How to price your classes: a complete guide for LATAM studios

Before you think about what to charge, you need to know what it costs you to run that class. Price is a business decision, not a feeling — and the business starts with cost. Four cost blocks almost always set your price floor.

First, rent and space overhead: rent or maintenance, electricity, water, internet, cleaning. These costs exist whether or not the class runs, so they get split across every class in the month — the more classes you run in the same room, the less each one carries.

Second, coach payroll: if you pay per class taught, that cost is direct and easy to assign. If you pay a fixed salary or an attendance-based commission, you need to prorate that cost across the number of classes the coach teaches per month.

Third, capacity: how many spots the class has and what percentage you actually fill on average — not the theoretical maximum. A 20-spot class that realistically fills 12 has a different real cost per spot than one you'd assume planning on all 20.

Fourth, smaller variable costs: supplies (water, towels, disposable mats), equipment depreciation, and payment or booking platform fees. Individually small, but they typically add up to 5%–12% of total cost across most studios.

The number you need before anything else is your cost per class-spot: what each occupied seat costs you, on average, across every session you run. The formula is simple:

Cost per class-spot = fixed monthly costs of the room and coach ÷ (number of classes per month × average occupied capacity per class).

That number is your floor — the minimum price you can sell at without losing money on that class. It isn't your final price: it's the starting point you apply margin on top of.

The margin you apply depends on your category and your city, so treat this as a range to sanity-check with your own data rather than a fixed number. Boutique fitness studios in urban Mexico commonly run gross margins of 60%–75% over cost per class-spot on drop-in pricing, and tighter margins — 35%–50% — on large packages or unlimited memberships, where volume and retention compensate for the lower per-session margin.

A common mistake is applying the same margin to every time slot. High-demand classes (6–8am on weekdays, Saturday mornings) sustain a higher margin because willingness to pay is higher; low-demand slots (mid-morning weekdays) generally perform better if you lower the margin to fill seats instead of holding a price against empty rooms.

The sales model changes both the perceived price and your cash flow. No model is abstractly superior — the question is which behavior you want to incentivize.

Drop-in (single class) carries the highest per-unit price because there's no repeat-purchase commitment. It's the right tool for tourists, occasional visitors, and testing demand in a new time slot, but it's the least predictable revenue model.

Packages (4, 8, 12 classes with a 30–60 day validity window) lower the per-class price 15%–30% versus drop-in in exchange for upfront payment and more frequent visits. This is the middle ground most boutique studios in LATAM use as their primary offer.

Monthly unlimited maximizes cash predictability and is the strongest psychological anchor ("I can come every day"), but it's only profitable if your real capacity supports it — if your peak slots are already near full with package holders, selling unlimited without a weekly booking cap can saturate exactly those slots and hurt everyone's experience.

Intro offers (free first class, a discounted first week) aren't a permanent pricing model — they're an acquisition tool. Set a clear expiration date and a mandatory next step (buy a package) so the offer doesn't quietly become a permanent discount disguised as a promotion.

Price isn't processed in isolation — it's compared. Across Mexico and the rest of LATAM, a prospective client anchors your price against three references: the traditional neighborhood gym (cheap, no boutique classes), other boutique studios nearby, and the per-class cost that comes from dividing your package total by its number of sessions.

That's why showing the per-class price inside a package ("$X MXN per session with the 8-class package") tends to convert better than showing only the total: it makes the savings versus drop-in and versus the traditional gym explicit, something the traditional gym rarely communicates in comparable terms.

On price endings, MXN amounts ending in 9 or 900 ($1,899, $2,499) still read as "deliberately calculated" in the urban boutique segment, while round numbers ($2,000, $2,500) signal simplicity — they work better on unlimited plans and memberships where the brand is already known and doesn't need to justify the number.

Avoid changing prices in ways visibly frequent to the client. An adjustment every 6–12 months, announced in advance with the option to lock the current price by buying before the change, creates far less friction than silent adjustments a client discovers at checkout.

These are the mistakes we see repeated most in studios that are just starting out or growing fast without revisiting their pricing structure:

Before announcing a new price or revisiting your current one, run through this list:

If you already use Ollynk, your occupancy reports by time slot are the most reliable input for this review — they show real occupancy by class and time band instead of the gut feeling that "that class always fills up," which tends to be biased by the good days.