Recess vs PushPress
PushPress is CrossFit native, built by people who run gyms, and it has a genuinely free plan of its own. So this page is not an argument about who is free. It is about what each free plan charges a card, what sits above it, and what happens when your timetable is a twelve week term rather than a daily class.
Every PushPress claim on this page was read on PushPress's own pricing page, product pages, help center and terms of service, 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, and card and bank processing is covered out of that rather than billed to you.
Recess is not built for chains past about a hundred locations. If that is where you are heading, PushPress or something larger is the better answer, and we would tell you so on the first call.
PushPress has a free plan too, and it is a product rather than a trial: unlimited members, unlimited staff, unlimited admins, unlimited leads. That makes this a narrower comparison than most, and a more useful one. The difference shows up in the card rate on that free plan, in which features sit above it, and in what a dated program costs to run.
Line by line, on their published numbers.
PushPress publishes more than most of this category: plan prices, card rates, ACH rates and a complete feature grid, all on one page. That makes their column easy to check, and everything in it is footnoted to the page it came from.
Train is not a line on a feature list, it is a whole product. Daily programming, score logging, benchmark history, lifetime personal records flagged automatically, habit tracking, challenges and leaderboards, plus programming subscriptions from established affiliate brands delivered straight into the app your members already open. Around it sits an owners' community that has been running for years, and a company that has been building for CrossFit boxes since long before it was a category.
Recess runs programming and challenges and does not go that deep. If your members' relationship with your gym runs through the whiteboard and the board of PRs, that is a real reason to stay, and nothing further down this page outweighs it.
Your studio's own app on the App Store, included. Every Recess studio gets a client app carrying its own name, logo and colors, published under its own listing on the App Store and Google Play, from the first day. On PushPress a member app is on every plan, but an app listed under your gym's name is the Branded Member App: an add-on their pricing page prices at $81 to $97 a month, on top of an Apple Developer account at $99 a year that their own FAQ says is on you.
Every feature on, with no rate for staying on the free one. PushPress Free is a real plan, and their own comparison grid is the clearest place to see where it stops: the AI assistant, Member Intel, rank tracking, invite-only events, pro-rated billing, plan purchase limits, Flex Fees, Committed Club, and every external integration including Zapier, Mailchimp, Slack and Google Calendar. It also runs a card at 4.99% plus 30 cents where Pro runs 2.89% plus 30 cents, so the free plan is paid for at the till. On Recess there is one version, every studio has all of it, and the fee does not move.
What it adds up to once everything is switched on.
Two of the three Core plans carry a price: $159 a month for Pro and $229 a month for Max. Their feature grid puts the same ticks against Pro and Max on every row, so the published difference between them is the card rate: 2.89% plus 30 cents against 2.75% plus 30 cents. Free is $0 a month with everything in the grid that is not marked off.
Do the plan fee and the card fee stack? Yes, and they say so on the same page. Their pricing FAQ lists Core, Grow at $329 a month, Train from $79 a month, the branded app at $81 to $97 a month and a Full Stack bundle at about $559 a month, and the processing rates sit in the plan cards above it. Texting inside Grow is billed on top at roughly 2 cents a segment, and the branded app needs an Apple Developer account at $99 a year that their FAQ puts on the gym.
Their own guidance on when to leave the free plan is honest and the arithmetic holds: they say most gyms move to Pro at around $10,000 a month of revenue, and that above $20,000 a month the lower rate recovers the subscription several times over. Below that, their free plan really is the cheaper of the two, and we would rather point at their sentence than pretend otherwise.
Recess is one thing at one price. No plan to pick, 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, and card and bank processing is covered out of that.
That is a trade, not a free lunch, and we would rather you saw it now than later. Roughly 5% appears on your member's checkout total where a subscription would have appeared on yours. If you would rather absorb the cost and keep the member's total clean, a monthly plan is a different bargain. Do the arithmetic on your own volume before you believe anyone, us included.
