What Works for One Coaching Business Won't Work for Yours
MemberPress covers how to package coaching subscriptions. MemberPress.ai shows what that answer looks like when it knows your specific business
Responding to MemberPress's original post.
MemberPress just published a solid walkthrough on selling business coaching subscriptions: 1:1, group, hybrid, and how to package coaching into recurring revenue without burning out. It’s genuinely useful if you’re starting from zero or trying to get your bearings.
But that kind of advice is built for everyone, which means it’s optimized for no one.
Let’s run the same question through two different lenses.
The question: I run a solo business coaching practice. I want to move to a subscription model. What should I charge, and how should I structure it?
What a solid general answer looks like:
Price around your time. Group programs can run $200–$500/month, 1:1 coaching commands a premium, and a tiered structure makes sense: community access at the base, group calls in the middle, private sessions at the top. Anchor your offer around a transformation, not hours. Monthly billing reduces friction, quarterly billing reduces churn.
All of that is reasonable. None of it is wrong. And none of it will tell you what to actually do.
What an answer that knows your business looks like:
Your cancellation data shows members leave after month four, not because they’re unhappy, but because they’ve hit the outcome they signed up for and there’s no visible next step. That’s not a pricing problem. That’s a milestone problem. Before you restructure tiers, you need a reason for members to stay past the win.
Most of your active members are on your monthly plan, even though your annual plan costs less than twelve monthly payments. That gap is worth a look, because the plan you lead with is a retention decision, not just a pricing one.
Your group program churns at several times the rate of your 1:1 clients. The math on scaling group looks good until you account for that gap. The question isn’t whether to offer group: it’s whether your group offer is doing the job you think it is.
None of that comes from general principles about how coaching subscriptions work. It comes from thirteen years of patterns across membership businesses, applied to the numbers that are actually yours.
The MemberPress post gives you a framework for what a coaching subscription can look like. That’s a real starting point. But the decisions that will actually move your retention, your revenue, and your sanity depend on what’s already happening in your business, not on what works on average.
General advice tells you what’s possible. Knowing your own numbers tells you what’s true.
Worth knowing
Is a tiered coaching subscription always the right structure?
Not necessarily. Tiers work well when your members have meaningfully different needs and budgets. If your audience is homogenous, tiers mostly create confusion and split your attention. The right structure depends on who's actually buying from you.
Why do coaching subscriptions tend to see cancellations around month three or four?
Often because members hit the outcome they signed up for and don't see a clear next step. It's less about price or satisfaction and more about whether your program gives people a reason to stay after the initial win.
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