Most coaching packages were not designed. They were assembled by opening three other coaches' sales pages, taking the union of everything on them, and adding one more thing so the list looked longer. That is why so many packages include a monthly video call nobody books, a recipe pack nobody opens, and a promise of same-day replies that quietly breaks at client number twenty.
Every line on that list is a commitment you make once and pay for every month, for every client, for as long as they stay. This is about deciding what goes in, what each inclusion costs you, and what to cut.
Setting the price is a separate job, and it is covered in how to price online coaching packages. This one is about what the client is buying for that number.
Start from the outcome and work backwards
Write down what the client will be able to do at the end. Not "get fitter" — something you could photograph or measure. Squat their bodyweight for reps. Get through a half marathon without walking. Lose 12 kilograms and still be eating normally. Train four times a week for six months without stopping.
Then ask what that person actually needs from you to get there, in order:
- A plan that suits their equipment, their week and their experience.
- A way to know they are doing it right.
- Something that keeps them doing it on the weeks they do not feel like it.
- Someone to change the plan when it stops working.
Almost everything a good package contains falls under one of those four. Everything that does not is either a sales-page decoration or a habit you inherited from a coach who inherited it from someone else.
This works because it produces different packages for different clients. A beginner who has never lifted needs technique feedback badly and does not need periodised programming. An intermediate who has trained for six years needs the programming and would find a form-check requirement patronising. If both of your packages contain the same seven bullet points, at least one of them was not designed for the person buying it.
If you took it out, would the client be less likely to get the outcome? If the honest answer is no, it is there to make the list longer.
Two kinds of inclusion, and only one of them limits you
Sort everything you might offer into two piles.
Things that scale. Work you do once and deliver to everyone: a program template, an exercise video library, a recipe collection, an onboarding sequence, a group chat, a monthly group call. The first client costs you the whole build. Every client after that costs you close to nothing. A hundred clients in a group chat is not a hundred times the work of one.
Things that do not scale. Work that repeats per client, every time: writing a bespoke program, reading a check-in and writing a reply, reviewing form videos, adjusting macros, being available for messages within a few hours, running a one-to-one call. Ten clients is ten times the work of one. There is no version of this that gets more efficient past a point.
That second pile is your entire capacity. Not your software, not your admin, not how organised you are — the number of non-scaling commitments you made, multiplied by the number of clients you made them to. How many clients an online coach can handle goes into where that ceiling lands.
The useful consequence is that you can make a package look and feel generous without making it heavier, as long as the generosity comes from the first pile. A cheaper tier built on a good template program, a strong resource library and a group check-in can be genuinely good. A cheaper tier built on "the same service but I reply slower" is worse coaching sold at a discount, and the client can tell.
What each inclusion really costs you
Here is the same question in numbers. These are working estimates for a coach who is reasonably practised — your own will differ, and the exercise of writing down your real ones is more valuable than the table.
| Inclusion | Your time, per client, per month | Scales? |
|---|---|---|
| Template program, adjusted at intake | 20–30 min once, then near zero | Mostly |
| Fully individual program, rewritten each block | 45–90 min per block | No |
| Written weekly check-in and reply | 15–25 min per week | No |
| Monthly check-in instead of weekly | 15–25 min per month | No |
| Form video review | 5–10 min per video | No |
| Macro targets set once | 10–15 min at intake | Mostly |
| Ongoing nutrition adjustments | 10–20 min per month | No |
| Bespoke meal plan | 60–90 min to build, more to maintain | No |
| Unlimited messaging, same-day reply | 20–60 min per month, unpredictable | No |
| Monthly one-to-one video call | 30–45 min, plus scheduling | No |
| Group call for the whole roster | 60 min total, any roster size | Yes |
| Exercise video library | Built once | Yes |
| Recipe pack or resource library | Built once | Yes |
| Community or group chat | 20–40 min per week, any roster size | Yes |
Two things fall out of this. The first is that a monthly call is one of the costliest lines on any sales page — 45 minutes including the reschedules, on top of everything else — and one of the least used. The second is that "unlimited messaging" is the only inclusion whose cost you do not control, because it is set by the client, not by you.
That does not mean cut it. Message access is one of the strongest reasons people buy coaching rather than buying a program. It means bound it: name the reply window and the days you answer, in the package, at the point of sale. Setting boundaries with online coaching clients covers how to say that without it reading as a limitation.
Session counts versus ongoing coaching
The in-person model is a block of sessions: buy ten, use ten, buy ten more. It transfers badly, and not only for the reason most people give.
The obvious problem is administrative. Sessions expire, or they do not; a client disappears for six weeks and comes back wanting the four they paid for; you end up running a ledger. The deeper problem is what it does to the client's attention. A person who bought ten sessions counts sessions. They know how many are left, they think about whether each one was worth it, and at session ten they make a fresh purchase decision at exactly the point where the results have not arrived yet.
