Most studio owners set their prices once, near opening, and then leave them alone for years. The unlimited tier gets a round number that felt right. The class packs get priced off a rough per-class figure. After that, the mix runs itself. The problem is that the mix, not the headline price, is what actually sets how much you earn per member. Two studios can charge the same rates and take home very different revenue per client, purely because of how their members sort themselves between unlimited and packs.
This is worth getting right because the boutique model runs on a narrow band of committed clients. Only about one in five members attend daily or almost daily, the kind of frequency that makes an unlimited membership rational for the client. Everyone else visits less, which means the way you price for that quieter majority decides most of your revenue. Once you see the per-visit maths, the pricing decisions get much simpler.
Effective price per visit is the number that matters
Headline price tells you almost nothing. What you want to know is the effective price per visit, which is what a member pays divided by how often they actually come. This is where unlimited quietly works against you. A client on a 200 pound unlimited plan who attends twelve times a month is paying you roughly 16 pounds a visit. Sell that same person a ten-pack and they might pay 25 pounds a visit. Your most engaged, most loyal clients are frequently your lowest-margin ones, and they feel like your best customers because they are always in the room.
ClassPass learned this the hard way at scale. When it ran a genuine unlimited tier, heavy users could cost the company money each month, because low-usage members were effectively subsidising high-usage ones. In 2016 it scrapped unlimited entirely and split the plan into tiers of five classes for 75 dollars, ten classes for 135 dollars, and a capped higher tier, on the founder's own logic that unlimited "can't be a long-term membership option because it doesn't align our business with our promise". You are not ClassPass, but the mechanism is identical. Unlimited transfers pricing power to your most frequent attenders, and past a certain visit count, they cost you margin.
Breakage is a feature of packs, not a flaw
The counterweight to unlimited is breakage, the value a client pays for and never uses. It is uncomfortable to build a model on unused sessions, but the numbers are stark and they are industry-wide. Roughly 67 percent of gym members rarely or never use their memberships, and Americans waste about 1.3 billion dollars a year on memberships they do not use. In fitness generally, around 18 percent of members never attend at all.
Class packs capture this reality cleanly. When a client buys a ten-pack and uses seven sessions before it lapses, the three unused visits are pure margin. The client also self-selected into the product that suits their real behaviour, which is why packs tend to produce healthy per-visit revenue from exactly the low-frequency majority that unlimited would underprice. The mistake is treating breakage as something to feel guilty about. It is the market correcting for the gap between what people intend and what they do. Your job is to price so that gap works for both sides, with fair expiry windows and no aggressive traps.
Commitment is why unlimited still earns its place
If packs are so efficient, why carry unlimited at all? Because commitment changes behaviour, and behaviour drives retention. Members on annual contracts show 55 percent lower churn than month-to-month members in the critical early months, and they are 35 percent more likely to attend in months two to four, exactly when new-year motivation fades and quiet cancellations begin. A committed unlimited member builds a habit, and habit is what carries someone past the six-month mark where roughly half of new members otherwise quit.
So unlimited is not really a pricing product. It is a retention product. It costs you per-visit margin on your heaviest users in exchange for a stickier relationship and a more predictable monthly base. The error is letting unlimited become the default that everyone drifts toward, including the client who comes six times a month and would happily pay more per visit on a pack. That client on unlimited is a retention win and a margin loss at the same time, and you want to know which one you are buying.
Where the mix tips into cannibalisation
The tipping point is the visit frequency at which your unlimited price undercuts your pack price per visit. Work it out for your own numbers. Take your unlimited monthly price, then find the number of monthly visits at which it beats your best pack's per-visit rate. Below that frequency, packs earn you more per client. Above it, unlimited is cheaper for the client and thinner for you.
The trap is pricing unlimited so the break-even sits too low, say at six or seven visits a month. Do that and you invite your moderate-frequency clients, the ones who would have paid pack rates, to migrate onto unlimited and pay you less. That is cannibalisation, and it is invisible on a revenue report because your member count looks stable while your revenue per member erodes. Set the break-even higher, around ten to twelve visits, and unlimited stays priced for the genuine three-plus-times-a-week client it is meant for, while everyone else finds packs to be the honest deal.
What to do with this
Start by calculating effective price per visit for each tier you sell, using real attendance data rather than list price. You will likely find your unlimited members span a wide range, from clients paying you 30 pounds a visit to clients paying you 12. Then work out the break-even frequency between your unlimited plan and your top pack, and check where your moderate attenders actually sit relative to it.
- Price unlimited so the break-even against your best pack lands around ten to twelve visits a month, not six. This keeps it aimed at true high-frequency clients and stops it cannibalising pack revenue.
- Keep at least one pack priced attractively enough that low and moderate attenders choose it willingly. Breakage on packs is legitimate margin from the majority who visit occasionally.
- Attach commitment to unlimited, whether a term or an auto-renew, because the retention gain is where unlimited pays you back for the per-visit margin it gives up.
- Review the mix quarterly, not once at opening. Watch revenue per member, not just member count, so you catch silent cannibalisation before it compounds.
The studios that price well are not the ones with the cleverest headline number. They are the ones who know, per tier and per client, what a visit actually earns them. Tools like kaizenwell exist to surface that per-visit and per-tier view from your booking data, but the discipline matters more than the software. Get the mix right and it sets a ceiling you can live with. Get it wrong and you will grow your member list while your revenue per member quietly falls.
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