question is never "is it free," it is "at what volume does free stop being cheap."

For PushPress, the math is clean. The subscription gap between Free and Pro is $159. The rate gap is 2.10%. Divide one by the other and you get the crossover:

Above roughly $7,600 a month in card volume, Pro costs less than Free.

Same math for Pro versus Max. The subscription gap is $70, the rate gap is 0.14%. Above roughly $50,000 a month in card volume, Max costs less than Pro.

Two numbers. If you know your monthly card volume, you know your plan. No sales call required.

Do this exercise with any vendor you are considering. If they will not publish a processing rate, that is the answer.

The lever almost nobody pulls: ACH

Look at that rate table again, specifically the right-hand column.

On PushPress Pro, credit card is 2.89% and ACH is 0.79%. On $20,000 a month that is $578 versus $158. A $420 monthly difference, or $5,040 a year, for the same revenue collected from the same members.

Nothing about your gym changes. The only thing that changes is which rail the money travels on.

That is not a projection. Across our own books last quarter, ACH came in 2.2 percentage points cheaper per dollar collected than card, measured on fees we actually charged, not rack rate.

Here is the part that surprised us when we went looking. Just over 4 in 10 US gyms processing with us run ACH at all, and about 3 in 10 run it regularly. So adoption is not the problem. But the median ACH gym routes only 9.2% of its volume through it, and ACH accounts for just 9.4% of all US member payment volume on the platform.

Read that again, because it is the real story. Most gyms who have already turned ACH on are using it for a handful of members. The cheap rail is sitting there, switched on, carrying almost nothing.

What happens when a gym actually commits: a personal training studio in Texas, a PushPress customer, moved from 4% of volume on ACH to 69% over the past year and cut their blended processing rate nearly in half. On their current volume that is about $7,300 a year. Across the eighteen gyms we can identify as making a real switch, the combined saving is roughly $4,200 a month.

Two things worth knowing before you push ACH hard. It settles slower than cards, so cash flow timing shifts by a few days. And it needs bank details at signup, which is a heavier ask than tapping a card. That friction is real, and on a $150 membership it is worth about $3 a month to you.

The move is not "force everyone onto ACH." It is: make ACH the default option on the signup form for recurring memberships, keep cards for drop-ins and retail, and stop paying card rates on your most predictable revenue.

How that compares

Most competitors do not publish an ACH rate, so there is nothing to compare. One does. Wodify, the closest platform to our own turf in CrossFit and martial arts, discloses card as low as 2.7% + $0.30 and ACH as low as 1.5% + $0.30.

Give them the card point: 2.7% is a hair under PushPress Max at 2.75%, worth about $10 a month on $20,000. Then look at ACH. 0.79% against 1.5% is a difference of roughly $142 a month on the same $20,000, or about $1,704 a year. On the rail that actually moves the number, the gap runs the other way, and it is fourteen times larger than the card gap.

Worth noting both figures are "as low as" and gated to their top tier, so a typical gym may pay more than either.

One limitation: ACH is a US-only product, so none of the above applies to gyms outside the US.

Failed payments: revenue you already earned

The third cost is the one that does not appear on any invoice, which is exactly why it survives.

Here is the scale of it on our own platform. Over a recent three-month window, 65,479 invoices had at least one failed charge, across 1,499 gyms. That is a median of about four failed invoices per gym per month, at an average of $121 a charge. None of those gyms did anything wrong. Cards simply expire.

The good news is that most of it comes back if something is chasing it. About 54% of failed invoices get paid within 14 days, and the median time from decline to payment is two days. In dollar terms that works out to roughly $350 to $460 recovered per gym per month (the average is $463, the median $370, and the top 10% of gyms clear $1,200).

Worth being precise about what that number is, because it is easy to overclaim: that recovery is not purely automatic retries. It is the combination of retries, the member updating their own card, and staff re-running a charge manually from the Staff App. The software makes all three possible. It does not do all three by itself.

Cards expire. Cards get replaced after fraud. Balances run short on the 1st. When a recurring charge fails, one of two things happens.

Either your software notices, retries on a smart schedule, notifies the member, and collects. Or the charge fails silently, the member trains for another three weeks for free, somebody eventually notices during a month-end report, and now you are having an uncomfortable conversation about back-dated charges with a member who feels ambushed.

The second version is worse than the lost money. It converts a billing problem into a retention problem. Members who get surprised by a bill they thought they had paid do not renew.

What good handling looks like:

• Automatic retries on a schedule tuned to when money actually lands in accounts, not the same hour every day.
• Member-facing notification with a link to update the card themselves. The member fixes it in ninety seconds and nobody has to make a phone call.
• A dashboard you can see, so failed payments are a number you check on Monday rather than a discovery you make in a quarterly report.
• Escalation rules, so a payment that has failed four times triggers a human before it triggers a cancellation.

