Is Unlimited Membership Profitable? How to Run the Numbers

Unlimited membership is profitable for studios when each member's net monthly fee, divided by their visits, stays above what it costs you to fill one seat, and when heavy users are not taking seats a drop-in customer would have paid for. We call this the Seat-Cost Test: three numbers, checked monthly, that tell you whether unlimited pays.

What decides whether unlimited makes money?

Two things: effective revenue per visit and displacement. Unlimited usually pays if most members attend less often than your breakeven count and your busiest classes are not full of members paying under seat cost.

Most pricing advice only looks at the first one. Effective revenue per visit is what each member actually pays you per class attended. Displacement is whether an unlimited member took a seat that someone else would have paid full price for.

A member who comes 14 times a month to half-empty classes is fine. A member who comes 14 times a month to your Saturday 9am class, which always has a waitlist, may be costing you real money. Same visit count, very different economics.

Why do unlimited members pay more per visit than they expect?

Most buyers overestimate how often they will come. One widely cited study found flat-fee gym members paid over $17 per visit when a $10-per-visit pass was available.

In Paying Not to Go to the Gym, published in the American Economic Review in 2006, DellaVigna and Malmendier tracked 7,752 members of three US health clubs. Members who chose a flat monthly fee over $70 attended 4.3 times a month on average. That works out to more than $17 per expected visit, when a 10-visit pass would have cost $10 per visit. The authors also found that monthly-contract members were 17 percent more likely than annual-contract members to stay enrolled beyond one year.

Anyone who has worked a front desk in January has seen this. The person buying unlimited says "five times a week." By week six they come twice. The lesson for pricing: build your model on observed attendance from day 60 onward, not on what people say at signup. The study looked at health clubs, not boutique studios, so treat it as directional.

How do you calculate your breakeven visit count?

Divide the net unlimited price by your cost per occupied seat. The result is the visit count where a member's fee stops covering what their visits cost to deliver.

Use the net price: the amount that actually lands in your bank after card processing, taken from your last payout statement. If you are weighing payment methods, this is where ACH versus card fees shows up in your margin.

Worked example (illustrative, not survey data): a $179 unlimited plan nets about $172 after processing. Cost per occupied seat is $7.50. Breakeven is $172 ÷ $7.50 = 22.9, so roughly 23 visits a month. A member coming three times a week, about 13 visits, still pays $13.23 per visit, well above seat cost.

What does a seat actually cost you to fill?

Add instructor pay and the per-class share of rent, utilities and software, then divide by average attendance, not by capacity.

Say rent, utilities and software come to $6,400 a month across 160 scheduled classes. That is $40 per class. Add a $50 instructor fee and each class costs $90 to run. At an average of 12 checked-in attendees in a 20-spot room, the cost per seat is $7.50.

The common mistake is dividing by capacity. $90 ÷ 20 = $4.50, which makes unlimited look almost twice as safe as it really is. Pull attendance from the last eight weeks of check-ins, not bookings, because late cancellations inflate booked numbers.

Breakeven changes a lot by slot. A member who only comes to 6am classes reaches seat cost after far fewer visits than one who only comes on Thursday evenings.

When does a heavy user start costing you money?

Only when they take a seat someone else would have paid for. In a half-empty class, an extra unlimited visit costs you almost nothing.

This is the part most pricing posts get wrong. The instructor gets paid whether 9 or 10 people show up. An extra body in a class that is not full costs you a towel wash and some wear on equipment.

The real cost is displacement. To check it, export the last four weeks of waitlists. For every class that hit a waitlist, count how many spots unlimited members held, and whether the people left on the waitlist were pack or drop-in customers. As a rule of thumb, if three or more classes a week end with two or more paying non-members stuck on the waitlist, you have a displacement problem.

How should unlimited be priced against class packs?

Price unlimited so it only beats your other options for members attending about twice a week or more. That keeps packs the sensible choice for occasional visitors.

Here is an example ladder: drop-in $30, 10-pack $250 ($25 per class), 8-class monthly $160 ($20 per class), unlimited $179. Unlimited becomes the cheapest option at the ninth visit of the month. That is the right place for the crossover. Anyone who comes less often buys a pack or the 8-class plan, and you collect more per visit from them.

If unlimited is priced so that it wins at five visits a month, your packs stop selling and casual customers move onto a plan where you collect less per visit. For more on commitment length, see annual vs monthly membership pricing.

Does unlimited work for appointment businesses like salons and massage?

Rarely as true unlimited. Each appointment uses a paid practitioner hour, so the cost of an extra visit never drops toward zero the way it does in a group class.

A lash or massage business has no "empty mat." Every visit uses chair time you could have sold. Use capped memberships instead: one 60-minute massage a month plus a member rate on extra sessions, or two lash fills a month. Allow unused credits to roll over for one month at most. Without that rule you build up a backlog of prepaid hours that all come due at once, often in your busiest season.

Capped plans still do what unlimited does for retention: they make the visit routine. The beauty client retention playbook covers how to make that routine stick.

What should you check every month once unlimited is live?

Run three checks on the first Monday of each month: median visits per member, members above breakeven, and waitlist displacement in your top five slots.

Use the median, not the average. A handful of daily attendees will pull the average up and make the whole plan look riskier than it is. Then count members above breakeven by name. If that list grows for two months in a row, look at their time slots before you look at price.

Also check the bottom of the list. A member with fewer than two visits in 30 days is a cancellation risk, and a call that week does more than an email next month. At-risk member detection explains how to set up that trigger.

Rerun your seat cost at least once a year, because attendance patterns shift. The Health & Fitness Association's full-year 2025 data reported record visitation at US fitness locations, with visit frequency rising in several segments, including boutique facilities. If your members follow that trend, your breakeven math from two years ago is out of date.

Should you cap or restrict unlimited instead of dropping it?

Usually yes. Booking-window limits and one-class-per-day rules protect peak seats while keeping the unlimited name that sells the plan at the front desk.

Three limits do most of the work. One class per day. No more than three future bookings held at once, which stops members from booking every Saturday class weeks ahead. And a no-show rule: three no-shows in 30 days means no advance booking for two weeks.

When should a studio drop unlimited entirely?

Drop it when your median member sits above breakeven for three straight months and caps have not moved the number. Then move members to a new plan deliberately.

That situation is rare. When it happens, it usually means the price has not moved in years while rent and instructor pay have. Before you remove the plan, try a price increase for new members only. If you do retire unlimited, move current members to a 12-class plan at their existing price for 60 days, then step it up. Avoid winning members back later with discounted unlimited. If you want an intro offer, a 30-day challenge membership with a fixed end date is safer.