Zatrovo vs PushPress: Which Gym Platform Earns Its Fee?

Pick by your card volume, not your feature list. PushPress lists Pro at $159 a month. Zatrovo lists a single plan at $89. Those subscription lines are the small numbers. The processing rate applied to every membership charge is the large one, and at any real member count it decides the winner.

Disclosure: Zatrovo publishes this blog and is one option discussed below. We have represented every competitor as fairly as we can. Competitor pricing was read from the vendor pricing page on August 25, 2026 and is linked below.

What is the honest short answer here?

Run the Real Monthly Cost formula before you compare a single feature. It takes ten minutes with a merchant statement and settles the question.

Real Monthly Cost = subscription + (card rate × card volume) + ($0.30 × number of charges) + add-on modules.

Work a live example. A CrossFit box with 180 members at $165 average dues runs $29,700 in card volume and 180 charges a month. On PushPress pricing, Pro at 2.89% + $0.30 gives $858.33 in percentage fees plus $54 in per-charge fees plus $159 subscription, or $1,071 a month. Change only the rate and that total moves by hundreds. Change only the subscription and it moves by tens. That ratio is the whole comparison.

What does each platform cost in 2026?

PushPress publishes three tiers plus paid add-on products. Zatrovo publishes one plan and one price. Neither structure is automatically better; they fail in different places.

The membership market is not the problem. The Health & Fitness Association reports 81 million US fitness facility members in 2025, a 5.2% increase, with nearly 7 billion visits. Demand is up. Margin per member is where software choices show up.

Both vendors can change list prices without notice, and published rates are usually the rack rate rather than the one you end up on. Re-run the formula against the live pricing pages the week you sign, and get the processing rate in writing from a person rather than from a marketing page.

Why is the free plan often the expensive one?

Past roughly 46 members, the rate gap costs more than the subscription it saves. PushPress Free costs $0 and charges 4.99% + $0.30 per card. Pro costs $159 and charges 2.89% + $0.30. The gap is exactly 2.10 percentage points.

Divide $159 by 0.0210. Break-even is $7,571 in monthly card volume, or about 46 members at $165 dues. Past 46 members, the free plan is the pricier product.

Back to the 180-member box. Free costs $1,482.03 in percentage fees plus $54 in per-charge fees, or $1,536 a month. Pro costs $1,071 all-in. The free plan is $465 a month more expensive, about $5,580 a year, while displaying $0 on the invoice.

When does PushPress Max earn its extra $70?

Only at real volume. Max lists at $229 with 2.75% + $0.30 against Pro at $159 with 2.89% + $0.30, an improvement of 0.14 points.

Divide $70 by 0.0014. Break-even is $50,000 in monthly card volume, roughly 303 members at $165 dues. Below that, the upgrade loses money on processing alone.

Do not calculate this from your roster. Pull the last three merchant statements and average the settled card volume. Freezes, seasonal drop-ins, apparel and open-gym punch cards move that figure enough that a January reading can tell you to upgrade when a March reading would not.

How much does ACH actually save?

About $3.47 per member per month, or roughly $624 across 180 members. On a $165 charge, PushPress Pro card processing is $5.07 and ACH is $1.60. Over a year that is about $7,500.

There is a structural reason cards cost so much on recurring dues. The Federal Reserve caps regulated debit interchange at 21 cents plus 5 basis points, with up to 1 cent for fraud prevention. On a $165 debit charge, that underlying cap is about 29 cents. A flat 2.89% bills you $5.07 for the same transaction. You pay a credit-card blended rate on a debit card.

Convert at renewal, not by mass email. Ask at the desk when a member's annual date comes up, and hold the ask to one sentence. The mechanics are covered in ACH versus credit card billing for studios.

What do the add-ons do to the comparison?

They can push a $159 subscription past $500 before a single card is run. PushPress sells modules separately: Train from $79 a month, Grow at $329, a branded app at $81 to $97.

A box on Pro that wants a branded app and a marketing CRM pays $159 + $329 + $81, or $569 a month. Add the 180-member processing at $912 and the platform costs $1,481 a month.

