Your software bill grows every time you do
Trainerize, Everfit and TrueCoach all charge per active client, so the better your coaching business does, the more you pay. Set your roster size and see the real multi-year total against owning your own app — and the month the two lines cross, if they do.
3-year total, 40 clients
Own it
$48,000
Rent it (Trainerize)
$1,401
Trainerize costs you about $39/mo at this roster — roughly $1 per client, per month.
At 40 clients, renting is clearly cheaper and stays that way inside your 3-year window. Drag the roster slider up to find the point where that stops being true.
- MVP build
- $12,000
- Maintenance, 3 years
- $36,000
This comparison excludes
- App-store commission on in-app payments, either path
- The exercise video library a platform gives you and a build does not
- Migrating client history and programme templates off your current tool
- Vendor feature updates you stop receiving after a custom build
An estimate, not a quote. Vendor prices are their own published figures, interpolated between published client bands, and can change without notice.
Before you decide
What the total doesn’t say on its own
Seat fees scale with success
Every platform here prices per active client. The month you double your roster is the month your software bill doubles, which is exactly when you can least justify it as a fixed overhead.
The crossover moves as you grow
A build is a fixed cost; a subscription is not. That means the break-even point is not a static number — it arrives on its own as your roster climbs, which is why the slider matters more than any single answer.
The video library is the hidden cost
Platforms bundle thousands of exercise demonstration videos. A custom build does not, and producing or licensing an equivalent library is a real line item most build estimates quietly omit.
Whose App Store listing is it?
On some branded-app tiers the listing, its reviews and its install base belong to the vendor, not to you. That determines what leaving actually costs, and it is almost never on the pricing page.
Methodology
How the crossover is calculated
The rental side reads each vendor’s own published client bands and interpolates between them for roster sizes that fall inside a band. That is an approximation and is labelled as one — vendors publish prices at band boundaries, not per client, so a figure between boundaries is a straight line drawn between two real numbers rather than a quote.
The build side is the published floor for the tier you picked, plus any add-on, plus maintenance at $1,000/mo running for the whole window — the fair comparison against a subscription you also pay every month.
Above a vendor’s highest published band the calculator holds their top price and says so, rather than extrapolating into territory where they quote individually. Real enterprise pricing above those bands is usually higher, which would move the crossover in favour of building, so treat that case as conservative.
The unprofitable advice: under about fifty clients this is almost never close. Stay on the platform, spend the difference on filling your roster, and revisit this page when seat fees genuinely start to sting. A coaching business fails from too few clients far more often than from paying $58 a month for software.
Coaching platform questions
What coaches ask before building
How much does a custom personal training app cost?
Using published prices: an MVP coaching app from $12,000 and a full custom build from $25,000, plus maintenance from $1,000/mo and an optional AI coach assistant from $1,999. A five-day planning sprint at $1,500 comes first and is credited in full toward the build. Whether that beats a subscription depends almost entirely on your roster size, which is what this calculator works out.
At what roster size does building your own app make sense?
There is no universal number, because it depends on which platform you're on and what you'd build. What is universal is the shape: platform fees scale with active clients while a build is fixed, so the crossover arrives as you grow. Drag the roster slider in the calculator and watch the break-even month move — that's the actual decision, and for most coaches under a hundred clients the honest answer is still to rent.
What do Trainerize, Everfit and TrueCoach cost?
As published on their own pricing pages in September 2026: Trainerize starts free for one client and runs through per-client bands up to Studio Plus at $248/mo for 500+. Everfit is free to 5 clients, with Pro from $19/mo scaling to $290/mo around 300 clients on monthly billing. TrueCoach is $26.34/mo to 5 clients, $57.99 to 20 and $136.99 to 50, with custom pricing beyond. All three change without notice, so check before deciding.
What does a platform give you that a custom app doesn't?
An exercise video library, which is genuinely expensive to produce and is the thing coaches most underestimate when they price a build. Also continuous feature updates, a support team, and no engineering risk. Custom wins when you're paying for a large roster of seats, when your programming model doesn't fit the platform's assumptions, or when the app itself is the product you sell.
Do app stores take a cut either way?
Yes, on in-app payments, and that applies whether you're on a platform's branded app tier or your own build — so it isn't a differentiator between the two paths and is excluded from this comparison deliberately. Current commission rates, small-business thresholds and external-link rules move often enough that it is worth checking Apple's and Google's current terms rather than relying on any figure quoted in an article.
Next steps
Turn the comparison into a plan
Let’s create together
Tell us your roster size and we'll tell you if building is premature
Send the number this gave you and what you pay today. If the honest answer is to stay on the platform another year, that's what we'll say — before you've paid us anything.