A person on ongoing coaching is not counting anything. They are in the middle of a process, and the decision in front of them is whether to stop, which is a much harder decision to make than the decision to not re-buy.
| Session blocks | Ongoing coaching | |
|---|---|---|
| What the client tracks | Sessions remaining | Progress |
| Renewal | An active decision, every block | Continues unless cancelled |
| Your revenue | Lumpy, and dies over holidays | Predictable |
| Unused inclusions | Client feels owed them | Nobody notices |
| Scope creep | Constant, over what counts as a session | Rare |
If you sell in-person or hybrid training, some session counting is unavoidable — you were in the room, the room has a cost. Even then, the better structure is a monthly fee that includes a set number of sessions rather than a block of sessions sold on their own. The client pays for coaching that includes contact, not for contact. The cadence decision itself — weekly, monthly or paid upfront — is worked through in how to bill coaching clients.
Length and minimum commitment
Nothing you sell works in four weeks. Strength takes a training block to show up, fat loss takes longer than that, and the habits underneath both take a season. A four-week package sells a timeline you cannot deliver, and the client leaves at week four having concluded that coaching does not work.
Three months is the useful minimum. It is long enough for something to happen and short enough that a stranger will agree to it. Twelve months is a much better business and a much harder sale, and it is worth offering as an option at a discount rather than as the only door.
The structure that works for most coaches: a three-month minimum commitment, then rolling monthly. The client gets a defined start and a clear obligation. You get a floor under every signup, and you stop losing people in month two, which is where most of them go.
A minimum commitment is a term of the package, not a threat. Say it plainly on the sales page and say why: this is how long it takes for the thing you came for to happen. Coaches who bury it in the terms and coaches who apologise for it both get the same result, which is a client who feels trapped by it. If your billing runs through a platform, the commitment should be part of the package's setup rather than something you remember to enforce — Fitsly's packages and payments hold the billing cycle, the minimum commitment and an optional client-slots cap on the package itself, so what the client agreed to at checkout is what actually bills.
Build the package so renewal is the default
Most packages are built entirely around the first three months, and then the client arrives at month four in a package with nothing left in it. Everything good already happened at onboarding.
The fix is to hold something back on purpose. Not to withhold coaching — to make sure the package has a shape that keeps going:
- A next block that already exists. The client finishes a block and the following one is already there. Nothing announces "we are done" like a program that ran out.
- A progress review at a fixed point. Month three, on the calendar, with photos, numbers and what changes next. Renewal conversations are much easier when the client has just been shown what changed.
- A goal that is not the current goal. The client who hit their fat-loss target has no reason to stay unless somebody puts a strength or performance goal in front of them.
- Something that only unlocks with time. A quarterly deep review, an annual plan, access to a more advanced programming track. It does not need to be much; it needs to be ahead of them.
Roughly half of retention is decided by whether the client can see what the next three months are for. The other half is whether they felt looked after in the first three, which is mostly check-in quality — running check-ins clients actually reply to and how to retain online coaching clients both cover that side of it.
The inclusions clients never use
Everyone's list is slightly different, but these come up again and again as things coaches pay for every month and clients touch once.
The monthly video call. Booked enthusiastically at signup, rescheduled twice, quietly dropped by month three. Clients who want calls really want them; most do not, and they are paying for the option. Offer it as the thing that distinguishes a top tier rather than putting it in the middle one.
The bespoke meal plan. Hours to build, and the client eats off it for nine days before going back to their normal food. Targets plus a small set of meals they already like beats a full plan almost every time, and takes a fraction of the time to produce.
The PDF guide nobody opens. A 40-page onboarding document is not an inclusion. Open rates on these are grim, and the parts clients need are the parts that should be in the first week's messages instead.
Daily check-ins. Sold as attentiveness, experienced as homework. Weekly is enough for almost everyone, and daily contact trains a dependency that makes the client worse at doing this without you.
"Unlimited" anything without a stated window. Unlimited messaging with no reply time is a promise the client interprets as instant and you interpret as reasonable, and the gap between those two is where complaints live.
Before you cut one of these, check the data you have: who has actually booked a call in the past three months, who opened the resource, who asked for the meal plan. Then either cut it, move it to the tier that is priced for it, or replace it with something cheaper that does the same job.
Write the package down before you sell it
The last step is the one most coaches skip. Write out, in a single document: the outcome, the inclusions, what each one means in practice, the minimum commitment, the reply window, and what is not included.
That document does three jobs. It becomes the sales page. It becomes the thing you send when a client asks for something outside scope, which turns an awkward conversation into a reference. And it forces you to see the whole list at once, which is when it becomes obvious that four of the lines exist because another coach had them.
Then run the arithmetic. Add up the non-scaling minutes for one client per month, multiply by the roster you want, and see whether the number of hours fits in a week you would like to work. If it does not, the package needs to change before the price does.
