Online coaching is sold as the business with no overheads. There is no gym rent, no equipment lease and no floor to staff, so the assumption is that whatever the client pays is what you keep.
It is not. The costs are smaller than a studio's and they are also invisible, which is a worse problem — a lease you notice every month, but nine subscriptions and an insurance renewal spread across a year you do not. This is the line-by-line: what you pay for, what each line typically costs an independent coach in Australia, the three costs that never arrive as an invoice at all, and what your margin actually looks like once all of it is counted.
The line items, and what each one costs
Every independent online coach pays for roughly the same nine things. The ranges below are annual, in Australian dollars, for one coach with no staff.
| Line item | Typical AUD per year |
|---|---|
| Coaching platform | $700 – $1,600 |
| Insurance (public liability and professional indemnity) | $500 – $900 |
| Certification renewal, registration and CEUs | $300 – $700 |
| Accountant and bookkeeping software | $600 – $1,500 |
| Phone and internet (business share) | $500 – $1,000 |
| Website, domain and hosting | $100 – $500 |
| Email and scheduling tools | $0 – $600 |
| Filming and audio equipment (spread over its life) | $200 – $600 |
| Education — a course or seminar a year | $300 – $1,000 |
| Total | $3,200 – $8,400 |
Do not read the bottom row as a range you might land anywhere in. Nobody is at the bottom of every line, and nobody is at the top of every line. A coach running lean software, a cheap accountant and no paid email tool still buys insurance at the market rate. Most independent coaches land between $4,000 and $6,000 a year, which is the figure the pricing calculation is built on.
Payment processing is missing from that table on purpose. It is the one cost that moves with revenue rather than sitting flat, so it belongs in its own section further down.
Software is the widest line, and the easiest to get wrong
Coaching platforms are priced by active client count, in US dollars, so the number on the pricing page is not the number on your card. Two coaches with identical rosters can be paying triple one another depending on how add-ons are packaged.
For 50 active clients, as of September 2026:
| Platform | USD per month at 50 clients |
|---|---|
| Fitsly | $69 |
| Kahunas Growth | $69 |
| PT Distinction Master | $89.90 |
| Everfit Pro plus Autoflow add-on | $124 |
| FitBudd Pro | $139 |
| Trainerize Pro 50 with nutrition, business and payments add-ons | $215 |
The spread is not mostly about the base price. It is about what is bundled. Trainerize charges separately for advanced nutrition coaching, video coaching, the business add-on covering scheduling and payments, and Stripe payments, so a coach comparing headline prices and a coach comparing what they will actually use get different answers. Everfit's Autoflow automation is a paid add-on on Pro and included on Studio. PT Distinction includes custom branding — your logo and colours inside its app — on Pro and Master at no extra charge, as Fitsly does on every plan, where several platforms bill separately for it.
Two practical points. First, price the tier you will be on in twelve months, not today — client bands step up and the step is where the bill jumps. Second, if you are still deciding, work out which add-ons you would buy and add them before you compare anything.
Insurance, registration and continuing education
These vary more by country and governing body than any other line, so treat the figures below as typical for an independent Australian coach rather than a quote.
Insurance. You need public liability and professional indemnity, and most coaching insurers sell them together. For an online-only coach with no premises and no equipment, that generally runs a few hundred to under a thousand dollars a year — less than an in-person trainer pays, because the risk profile is different.
Check that your policy covers online delivery explicitly. Some policies written for gym-floor training exclude remote programming, which is the entire thing you do.
Registration and certification. If you hold an industry registration you pay an annual fee to keep it, and you accumulate continuing education credits to renew. The credits are the real cost: some are free, most are not, and they arrive in a rush if you leave them to the last quarter of the cycle.
Education you choose. Separate from the credits you are required to hold. One good course, seminar or mentorship a year is the difference between a coach whose service improves and one whose service is the same in five years. Budget for it deliberately, because it is the first line that gets cut in a slow month and the one you will most regret cutting.
Accounting, phone, website and the filming kit
The unglamorous half of the table, and the half coaches consistently underestimate.
Accountant and bookkeeping. A tax return for a sole trader plus a bookkeeping subscription is the base. Add a BAS if you are registered for GST. This is not a line to cut — an accountant who costs you $900 and finds you more than that has paid for themselves, and one who keeps you out of trouble has paid for themselves twice.
One thing this article will not do is tell you what is deductible, whether you should register for GST, or whether to trade as a sole trader or a company. Those answers change with your income, your state and your circumstances, and getting them from a blog rather than an accountant is how coaches end up with a surprise bill. Ask an accountant once, properly, and then stop guessing.
Phone and internet. You are already paying for both. The business share is the portion you count, and it goes up when you start running video calls and uploading exercise footage.
Website, domain and hosting. A domain is small money. A site is somewhere between a free one-page link hub and a few hundred dollars a year for something you control. Most coaches overbuild this early and underuse it later.
