Twelve gym owners shared their actual software invoices. Eleven of them were paying more than they thought they were. The average delta between perceived monthly cost and actual monthly cost was $187/month.
We asked 12 independent gym owners to pull their last three months of software invoices and tell us what they thought they were paying. Then we looked at the actual invoices.
Eleven of the twelve were wrong. Most were wrong by a significant amount. The average delta between perceived monthly cost and actual monthly cost was $187/month. One gym was off by $480/month — they'd added a branded app module 14 months earlier, forgotten they had it, and were paying $199/month for a feature no one on staff had opened in over a year.
The gyms in the audit ranged from 85 to 480 members. Eight were on Mindbody (Starter, Accelerate, and Ultimate tiers). Three were on Glofox. One was on ClubReady. Gym sizes and locations varied; the billing opacity was remarkably consistent across platforms.
We looked at: base platform fee, per-seat staff fees, add-on module fees, branded app fees, processing fees, and any third-party tools purchased as Mindbody marketplace integrations.
Mindbody's base plans include a limited number of staff logins. Every staff member above that threshold costs $40/month on most plans. A gym with 6 coaches and 2 front-desk staff using Mindbody Accelerate (which includes 3 staff logins) is paying $200/month in staff seat overages they may have set up and forgotten. When we explained this to three different gym owners, each one said some version of: "I didn't realize it was per person."
The average staff-seat overage across the 8 Mindbody gyms in the audit: $147/month.
Five of the 8 Mindbody gyms were paying for the branded app feature ($199/month). Three of them said, when asked, that members mostly booked through the Mindbody consumer app or the web widget. One gym's owner estimated that fewer than 15% of bookings actually came through their branded app — meaning they were paying $199/month for a feature that captured 15% of their booking volume, with the rest coming through channels that didn't require it.
This is the single largest line item most owners can't justify when forced to look at it directly. It adds up to $2,388/year. For many small gyms, that's more than a month's worth of one coach's hourly pay.
Six of the 12 gyms were paying for a marketing or automation module — either Mindbody's built-in suite ($50–$100/month) or a third-party integration through Zapier or Mailchimp ($20–$60/month). Four of the six said their usage was "occasional" — seasonal promotions, new member welcome emails, maybe a win-back campaign once. The two who used it regularly said it was worth it. For the other four, it was a standing expense that had outlasted the intention that created it.
Two Mindbody gyms were paying for third-party apps through the Mindbody marketplace — a form tool, a review collection service — that the owners barely remembered adding. These were $15–$40/month individually, invisible as line items because they showed up in the Mindbody invoice as pass-through charges rather than clearly labeled third-party subscriptions. Neither owner could explain what the tools did when asked directly. Neither had been used actively in more than 6 months.
This one was subtler. Four gym owners quoted their processing rate as "2.9% plus 30 cents." When we looked at their actual processing statements, two of them were being charged a blended rate that included an additional per-transaction surcharge on certain card types (rewards cards, corporate cards) that put their effective rate closer to 3.3–3.5%. Over $40,000/month in card volume, that's a $160–$240/month difference they weren't accounting for.
8 Mindbody gyms (average):
3 Glofox gyms (average):
The Glofox delta was smaller, partly because the branded app is included in the base contract, and partly because the custom contract pricing makes owners more aware of what they signed up for.
Pull your last three invoices right now. Without looking, write down what you think you're paying per month. Then look.
If you're off by more than $50, run through this checklist: How many staff logins does your plan include? How many do you actually have active? Do you pay separately for a branded member app? When did you last have a member tell you they used it? Are you paying for a marketing or automation module? Could you name three automations you ran in the last 90 days?
The point of the exercise isn't to cut everything. Some of these features earn their cost. The point is to make the decision consciously — to pay for things you use rather than pay for things you added once and forgot about.
The gym that was paying $199/month for an app nobody used for 14 months spent $2,786 on nothing. That's not a software company exploiting them. That's a line item that survived on inertia because nobody looked.
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