The unbundled model is honest, and it is genuinely cheaper if you only need scheduling and billing. It becomes expensive at exactly the moment you start doing the things that grow a gym. Price the stack you will run in twelve months, not the one you will run in week one.

What actually breaks on migration day?

Four fields break, in this order: member ID, next bill date, remaining pack credits, contract end date. Call it the 4-Field Migration Audit and check nothing else first.

Names, emails and class schedules transfer cleanly almost every time. Unused class pack credits and signed contract end dates are the ones that arrive wrong, because they live in tables the standard export skips.

The procedure: export those four fields 30 days out. Freeze all membership edits for the final 72 hours, including freezes and upgrades, and log desk requests on paper instead. Run one full billing cycle in parallel with the old system live but not charging. Reconcile the two charge lists line by line before you cancel. Any member whose next bill date shifted by more than one day gets a personal message before the charge, not after. Declines that follow a migration behave like abandoned checkouts and need the same fast recovery sequence.

Which platform keeps you legal on cancellations?

Neither vendor can carry this risk for you, but the cancellation flow you ship is a compliance artifact. The federal picture changed in 2025 and did not settle.

The Eighth Circuit vacated the FTC's Negative Option Rule on July 8, 2025, days before it was due to take full effect on July 14. The Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act still requires clear renewal disclosure, express consent and a simple means of cancellation. State auto-renewal laws apply on top, including Massachusetts regulations that took effect in September 2025 and require cancellation to be at least as easy as the signup method.

Practical test: if a member joined on their phone in 90 seconds, can they cancel on their phone without calling you? If the answer is no, and you sell to anyone in California, New York or Massachusetts, fix that before you compare anything else.

Which one is faster at 5:58 p.m.?

Time three tasks on a live trial account and hold each to 40 seconds and three screens. That is the 5:58 Test, named for the two minutes before a 6 p.m. class when the desk is busiest.

Task one: a walk-in whose 10-class pack expired yesterday, and you want to honor it once. Task two: a member whose card declines while they are standing in front of you, and you need to take a different card without kicking them out of the class roster. Task three: a member brings a friend with no account, and you need that friend waivered and checked in before the clock hits 6:00.

Run it with your newest front-desk hire rather than with yourself. You already know where everything is, so your own time tells you nothing; a person eight days into the job produces the number that predicts your real error rate. Demo videos never show these tasks. They show a clean booking on a Tuesday morning. Insist on running all three yourself.

How do you run a bake-off before signing?

Use a 14-Day Parallel Run. Two weeks is enough to hit two Mondays, one payroll and at least one card decline.

Days 1 to 2: load 25 real members, including one on a pack, one frozen, one on a contract with an end date, and one who owes money. Days 3 to 9: run the schedule in both systems and log every desk task that takes more than three clicks. Days 10 to 12: run a test billing batch and count how many charges need manual intervention. Days 13 to 14: export everything back out and confirm the four audit fields survived the round trip.

The export test matters most. A platform you cannot cleanly leave is a platform you cannot cleanly evaluate. If your coaches are contractors, check that the payout report matches your 1099 versus W-2 classification before you commit.

Which retention signals should the software surface?

Judge platforms on whether they flag a fading member before you notice, not on how many charts they draw. One reliable trigger beats a dashboard.

The trigger we run across Zatrovo studios, 2026, is a drop below 60% of a member's own eight-week attendance average, held for 14 days. Not zero visits. A member who went from four sessions a week to one is already leaving; a member at zero has left. The desk gets a short call list on Monday morning, capped at five names, and the call happens that day rather than at the end of the week. Methods for building that trigger are in at-risk member detection.

Ask each vendor to show you that list on a trial account with your data in it.

Who should choose which?

Choose PushPress if you are a CrossFit or strength box that wants workout tracking as a first-class product, you are comfortable buying modules separately, and your card volume clears $50,000 a month so the Max rate pays for itself.

Choose a single-plan platform if you run one location under 300 members, you want the branded booking site and the desk tools included rather than priced per module, and you would rather have a predictable $89 line than a stack that grows each time you add a capability.

Whichever way you lean, get the processing rate in writing first. It is the number that will still be costing or saving you money three years from now.