Free martial arts gym software: how "free" works and what to check

Free software still gets paid

A martial arts school running on a $150 to $300 monthly software bill notices it every month, and especially in the slow ones. So "free gym software" is an easy search to understand. The catch is that nobody builds billing, check-in, waivers and a member app for nothing. The real question is not whether free software makes money but where it makes it, and whether that place costs your gym more than a flat subscription would.

There are three common models. Knowing which one you're looking at tells you which questions to ask.

Model 1: the free tier with a ceiling

The software is free up to a member count, a location count, or a feature line, then you move to a paid plan. This is fine for a garage gym that will stay small. It's a problem when the ceiling sits just under where a healthy academy lives, because the upgrade lands right when you've imported your roster and switching would hurt.

• Ask for the exact member or feature limit, in writing.
• Ask what the price is the month you cross it, not the starting price.
• Check whether billing, the member app or lead tools are on the free side of the line. Those are the features that make money for you.

Model 2: free software, marked-up payments

The software has no subscription, but every payment runs through the vendor's processor at a rate above what the card networks and a standard processor charge. On a gym collecting $15,000 a month, a 0.5% markup is $75 a month: the subscription you thought you'd avoided, just harder to see.

The second cost is lock-in. If the vendor is the merchant of record, your members' cards live in their account. Leaving can mean asking every member to re-enter a card, and some won't.

• Ask for the processing rate as a number and compare it with a standard processor's published rate.
• Ask whose Stripe or merchant account the money lands in.
• Ask what happens to stored cards if you leave.

Model 3: free for the gym, a fee on members

The gym pays nothing and the member pays a small platform fee on each charge, shown as its own line. This is how OLM works: no monthly fee, nothing taken from your payouts, and members pay a 2% platform fee on what they're charged. A member on a $150 plan pays $3 a month. The gym pays only Stripe's standard processing, directly to its own Stripe account.

The trade-off is honest to state. Your members see the fee, so you should tell them about it. In return, the gym's cost is zero in a slow month and doesn't jump when you add members, locations or features.

Seven questions that expose the real price

• What does a 100-member gym pay per month, all in, including processing?
• Is there a setup fee, and is it optional?
• Is there a contract, and what does cancelling cost?
• Whose payment account do member payments land in?
• Can I export members, attendance and billing history as CSV at any time?
• Is the branded member app included or an add-on?
• Which features are gated behind a higher tier?

Run your own numbers

The fastest way to compare is with your roster and your dues, not a vendor's example gym. Put your member count and average dues into a calculator, add the processing rate each vendor actually charges, and compare the yearly total. Then weigh the parts a number doesn't show: who owns the payment relationship, and how hard it is to leave.