Filming equipment. A phone shoots perfectly acceptable exercise demos. What actually improves the footage is a tripod, a clip-on microphone and a light, and all three together cost less than one month of most coaching packages. Spread over the two or three years you will use them, this is the smallest real line in the business and the one with the best return, because exercise demonstrations and check-in videos are things you record once and reuse across every client.
Payment processing is a percentage, not a subscription
Every other line is a flat cost you pay whether you have five clients or fifty. Processing is not. It is a percentage of everything you collect, so it grows exactly in step with your revenue and never appears as a bill you can look at.
Australian card rates sit a little under 2% plus a fixed amount per transaction for a domestic card, with a materially higher rate for international ones — check your processor's current published rates, because they change and they differ by country. On $95,000 of card revenue in a year, a rate around that level works out to a little under $2,000. That is a real cost and it is bigger than your software, your insurance and your website combined.
Three things follow from that.
Your platform may add its own margin on top of the processor's rate, so check what you net on a charge rather than assuming the published processing rate is the whole story. International clients cost you roughly double to bill, which is worth knowing before you price a package for an overseas roster. And monthly billing costs more in fixed fees than the same money collected quarterly, because the 30 cents is charged per transaction — small, but it is the argument for offering a paid-in-full option that has nothing to do with cash flow.
The costs that never arrive as an invoice
Add up the table and you have your expenses. You do not have your costs, because the three expensive things about running a coaching business never generate a receipt.
Unpaid admin hours. Onboarding a client, writing the first program, answering the messages that are not really coaching questions, rebuilding a check-in form, chasing a card that declined, re-sending an invoice, moving a client's start date. None of it is billable and all of it is work. If a client takes three hours a month and you priced them at one, your real hourly rate is a third of what you think it is, and you will feel that long before you can explain it.
The fix is not to work faster. It is to notice which of those hours are structural. Chasing a failed payment is not a judgement call — it is a task that should happen without you, which is what recurring billing with automatic retries in a platform's payments and packages is for. Writing an individual program is a judgement call and should stay yours. Sort your admin into those two piles and automate one of them.
The cost of losing a client. A client who leaves does not cost you their monthly fee. They cost you their monthly fee for every month they would have stayed, plus everything you spend replacing them — the content, the discovery call, the ads if you run them, the free first month if you offer one. Replacing a client is always more expensive than keeping one, and the gap is much larger than most coaches assume because the acquisition side is spread across weeks of unpaid effort rather than landing as a single bill. If you have never worked out your churn rate, do it before you spend another dollar on getting more coaching clients — the leak is usually cheaper to fix than the funnel is to widen.
The discount that never came back. You dropped a client from $300 to $240 to close them, and they are still at $240 two years later. That is $1,440 a year, from one client, forever — larger than your software, insurance and accountant combined. Multiply it by the three or four clients you have done it for and the discount you barely remember giving is the single biggest line in your business. Discounts belong in a package structure you decided in advance, exchanged for something specific, not improvised at the end of a sales call.
What your margin looks like at 20 clients and at 60
Because almost every cost is fixed, margin is not a percentage you set. It is something that happens to you as the roster grows.
Assume $250 per client per month, and $4,800 a year in fixed costs at 20 clients, rising to $5,600 at 60 as the software tier steps up and the tooling grows a little.
| 20 clients | 60 clients | |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $60,000 | $180,000 |
| Fixed costs | $4,800 | $5,600 |
| Payment processing (just under 2% assumed) | $1,240 | $3,700 |
| Total costs | $6,040 | $9,300 |
| Left before tax | $53,960 | $170,700 |
| Costs as a share of revenue | 10% | 5% |
Tripling the roster tripled the revenue and added about $3,300 in cost, most of it processing. Everything else barely moved.
The number that matters is the marginal one. One more client at $250 a month brings in $3,000 a year and costs you about $55 in processing and nothing else at all — until you cross a client band on your software, where the whole step lands on one client. Roughly 98% of that client is margin.
Which tells you what the actual constraint is, and it is not money. Your costs will not stop you adding a client; your hours will. That is why the expensive things in this article are the ones without invoices, and why cutting $200 a year from your software bill is not a strategy while an hour a week of unpaid admin is walking out the door. It is also why the early months are hard in a specific way: the fixed costs arrive in full before the first client does, which is the real reason landing your first client feels disproportionately important. It is the one that turns a cost base into a business.
What to do with these numbers
Three things, in order.
Write down your own version of the first table using real amounts from your bank statements, not the ranges here. Most coaches find one or two subscriptions they stopped using and a renewal they had forgotten was annual.
Add processing at the rate you actually pay, on the revenue you actually collect. It will be larger than you expect.
Then take the total into your pricing. A cost base you have measured turns your price from a guess into a calculation, and it is the only way to know whether the number you are charging supports the roster you can realistically carry.