If you want a single diagnostic question for any billing platform, this is it: show me the screen where I see every failed payment from the last thirty days and what the system did about each one. Vendors who have built this will show you immediately. Vendors who have not will talk about their retry logic in the abstract.

For reference, our own retry logic averages 3.4 attempts per failed invoice, spread across the window where money actually lands in accounts rather than hammering the same card daily.

What to ask before you sign

Five questions. Any vendor who cannot answer all five in writing is telling you something.

1. What is the credit card rate, and what is the ACH rate? Both numbers, percentage plus per-transaction.
2. Do you add anything on top of the processor's base rate? Some platforms mark up Stripe. Some add a gateway fee. Some do both.
3. What happens on a failed payment? Specifically: retry schedule, member notification, and where I see it.
4. Can I pause a membership without cancelling it? And does a paused member still count toward my seat limit or plan tier.
5. If I leave, what happens to my member data and my payment tokens? Card tokens that cannot transfer mean every member has to re-enter payment details, which is the most expensive kind of switching cost.

The last one is the one people forget, and it is the one that keeps gyms on software they dislike for years.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does gym billing software cost? Most gym billing software runs $0 to $300 per month for a single location, but the subscription is only part of it. Processing fees on member payments typically add $400 to $1,000 per month for a gym doing $20,000 in monthly revenue. PushPress plans are $0 (Core Free), $159 (Core Pro), and $229 (Core Max), with processing rates of 4.99%, 2.89%, and 2.75% plus $0.30 per credit card transaction.

Is free gym billing software actually free? The subscription is free. The processing is not. Free plans in this category are funded by higher transaction rates, so the more revenue you process, the more the free plan costs you. On PushPress, Core Free charges 4.99% + $0.30 per card transaction versus 2.89% + $0.30 on Core Pro. Above roughly $7,600 a month in card volume, the paid plan is cheaper overall.

What is a good processing rate for a gym? For US credit card transactions, anything at or under 2.9% + $0.30 is competitive, because that is close to standard processor pricing. Rates of 3.5% and higher usually mean the platform is marking up the processor. ACH should be well under 1%. PushPress Pro is 2.89% + $0.30 on cards and 0.79% + $0.30 on ACH.

Can gym billing software charge members by bank transfer instead of card? Yes, in the US. ACH bank transfers cost far less than credit cards. On PushPress Pro and Max, ACH is 0.79% + $0.30 compared to 2.89% and 2.75% on cards. For a gym processing $20,000 a month, shifting recurring memberships to ACH saves roughly $420 a month. Measured across US gyms processing with PushPress last quarter, ACH ran 2.2 percentage points cheaper per dollar collected than card. ACH settles a few days slower than cards, and it is a US-only product.

How much of a gym's failed payments can be recovered? More than most owners expect. Across 1,499 gyms on PushPress over a recent three-month window, about 54% of failed invoices were paid within 14 days, with a median time from decline to payment of two days. That works out to roughly $350 to $460 recovered per gym per month (average $463, median $370). Recovery combines automatic retries, the member updating their own card, and staff re-running the charge manually.

How does gym billing software handle failed payments? Good platforms retry the charge automatically on a staggered schedule, email or text the member a link to update their card, and surface every failure on a dashboard the owner can check. PushPress averages 3.4 retry attempts per failed invoice, timed around when money actually lands in accounts. Weaker platforms fail silently, which means members keep training while unpaid and the problem surfaces weeks later. Ask to see the failed-payments screen during any demo.

Can I pause a member's billing instead of cancelling? Most gym-specific platforms support holds, and it matters more than it sounds. A paused member comes back on their own. A cancelled member has to be sold again. Confirm whether paused members still count against your plan's limits.

Does gym billing software handle drop-ins and retail? Yes, and it should be the same system that runs your memberships. Running memberships, drop-ins, personal training, and retail through one system means one revenue report instead of reconciling three. PushPress handles recurring memberships, one-time sales, class packs, appointments, and point-of-sale retail in the same platform.

The bill you are actually paying

Pull your last three months of statements. Add up what you paid in processing. Compare it to what you paid in subscription fees.

For most gyms the processing number is two to five times larger. We broke the full total-cost-of-ownership math down in what gym software really costs. And unlike the subscription, it grows every time you sign a new member.

That is the number to negotiate, the number to compare across vendors, and the number to check before you switch platforms to save $40 a month on a subscription.

Ready to see the whole bill? Compare PushPress plans and processing rates, or book a demo and bring your last statement. We will do the math with you.