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 to see the 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, or 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
This is an estimate. 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 when you can least justify it as a fixed overhead.
The crossover moves as you grow
The break-even month shifts with every client you add, so check it at the roster you expect next year as well as the one you have now.
The video library is the hidden cost
Platforms bundle thousands of exercise demonstration videos. A custom build doesn't, so producing or licensing an equivalent library is a separate line item, and build estimates often leave it out.
Whose App Store listing is it?
On some branded-app tiers the listing, its reviews and its install base belong to the vendor. That decides what leaving costs, and pricing pages rarely mention it.
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. The result is labelled as an approximation: vendors publish prices at band boundaries, so a figure between boundaries is a straight line drawn between two published numbers.
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, to match 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. Enterprise pricing above those bands is usually higher, which would move the crossover in favour of building, so treat that case as conservative.
Under about fifty clients the comparison is almost never close, and most coaches are still better off renting until they near a hundred. Stay on the platform, spend the difference on filling your roster, and come back when seat fees start to sting. A coaching business fails from too few clients far more often than from paying $58 a month for software.
FAQ
Personal trainer app cost questions
How much does a custom personal training app cost?
An MVP coaching app starts at $12,000 and a full custom build at $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?
It depends on which platform you're on and what you'd build, so there's no single number. Platform fees scale with active clients while a build costs a fixed amount, which means the crossover arrives as you grow; drag the roster slider and watch the break-even month move. Under about fifty clients it is almost never close. Between fifty and a hundred it gets closer, but most coaches still come out ahead renting.
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 expensive to produce (see the note on video above). 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 doesn't separate the two paths and we left it out of this comparison. Commission rates, small-business thresholds and external-link rules change often, so check Apple's and Google's current terms instead of relying on a figure quoted in an article.
Next steps
If you're weighing a build
Work with us
Not sure it's time to build?
Send your roster size and what you pay today. If you should stay on the platform another year, we'll say so before you've paid us anything.