How Much to Charge for a Workout Plan (2026)

Most pricing advice for coaches is a number pulled from someone else’s business. This page is a method instead: work out what the product is, price the outcome, then subtract what the platform takes so you know what actually reaches you.

Fee figures below were verified on vendor pricing pages on 17 July 2026 (LMS) and 3 August 2026 (coaching software).

First: What Are You Actually Selling?

Nearly every pricing mistake starts here. Three products get called “a workout plan” and they are not comparable.

A document. Programming, delivered once, no contact with you. The buyer gets a file and gets on with it. This competes with free programmes and with every other PDF on the internet, which is why the ceiling is low.

A document with support. Same programming, plus some access to you — a form check, a check-in at week four, answers when something hurts. This is a materially different product because the buyer is no longer alone with it.

Ongoing coaching. Programming that changes based on what the client actually did. This is a service with a monthly cost to you in time, and it should be priced as one.

The gap between a $19 plan and a $199 plan is almost never the number of pages. It is whether a human looks at the buyer’s situation.

Price the Outcome, Not the Effort

What a plan cost you to write is irrelevant to its value. What it does for the buyer is the whole question.

Ask what the outcome is worth to the person buying. Someone who has failed three times to build a squat is not comparing your plan to a free one — they are comparing it to another year of not getting there. Someone browsing for general fitness content is comparing you to YouTube, and no amount of design work moves that.

This is why specificity raises prices. “12-week strength base for women who have never lifted” can be priced against the outcome. “Get fit in 12 weeks” gets priced against free.

Then Subtract What the Platform Takes

Your listed price is not your revenue. On a single $97 sale:

Setup	Platform fee	Payment processing	You keep
Thinkific Basic	$0	~$3.11	$93.89
Teachable Builder	$0	~$3.11	$93.89
LearnWorlds Starter	$5.00 flat	~$3.11	$88.89
Teachable Starter	$7.28 (7.5%)	~$3.11	$86.61

Payment processing assumes the common 2.9% + $0.30 rate. Now scale it — the same fee structures at 40 sales a month:

Setup	Monthly plan	Transaction fees	Total cost
Thinkific Basic	$54	$0	$54
Teachable Builder	$89	$0	$89
Teachable Starter	$39	$291	$330

The cheapest monthly plan becomes the most expensive setup once volume arrives. If you are pricing a plan at $97 and expect real sales, the transaction fee decides your margin more than the subscription does. Full platform fee comparison.

The Coaching Version of the Same Maths

If you are selling ongoing coaching rather than a plan, the cost structure inverts: you pay per client, every month, for as long as they stay.

At $150/mo per client, here is what the software takes:

Clients	Revenue	Everfit	As % of revenue
5	$750	$0 (free tier)	0%
10	$1,500	$29	1.9%
20	$3,000	$49	1.6%
50	$7,500	$95	1.3%

Software is not what makes coaching expensive to deliver — your time is. Which is the actual argument for charging properly: at 20 clients you are spending perhaps 15-20 hours a month on check-ins and adjustments, and $49 of software is not the constraint. Your hourly rate is.

Coaching software costs compared.

One-Time or Monthly?

One-time for a fixed programme with a defined end. The buyer gets the thing, uses it, and is done.

Monthly only if something new arrives each month. New programming, check-ins, access to you, a community that is actually active.

Charging monthly for static content produces the same outcome every time: cancellations in month two, then refund requests, because the buyer correctly notices nothing new arrived. Recurring revenue is attractive enough that coaches talk themselves into this, and it damages trust faster than any pricing mistake.

A Sanity Check Before You Publish

Three questions:

Would you pay this? Not “is it worth it” — would you personally hand over this amount for this, from someone you had just discovered.

Can you name what makes it worth more than free? If the honest answer is “it’s better organised”, the price needs to come down or the product needs to grow.

Does the price survive the fee subtraction? If a $47 plan leaves you $37 after fees and took three weeks to write, the maths only works at volume you do not have yet. Either raise the price or add the support that justifies raising it.

Raising Prices Later

You can. Buyers who already paid keep their price; new buyers pay the new one. Nobody has ever successfully argued that a coach must charge forever what they charged in their first year.

The version of this that works is adding something rather than announcing an increase: the plan that was $47 becomes $97 when it includes a form check, and that is an easier conversation than the same file costing twice as much.

Ready to build the thing? How to sell workout plans online covers the launch end to end.