Pull out your last credit card statement. Find every coaching tool you pay for. Add them up.
If you are like most coaches running a serious online practice, the number lands somewhere between two hundred and four hundred dollars a month. Not on coaching. On infrastructure. The programming app. The payment processor. The nutrition tool. The scheduling app. The video call platform. Maybe a separate CRM. Maybe a comms app. Maybe a habit tracker the athletes never open.
That is the bill before a single athlete pays you. Before you write a program. Before you watch a single rep.
The number is high because the structure underneath it is broken. Every tool charges a flat fee. Every fee accumulates. Every accumulation eats your margin. The coach pays whether the practice grows or shrinks. The platforms pay nothing if the coach quits. This is the part of the industry that nobody writes about, because every player in it has the same incentive to keep quiet.
I want to write about it. Then I want to show you what a different structure looks like.
TL;DR
- The typical online coach pays for five subscriptions across the stack. Total cost averages two hundred to four hundred a month.
- Every tool charges a flat fee. The fees are decoupled from whether the coach earns anything.
- Most coaches do not realize how much they pay because the charges live on different statements.
- Outcome-aligned pricing is rare. Marrow charges 5 percent of athlete revenue and replaces most of the stack.
- The Founder Cohort locks 5 percent for the life of the account. The first fifty coaches in.
The Real Math on the Typical Stack
Most coaches do not run the math because the charges live on different statements. The programming app bills on the 5th. The payment processor takes a cut on every invoice. The scheduling app charges quarterly. The nutrition tool charges annually with a discount that hides the run rate. The video tool is folded into the coach's personal Zoom bill. The CRM was free at three contacts and started charging six months in.
Add them up the way a CFO would.
The programming app sits between thirty and a hundred a month. The range depends on tier and how many athletes the coach manages. Annual prepay is common, which pushes the number into a discount but locks in a year. The payment processor takes two to three percent plus thirty cents per transaction, then takes its piece on top of that if the coach uses the platform's billing wrapper. The nutrition tool is another twenty to seventy a month, depending on whether the coach wants meal plan templates or just macro tracking. The scheduling tool is fifteen to thirty. The video call platform is another fifteen if the coach pays for the Pro tier that removes the forty-minute cap. Throw in a CRM at twenty to fifty a month, and a comms app at ten to thirty.
The minimum, with discount stacking, is around two hundred a month. The realistic median for a coach with a serious practice is closer to three hundred to four hundred. The outlier is the coach who has bought into a high-end programming platform plus a high-end nutrition platform plus a video studio subscription. That coach is paying five hundred plus before they earn a dollar.
None of these numbers are absurd in isolation. Sixty dollars a month for a piece of software is not the issue. The issue is that six tools at sixty dollars each is three hundred and sixty dollars. And every one of them charges whether the coach has two athletes or twenty.
The Structural Problem With Flat Fees
The flat fee is not malicious. It is just decoupled. The platform charges the coach a number per month. The coach charges the athletes a number per month. Those two numbers have nothing to do with each other.
If the coach doubles the roster, the platform's revenue from that coach does not move. If the coach loses half the roster, the platform's revenue does not move either. The platform is in a different business than the coach. The coach sells coaching. The platform sells shelf space.
Decoupled pricing has a quiet effect on product. When a platform's revenue does not move with the coach's revenue, the platform's roadmap stops being about retention. It becomes about acquisition. The next dollar of platform revenue comes from a new coach signing up, not from an existing coach keeping their athletes longer. So R&D money flows toward funnel builders, social media templates, lead magnet generators, and marketing courses. The platform becomes a sales funnel for coaches instead of a tool for coaches.
This is why coaches feel, after a year on most platforms, that they are spending more time on marketing than on coaching. The platform was designed to reward that drift. It is teaching the coach to be a marketer because the platform's math depends on the coach being a marketer.
I covered this in more depth in a separate piece on the 5 percent decision. The short version: pricing structure determines product direction. If you want to know what a platform will ship next year, look at how it charges you this year.
What "Outcome-Aligned" Means
Outcome-aligned pricing is simple to define and rare to find. The platform earns more when the coach earns more. The platform earns less when the coach earns less. The two numbers move together.
The cleanest version is a percentage of athlete revenue, paid only when the coach is paid. If the coach earns nothing, the platform earns nothing. If the coach has a great month, the platform has a great month. The platform's incentive becomes identical to the coach's incentive. Both parties want the same thing: athletes who keep training, coaches who keep getting better at the work.
