Here's the math that made us build MyTrainerOS: a trainer doing $8,000/month in member revenue on TrueCoach pays roughly $4,800/year in platform transaction fees on top of the monthly subscription. On Mindbody, with marketplace fees stacking on top, that number can hit $15,000/year. On MyTrainerOS, it's $0.
You pay your $49/month (Coach Pro) or $99/month (Studio). Stripe takes their 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction — that's Stripe's fee, not ours, and it's the same whether you use us or any other platform. We don't add a percentage point on top. We don't take a "platform fee." We don't have a "marketplace tier."
Why this pricing is even possible
The honest answer is that per-transaction fees were never about paying for the software. They were about getting trainers to agree to prices they wouldn't accept as a monthly bill. "2% of every transaction" sounds small. "$4,800 per year" does not. The fee obscures the cost.
Flat SaaS pricing is possible because infrastructure costs don't scale with GMV. It costs us roughly the same to serve a trainer with $5K/month in revenue as one with $50K/month. Charging 2% of revenue means the $50K trainer subsidizes our CS team for the $5K trainer — a transfer that benefits us, not them.
The hidden cost of take-rate pricing
Beyond the dollars, transaction-fee pricing has a subtle misalignment. Your platform makes more money when your revenue grows. That sounds fine until you realize it means your platform has an incentive to keep your prices high — because higher member pricing means a higher cut. When you try to test a discount, a pricing experiment, or a free trial, you're cutting your platform's revenue. They won't actively block you, but they also won't build features that make price-testing easy.
Under a flat-fee model, we make the same money whether you charge $50 or $500 per member. Our incentive is just to keep you on the platform — which means shipping features that keep you successful, not features that keep your ARPU up.
How we compare
See the full breakdown on the comparison pages, but the short version:
- TrueCoach — ~$129–137/mo for 50 members + 5% transaction fee
- Trainerize — $70–125/mo + their payments add-on ($10/mo)
- Mindbody — $139–699/mo + marketplace fees up to 20%
- Everfit — $49+/mo with add-ons + processing fee
- MyTrainerOS — $49/mo (Coach Pro) or $99/mo (Studio). Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30 goes to Stripe. We take $0 of your revenue.
Is this sustainable?
Yes. Our unit economics work at $49/month with a 6-month payback period on CAC. We're profitable on a per-customer basis from month seven. We don't need a slice of your revenue to survive — we just need to keep building a product good enough that you stay.
Start a free 30-day trial — no credit card required, no commitment, and if you ever upgrade, you'll know exactly what you're paying every month.