Pricing
Pricing Membership Plans That Grow Sports Clubs (Without Burning Regulars)
Three pricing patterns that grow LTV at padel and tennis clubs — and the two pricing experiments that consistently backfire.
Quick answer
Sports clubs grow membership LTV by designing three tiers, not five — entry, core, and unlimited — with court-hour anchors instead of class counts. Dynamic off-peak pricing adds 12–18% revenue without alienating regulars when it only discounts unused capacity. Skip dynamic pricing on peak hours; that's how clubs lose their best members.
Pricing is where founders most often confuse complexity with sophistication. More tiers, more time-slot premiums, more peak-versus-off-peak math — none of it consistently grows revenue. Three tiers and one off-peak lever do.
Why three tiers, not five
Every extra tier breaks the upgrade ladder. A member on "Bronze 8" doesn't know whether to jump to "Silver 12" or straight to "Silver 16", and so they sit on Bronze for another season. Clubs with three tiers — entry, core, unlimited — outperform five-tier clubs on lifetime revenue per member by about 23%, because the upgrade path is obvious and members actually take it.
The architecture that works.
- Entry — five to ten court hours per month. Aimed at recreational players who would otherwise pay per game. Price it at roughly 60% of what those hours would cost à la carte; the value lands immediately.
- Core — fifteen to twenty-five hours per month plus one club program (clinic, league). This is where most of the lifetime revenue lives, and the program is the hook that pulls regulars off the entry tier.
- Unlimited — uncapped hours, priority booking, two programs. Aimed at the 8–12% who play four or more days a week. They value priority booking far more than they value raw hours; that's what they're actually paying for.
Add-ons — guest passes, locker rental, ball-machine sessions — sit on top of the three tiers. Don't fold them into the tiers themselves, or you fragment the ladder again.
The off-peak lever
Most clubs sit on 40–55% empty courts during weekday off-peak hours, typically ten in the morning to four in the afternoon. A discount on that window is the highest-return pricing experiment available. Three rules keep it from backfiring.
- Cap the discount at 25% below the peak rate. Anything deeper teaches members to wait for the discount.
- Discount unused capacity only. Never apply the off-peak rate to a slot that's already booked, even on a slow calendar day.
- Make it instant and visible. Show the discount as a "this slot only" tag inside the booking flow. Don't email a code; the friction kills it.
Clubs running this pattern fill the off-peak window about 31% more densely than baseline. The members using the discount aren't the ones who would have paid peak — they're new occasional players who couldn't justify $35 an hour but happily book at $26.
What to skip
Two pricing experiments fail consistently.
Dynamic pricing on peak hours. It looks tempting: Friday 7pm is always packed, why not charge more? Because the regulars booking that slot every week feel ambushed. Churn from that experiment outruns the revenue gain in nine cases out of ten. If you need a peak premium, make it a flat, predictable add-on — for example, an extra $5 per hour on prime time — rather than a price that moves on the member.
Surge multipliers on tournaments. Members will pay a flat tournament entry fee. They will not stomach "1.4× the normal rate because it's tournament weekend." Price tournaments as separate events with their own number, not as a coefficient on top of regular play.
Communicating price changes
The size of the change isn't the variable that drives churn on a price update. The warning window is. Clubs that announce changes thirty or more days in advance see roughly 60% less churn than clubs that announce the same change in the month it takes effect. The message that lands looks like this.
- Open with the reason: court resurfacing, new program, additional coaches.
- State the change cleanly: old price → new price, effective date.
- Offer a one-month lock-in at the old rate for members who renew before the change.
- Skip the apology. Members read apologies as uncertainty, and that kills conversion on renewal.
A well-communicated 5% increase almost never loses revenue. The same 5%, poorly communicated, can cost a club 12% of its member base. The communication is the product, not packaging on top of it.
The boring baseline
Clubs that rework pricing without first looking at hours used per member are guessing. Pull the report. Look at the distribution. If 30% of your Core members are using fewer hours than the entry tier covers, you don't have a pricing problem — you have a retention problem dressed up as one. Fix retention first. The tier math is the easy part.
FAQ
How many membership tiers should a small club have?
Three. Entry (5–10 hours/month), core (15–25 hours/month), unlimited. Five tiers split decision fatigue without improving conversion, and create headaches in the upgrade path. If you need more granularity, layer add-ons on top of three tiers — don't multiply the tiers themselves.
Should peak-hour court time cost more than off-peak?
Yes, but the way matters. Charge a flat premium for peak hours (e.g., $5/hour extra) rather than dynamic prices that change daily. Members tolerate a known premium; they revolt against feeling like the price is moving against them.
Is dynamic pricing safe?
Only for off-peak slots that would otherwise go empty. Cap the discount at 25% below peak. Dynamic pricing on peak hours destroys trust with regulars and almost never recovers the revenue loss from churn.
How far in advance should I announce a price change?
30 days minimum, 60 days ideal. Same-month changes drive 60% more churn than well-announced ones. The math: a 5% price increase rarely loses revenue, but a 5% price increase announced badly can lose 12% of members.