Recess vs Exercise.com
Exercise.com publishes no prices at all. Their pricing page carries one line, "Get a quote today", and a button to book a demo. That is the whole pricing page. So the only honest comparison is between a number you can see and a number you cannot.
Every Exercise.com claim on this page was read on Exercise.com's own site, and is footnoted below.
Recess has no monthly platform fee, no add-ons and no setup cost. It earns roughly 5% paid by the member at checkout, with card and bank processing covered by Recess out of that fee.
Recess is not built for chains past about a hundred locations. If that is you, neither of these is the answer, and we would say so on the first call.
Who each one suits, plainly. Exercise.com builds a custom platform and quotes you for it, which suits a business that wants something shaped to order and has the budget to find out what that costs. Recess is one product at one price, published, with nothing to negotiate.
Where the two actually differ.
Exercise.com publishes no plan names, no prices, no card processing rates, no setup fees and no contract length. Everything below that concerns money comes from the absence of a figure, not from a figure we disagree with.
They build to order. If you want a platform shaped around how your business already works, rather than fitting your business to someone else's software, that is a real offer and very few people in this category make it. Their workout programming is the strongest part of what they do. For a gym where programming and performance tracking are the product, that focus is worth something.
What you cannot do is compare it on price, because there is no price to compare. Go in knowing you will spend a call finding out, and ask for the card rate in the same conversation.
You can see what it costs before you talk to anybody. No plan fee at all, and a service fee of about 5% paid by the member at checkout. That is the whole pricing model and it is on our pricing page in plain numbers.
And every feature, free, permanently. Nothing is quoted, nothing is negotiated and nothing sits behind a tier. A school that has not taken its first payment gets the same software as one with six hundred students.
What you actually pay.
Exercise.com publishes no prices. Their pricing page at exercise.com/platform/pricing contains a sentence about having a package for every fitness business and a button that says Get a Quote. There are no plan names, no figures and no rate card.
This is not a criticism of the product. Plenty of good software is sold this way, and building to order genuinely does make a standard price list hard to publish. But it does mean you cannot compare them to anything until you have had a sales conversation.
What to ask for, in writing, on that call. The monthly or annual fee, the card processing rate, any setup or onboarding fee, the contract length, and what a branded app costs. Those five answers make the comparison possible. Without them nobody can do it, including us.
Recess is one thing at one price. No plan to choose, no seat count, no setup fee, nothing behind a paywall and nothing to negotiate. Recess earns a service fee of about 5% paid by the member at checkout, and card and bank processing comes out of that fee rather than being charged on top.
Recess is one thing at one price. No plan to choose, no seat count, no setup fee, nothing behind a paywall inside the product. Recess earns a service fee of approximately 5% paid by the member at checkout, with card and bank processing covered by Recess out of that fee.
That is not automatically cheaper for you, and we would rather say so than have you find out. If you would rather absorb the cost yourself and keep the checkout total clean, a monthly subscription is a different trade. Do the arithmetic on your own volume before believing anyone, including us.
What Recess costs you.
There is nothing to put on the other side of this calculator, because Exercise.com publishes no price. What it does show is the Recess side: no plan fee, no processing billed to you, at any volume.
Your members pay a service fee of about 5% at checkout on Recess, which is how the software is free for you. That is a real trade rather than a free lunch, and the point of this is that you can see both sides of it.
What owners ask when they are weighing this up.
Actually free, permanently, with every feature included. There is no plan to choose and nothing behind a higher tier. Recess earns a service fee of approximately 5% paid by the member at checkout, and card and bank processing is covered out of that rather than billed to you on top.
Because they publish none. Every other comparison on this site quotes the other company's own figures and footnotes where they came from. Exercise.com states no plan price, no processing rate and no contract term anywhere public, so inventing numbers for them would be worse than leaving the column empty.
No. There is one version of Recess and it includes messaging, sequences, campaigns, lead capture, reporting, staff, payroll, multiple locations and your own branded client app published under your own listing.
We do not know, and neither does anyone who has not had a quote. That is the honest answer. Ask them directly for the five figures listed above and you will be able to compare it properly, to us or to anyone else.
Recess, and it is not a close call. Every feature is included from day one and there is no plan fee to carry while you fill your first classes. A quoted custom platform is a reasonable thing to buy once you know what your business needs, not on day one.
No. Independent single-location gyms are exactly who Recess is built for, and there is no monthly fee to justify at that size. The size we are wrong for is the other end, past about a hundred locations.
Every Exercise.com claim on this page was read on Exercise.com's own site, not from review sites or summaries, on 3 October 2026.
Sources: the Exercise.com home page and the pricing page at exercise.com/platform/pricing, both of which direct visitors to book a demo or request a quote rather than listing prices.
Where this page says a figure is not published, that means it was not stated anywhere on Exercise.com's public site on the date above. Plan prices, card processing rates, setup fees, contract length and the cost of a branded app all fall into that group.