A membership sells consistency: predictable revenue at a lower price per visit, with a retention problem the moment someone stops turning up. A class pack sells commitment without ongoing obligation: cash upfront, usage risk left with the studio. Drop in sells flexibility, at the highest price and the least certainty of the three.
Most studios and clinics do not deliberately choose between these models. They often inherit a pricing structure from their booking software, competitors or whatever was easiest to launch, then build the business around it. That is the wrong order. Pricing should follow the economics of the business: its capacity, demand patterns, cash-flow needs and ability to retain clients.
What each model is actually selling
Membership sells the promise of access, not attendance. The member pays whether they come once or twenty times that month, and the studio's job is to make the value of that access feel obvious enough, often enough, that they keep paying. The commercial logic depends on average utilisation, not maximum utilisation. If members consistently use more capacity than the price can support, the model becomes unprofitable; if they use less, the membership can generate attractive recurring revenue.
A class pack sells a fixed number of visits, paid for in advance, with an expiry date attached. It is a purchase, not a subscription, and the member's obligation ends the moment the pack is used or lapses. That single difference changes almost everything else about how the model behaves.
Drop in sells a single visit, at the point of need, with no forward commitment on either side. It is the most expensive way for a client to use your business and the least reliable way for you to plan around them.
Cash flow: what the money looks like before you spend it
Membership revenue is the most forecastable of the three. A known number of members at a known price gives you a number you can build a rota, a wage bill and a stock order against, weeks before the money actually arrives. The cost of that certainty is a lower price per visit and a slower response to a bad month: revenue does not fall until members actually cancel, and it does not recover until new members join and complete their first billing cycle.
A class pack front-loads cash, which can be useful for working capital, but it also creates a liability until those sessions are delivered or the relevant expiry conditions are met. A pack sold is therefore not the same thing as revenue earned. Operators need to distinguish cash collected from services delivered when assessing the true financial position of the business. Unused sessions, sometimes called breakage, are money collected but not yet earned.
Drop in tracks usage exactly, because payment and delivery happen in the same moment, but it gives you nothing to plan against. A strong week tells you nothing reliable about the next one.
Retention: what each model asks of the business, not just the client
A membership creates a monthly retention test the studio cannot avoid. Every cancellation is visible immediately, on a specific date, which is precisely why membership businesses that manage retention well tend to have a genuine, staffed process for the first few visits rather than leaving it to an app. I have written elsewhere about how much of that decision gets made in the first fortnight, and it holds just as true here: a membership model succeeds or fails on what happens long before the first renewal date, not on the renewal date itself.
A class pack softens that pressure without removing it. The signal is not a cancellation, it is a pack that is not renewed once the current one runs out, which is easy to miss because nothing forces the studio to notice on a fixed date the way a failed membership payment does. The pattern I have seen across pack-based studios is that the real churn moment, the client who quietly does not come back for a second pack, is invisible unless someone is actively tracking pack expiry against rebooking.
Drop in asks nothing of retention as a system, because there is no ongoing relationship to retain. Every visit has to earn the next one on its own terms. That is not a flaw if drop in is a small, deliberate part of the business; it becomes one if a studio is relying on drop-in traffic to carry volume it should be converting into a pack or a membership instead.
Capacity: the model decides who shows up, and when
Membership, particularly unlimited membership, can concentrate demand into the most popular time slots because the marginal cost of another visit feels like zero to the member. The operational challenge is therefore not simply how many members you have, but when they choose to use their access. Capacity planning, booking limits and utilisation by time slot become critical.
A class pack produces lumpier demand than either alternative. Clients holding a pack close to its expiry date tend to book in a cluster, trying to use what they have paid for before it lapses, a demand spike that has nothing to do with genuine appetite and everything to do with a deadline.
Drop in fills the gaps the other two leave, but it is the hardest of the three to forecast against: a drop-in client owes you nothing and can simply not show up next week, with no signal beforehand.
What operators are actually choosing
Mindbody's 2025 State of the Industry Report, based on a survey of 1,421 fitness and wellness decision-makers, found that monthly or tiered memberships were cited as the most popular pricing model for 2025 by 54% of operators, with class packs cited by 44% and unlimited memberships by 27% (Mindbody, 2025 State of the Industry Report). Those figures sum to well over 100%, which tells you operators are citing more than one model each, though the report doesn't break down exactly how many run all three at once. My own reading, not the report's finding, is that this matches what the trade-offs above would predict: membership carries the base, and a class pack or drop-in rate sits alongside it to capture demand a single model would either overprice or underprice.
The revenue-mix question behind that choice is not a new one. The Health & Fitness Association's 2025 Fitness Industry Benchmarking Report, drawn from 175 companies operating more than 17,000 facilities and published 30 September 2025, reports operators tracking dues and non-dues revenue separately as a standard indicator, alongside a median EBITDA margin of 23.6% across the sample (Health & Fitness Association, 2025 Fitness Industry Benchmarking Report). That report doesn't specify the accounting treatment for packs versus one-off visits; my own rule is to treat dues-style recurring revenue and everything else as genuinely different lines to track, because a studio that cannot say what share of its revenue sits in each category is not tracking the thing that actually determines its cash-flow risk.
Choosing deliberately instead of drifting
The question is not which model is best in isolation, but which model best fits the economics of the business. A studio with fixed capacity, limited classes and consistently high demand at peak times may be better served by class packs and controlled drop-in pricing than by unlimited membership. A studio with meaningful spare capacity during quieter periods may benefit from membership because recurring access can help fill those sessions and create more predictable revenue.
The decision should therefore start with the numbers: capacity, utilisation by time slot, average visits per client, average revenue per visit, retention and cash collected in advance. Once those are understood, the pricing model becomes an operational decision rather than a marketing preference. That is the ground we work on with founders more broadly.
FAQ
What is the difference between a membership model and a class pack model for a fitness studio? A membership charges a recurring fee for ongoing access, so revenue is predictable but retention has to be actively managed every month. A class pack charges once for a fixed number of visits with an expiry date, so cash arrives upfront but usage risk, and the real churn signal, sits with the studio rather than showing up as a clean monthly cancellation.
Can a studio run more than one pricing model at once? Yes, and Mindbody's 2025 survey data suggests most operators already do, combining a membership base with class packs and a drop-in rate rather than picking a single model for the whole business.
Is drop-in pricing ever the right primary model? Rarely, on its own. It carries the highest price per visit and gives a studio nothing to forecast against. It works well as a smaller layer alongside membership or packs, converting occasional visitors into a more committed model over time.
Does an unused class pack count as revenue? It is collected cash, but treating it as earned revenue the moment it is sold overstates how healthy the business actually is. The honest version books it as a liability until the session is used or the pack expires.
Gaia Gabiati, Consulting Lead at The Boutique Consultancy. A decade across health clubs, private members' clubs, hospitality, wellness and multi-site aesthetics clinics, from Milan through Harvey Nichols, Virgin Active, Third Space and Soho House, to running the operational side of multi-site luxury aesthetics clinics.