Growth
Most gym owners offer unlimited memberships without ever questioning it. It feels like the generous thing to do. But there’s a pricing model that’s simpler, more profitable, and actually better for your members and most gyms aren’t using it.
This is what that model looks like, why it works, and how to add it to your gym in two steps.
A Note Before We Dive In: This strategy is designed specifically for boutique fitness studios and gym models built around limited-session memberships (think 2x or 3x per week structures). If you run a health club or open-access facility, this one isn’t for you.
Unlimited sounds premium. In practice, it isn’t. When there’s no limit on access, there’s no scarcity and when there’s no scarcity, there’s no perceived value.
Members don’t place a premium on something they can always get more of. Most people who buy unlimited memberships never come close to using them, which means you’re undercharging your most engaged members and overcomplicating your offer for everyone else.
There’s also a math problem hiding inside the unlimited model that most gym owners never sit down to look at.
Consider this: if you’re charging $249 per month for unlimited access and a member shows up every single day, you’re earning around $8 per class from that person. Eight dollars.
Meanwhile, a member on a standard 3x per week membership at $179 per month is paying around $14 per session, and those are the people who are energized, consistent, and not burning out your floor space.
The everyday attender on an unlimited plan isn’t just costing you on a per-session basis. They’re physically taking a spot on the floor that a motivated, consistent member could be in. You end up diluting the experience for your strongest retention bets in exchange for $8 a class from someone whose attendance pattern is more likely to lead to burnout and cancellation.
With unlimited memberships, your most dedicated members end up paying for the people who show up the least.
Instead of asking every engaged member to choose between capped access and unlimited, you give them a third option: a prepaid class pack they can bolt on to their existing membership whenever they want more.
Here’s the structure.
You create a 50-class and a 100-class pack, priced at a 10 to 25 percent discount off your standard per-class rate. So if your normal class rate is $16, it looks like this:
Three rules make this work:
Rule 1: It requires an active recurring membership. The class pack cannot be purchased or used without an active membership in place. This protects your recurring revenue. There’s no path to buying sessions a la carte and canceling their membership. The recurring membership is always the foundation.
Rule 2: It’s overflow only. Members can only dip into their class pack after they’ve used their standard weekly sessions. If they’re on 3x per week, they use those three sessions first. The class pack covers anything beyond that. It’s not a replacement for their membership, it’s an addition to it.
Rule 3: It expires in one year. The pack has a 12-month expiration. This creates urgency, prevents stale credits from sitting on your books indefinitely, and keeps members engaged.
Let’s say Jennifer joins your studio on a $179 per month, 3x per week membership. Month one goes well. By month two, she’s hooked and wants to come more. Instead of asking you to switch her to unlimited, she buys a 50-class pack for $700.
Her 90-day spend looks like this:
That’s $1,237 in 90 days from a single member who started at $179 per month. Her recurring membership never changed, so your monthly revenue baseline stays intact. And because the class pack is tied to her active membership, Jennifer now has a financial and emotional reason to stay enrolled. She’s invested. She has classes in the bank. She’s not going anywhere.
That’s what protecting recurring revenue actually looks like.
The gym owner running unlimited memberships:
The gym owner using the Class Pack Bolt On:
The members who want to be in your gym every day are some of your best. They deserve a spot on the floor. But they should be paying appropriately for it, not coming in on a $249 unlimited plan that nets you $8 a session.
Pricing discipline matters. Don’t discount too aggressively. The 10 to 25 percent range exists for a reason. Go deeper and you train members to wait for deals rather than see the value in what you’re already offering.
Your team needs to know how to present this. When a member says they want to come more, your coaches and front desk should be ready to walk them through the class pack on the spot. This is one of the easiest sells in the building, you’re not asking anyone to change their existing commitment, you’re just giving them more of what they already love.
Keep the rules clean. The class pack only works as a retention and revenue tool if the membership requirement and the overflow rule are actually enforced. The structure is what makes it protect your business.
The Class Pack Bolt On isn’t complicated. It’s a smarter alternative to a model most gym owners accepted as the default without realizing there was a better option sitting right in front of them. Cash flow goes up. Lifetime value goes up. Retention goes up. And your recurring revenue stays exactly where it should be, stable and growing.
