How to price class packs and memberships (so they actually sell)

Most studios set their prices once, early, by glancing at what the studio down the road charges, and then never touch them again. It works well enough to open the doors. It also quietly leaves money on the table and, worse, confuses the people trying to give you that money.

Pricing is not a dark art. It is a short ladder, built in a sensible order, that rewards people for committing more. This is how to build that ladder for a small class-based studio, with worked numbers you can adapt to your own prices.

Start with the single-class price

Your single class — the drop-in — is the anchor. Every other price is read against it, so set it first and set it honestly.

The drop-in should be the most expensive way to attend, per class. It is the price for maximum flexibility and zero commitment, and it should feel like a small premium for that freedom. If your drop-in is £18, that number is now the reference point for everything below. Packs and memberships exist to beat it, in exchange for commitment.

Resist the urge to make the drop-in cheap to look welcoming. A cheap drop-in undercuts every pack and membership you are about to build, because there is no longer much reward for committing.

Price packs as a discount for commitment

A class pack is the client pre-paying for several visits at once. They are handing you cash up front and accepting a little less flexibility, so they should get a lower price per class in return. That discount is the whole reason a pack exists.

A clean ladder, anchored to an £18 drop-in:

Option	Price	Per class	Saving vs drop-in
Single class	£18	£18	—
5-class pack	£81	£16.20	10%
10-class pack	£153	£15.30	15%

Two packs is usually enough. The 5-pack is the low-commitment step up from a drop-in; the 10-pack rewards the client who is starting to build a habit. A third, larger pack rarely adds sales and mostly adds a decision.

Give packs a gentle expiry — three months on a 5-pack, six on a 10-pack is fair and common — and show it at the moment of purchase. Expiry nudges people to actually come in, and it stops you carrying a growing pile of unredeemed credits that are really a debt you owe in classes.

Price memberships as the regular's reward

A membership is for the client who has stopped counting visits. The job of the membership price is to make a genuine regular better off than they would be buying packs, so the loyal client never feels punished for showing up.

Find the crossover. With the 10-pack above at £15.30 a class, a £120 monthly unlimited membership pays for itself at about eight classes a month (120 ÷ 15.30 ≈ 7.8). So:

• A member attending eight or more times a month is ahead — they are getting their most-loyal-client reward.
• A member attending four to seven times is paying a small premium for the convenience of never thinking about credits, which most are happy to do.
• A member attending once or twice will eventually notice and may drop off — worth a friendly nudge to a pack before they churn quietly.

Set the membership a little below the crossover, not far above it. If unlimited only beats packs at twelve classes a month, almost nobody will reach it and the membership will not sell. The membership should feel like the obvious choice for anyone coming twice a week or more.

One or two membership tiers is plenty: an unlimited monthly, and perhaps a "4 classes a month" tier for the steady-but-not-frequent client. More tiers than that and you are back to confusing people.

Keep the list short

Here is the counter-intuitive part. Every option you add lowers what the average person pays, because a longer list makes the decision harder, and a stalled decision usually lands on the cheapest thing — or on nothing at all.

A short, confident price list converts better:

• One drop-in.
• Two packs (a 5 and a 10).
• One or two memberships.

That is the whole menu. Five or six clear options that ladder neatly from "just visiting" to "this is my studio" will out-earn a dozen overlapping ones every time.

Build a path, not a price list

The point of the ladder is movement. A healthy studio quietly walks people up it: a first-timer takes an intro offer, enjoys it and buys a 5-pack, builds a habit and moves to a 10-pack, and the steady ones graduate to a membership without you ever hard-selling them. Each step should be the obvious next one, priced so that committing a little more always feels like the better deal.

When you change a price, change it forward — new prices apply to new purchases, existing members keep what they signed up for until they choose to change. Grandfathering your early supporters is both kind and good business; they are the ones who told their friends.

What your booking software should make easy

Pricing only works if the software runs it for you without fuss. A few things worth checking:

• Packs auto-deduct and memberships auto-renew. A credit should come off when the client books, and a membership should renew on its own — no manual ticking off at the desk.
• Members can use packs too. Real clients are not tidy. Someone on a membership might still buy a workshop pack; the system should cope.
• Pricing is yours to set and change in plain sight, without a sales call to "unlock a tier," and the payments land in your own account so you keep what you earn rather than handing over a cut of every sale.
• You can see the crossover in your numbers — how many members are above and below their break-even — so you can nudge the quiet ones before they leave.

In Junocal, packs, memberships and a drop-in price all sit on one plan from £15 a month, you set and change every price yourself, and clients pay you directly through your own Stripe account. The pricing is public, and there is more on why I built it this way if you want the longer story. If you are still deciding between packs and memberships at all, here is how to set both up.

The short version

Set your drop-in price first; it is the anchor. Add two packs that get cheaper per class as the client commits more. Add a membership priced just below the point where a regular would beat your best pack — roughly six to eight classes a month. Keep the whole list to five or six clear options, give packs a gentle expiry, and change prices forward so your early clients keep their deal. Then let the ladder do the work of walking people from visitor to regular.