The math from the coach's side looks different than a flat fee. A flat fee is a fixed cost. It is high when you have two athletes and low when you have fifty. A percentage fee scales with revenue. It is low when you have two athletes and proportional when you have fifty. The coach who is just starting pays less. The coach who has built a serious practice pays more in absolute dollars but the percentage stays bounded by what they actually earn.
The fair comparison is not list price against list price. It is total cost of ownership against percentage of revenue at the coach's actual scale. A coach earning six thousand a month who pays three hundred in flat fees is paying 5 percent of revenue already. The difference is that the flat fee does not move when revenue drops. The percentage does.
Where the Stack Consolidates
The reason coaches pay for five tools is that most platforms only solve one piece. The programming app does not handle payments. The payment processor does not handle nutrition. The nutrition tool does not schedule sessions. The scheduling tool does not run video calls. So the coach assembles the stack and pays each tool separately.
The consolidation play is to build the tools together so the coach pays once. Programming, payments, nutrition, comms, scheduling, and the public coach storefront all under one roof. The savings are real. The bigger win is the data. When the programming app and the payment processor and the nutrition tracker all live in the same system, the platform can read across them. It can see the athlete whose payments are on time but whose check-in cadence dropped. It can see the coach whose roster grew but whose retention is sliding. None of that signal exists when the data sits in five different vendors.
This is the thesis behind Marrow's coach surface. One platform that does the work of the typical five. Built so the coach can run a serious practice without assembling and managing the stack.
The Coach Math Worked Example
Consider a coach with twenty-five athletes paying one hundred and ninety-nine a month. Monthly coach revenue is just under five thousand dollars.
On the typical stack, the coach pays the programming app a flat seventy a month. The payment processor takes 2.9 percent plus thirty cents per transaction, which is roughly one hundred and sixty across twenty-five invoices. The nutrition tool is forty. The scheduling tool is twenty-five. The video tool is fifteen. The CRM is thirty. Total monthly software cost lands at three hundred and forty dollars.
On Marrow's outcome-aligned model, the same coach pays $49 a month and 5 percent of athlete revenue. The percentage on five thousand is two hundred and fifty. Total is two hundred and ninety-nine.
The dollar difference at that scale is forty-one dollars a month. Not transformative. The structural difference is. On the typical stack, the coach's three hundred and forty is a fixed cost. If the coach loses half the roster, the bill stays at three hundred and forty while revenue drops to two thousand five hundred. On Marrow, the bill drops with the revenue. Five percent of twenty-five hundred is one hundred and twenty-five. Total bill is one hundred and seventy-four. The platform absorbs the downside with the coach.
This is what outcome-aligned pricing actually buys: a platform that does not get richer when the coach struggles.
The Honest Limits of This Model
Percentage-based pricing does not work for every coach. The two situations where it works against the coach are worth naming.
Coaches running commodity-priced practices should not pay a percentage. If the average athlete pays forty-nine a month, the percentage take in absolute dollars is too small to fund the infrastructure. The coach gets less than they would from a flat-fee platform that subsidizes them with revenue from higher-priced practices. Marrow is not the platform for that practice. A coach running at that price point should buy the cheapest flat-fee option that meets their needs.
High-volume coaches with very large books at modest prices also see the math cut the other way. Two hundred athletes at ninety-nine a month is just under twenty thousand in monthly revenue. Five percent is around a thousand. A flat-fee platform at a hundred is ten times cheaper in absolute dollars. The coach who has built that practice should run the math both ways and pick. I am not going to argue against the coach who chooses the cheaper option per month. That is a defensible choice.
The coaches who fit the percentage model are running serious practices at premium prices. Twenty to fifty athletes paying ninety-nine and up. At that scale, percentage pricing is competitive in absolute dollars and structurally better in incentive alignment. The platform earns when the coach earns. The platform loses when the coach loses. That is the trade.
The Founder Cohort Note
The first fifty coaches into Marrow lock 5 percent for the life of the account. After the cohort closes, the standard rate is 8 percent. The 5 percent number is the only thing locked for life. The $49 monthly founder rate is locked for 12 months. Both numbers are honest.
I write the locked terms here because too many platforms quietly walk back their founding deals once they have leverage. The Marrow contract holds. If we make less per coach at 5 percent than we could have under a different rate, that is the cost of asking the first fifty coaches to build the platform with us. It is fair.
If you are running a practice at twenty to fifty athletes at ninety-nine and up, the math is worth running. Pull out your stack. Add it up the way a CFO would. Compare to our pricing page at your actual scale. If the structure makes sense, the door is open to a few more coaches in the cohort at marrowfitness.com/founder. If it does not, the article still saved you the audit.
Edwin Grant, Marrow Fitness