Run it against your own takings.
This picks whichever PushPress plan is cheaper at your volume and shows that one, so their side is always their best case. It counts Core only. Grow, Train, the branded app, texting and the Apple account are all extra, so the real figure is higher than the one below.
Your members pay a service fee of about 5% at checkout on Recess, which is how the software is free for the studio. That is a real trade rather than a saving out of nowhere, and the point of this panel is that you can see both halves of it.
Seven things owners ask before they move.
Where the money comes from. PushPress Free costs the studio nothing a month and 4.99% plus 30 cents on every card sale, and a set of features sits above it on Pro at $159 a month, which also drops the card rate to 2.89%. Recess costs the studio nothing a month and nothing per sale, with every feature on, and earns roughly 5% paid by the member at checkout instead. One puts the cost on your side of the counter and one puts it on theirs.
You would lose depth, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Recess has programming and challenges. PushPress Train is a dedicated workout product with score logging, benchmark history, automatic personal records, habit tracking and affiliate programming feeds, and it goes further than we do for a strength and conditioning gym where that data is the daily experience. If that is your gym, weigh it heavily.
They publish it, so you can check us. Core Pro is $159 a month and Core Max is $229. Grow is $329 a month, Train starts at $79 a month, and the branded app is $81 to $97 a month. Their pricing FAQ quotes a Full Stack bundle of Core Pro, Grow, Train and the branded app at about $559 a month. Card processing, texting inside Grow at about 2 cents a segment, and the $99 a year Apple Developer account all sit on top of that.
No. There is one version of Recess and it includes two-way messaging, sequences, campaigns, lead capture, referral rewards, reporting, staff records, payroll, multiple locations and your own branded client app published under your own listing. There is no higher plan to reach for and nothing switched off at your size.
It is the part of this comparison that changes most. On PushPress a dated course is assembled from two pieces that their own help center says are not connected: a recurring class you trim by hand after the last session, and a separate non-recurring plan you sell against it. On Recess a term is one object. It has a start, an end, a roster, a price, make-up credits and a waitlist, a parent enrolls a child into it, and each sibling sits in the family with their own record and their own progress.
Yes, genuinely. Their Rank Tracking builds custom belts and stripes, advances students on time at rank, attendance or a manual evaluation, promotes individually or in bulk with an audit log, and shows rank in the member app. Two things to check against your own plan: their pricing grid shows it off on the free tier, and it is a separate app you install into Core. On Recess belts, stripes, skills, levels, milestones and certificates are on for every studio.
If you are a CrossFit box and the whiteboard is the point, start on PushPress and take Train with it. For anyone else, start on Recess: every feature is on from your first payment, the branded app is in the App Store under your name rather than $81 a month later, and there is no plan to outgrow. A new studio should not be choosing which tools it can afford to switch on.
Every PushPress claim on this page was read on PushPress's own website, help center and terms, not on review sites or summaries, and all of it was checked on 31 August 2026. The pricing page was also opened in a browser to confirm a visitor sees the same figures the markup carries. Prices and features change, so verify anything here that matters to your decision.
Sources: (1) the PushPress pricing page, for the three Core plans, the card and bank rates, the full feature grid and the pricing FAQ that lists Grow, Train, the branded app and the Full Stack bundle; (2) the PushPress Core product page, for the plans restated with rates and for migration; (3) the Branded Member App page, for the setup fee, the contract, the 30 day notice, the build time and the Apple Developer account; (4) the PushPress Train page; (5) the PushPress Grow page, for the $329 price and what Grow contains; (6) their help center article on sub-accounts for families, partners and children; (7) their help center article on creating classes with a start and end date, which is where the sentence about the schedule and the plan comes from; (8) their help center article on Rank Tracking; (9) their help center article on Grow SMS costs and limits; (10) their terms of service, effective 31 July 2025; (11) their help center article index; and (12) their martial arts page, for family plans and sibling discounts.
Two things on this page are ours rather than theirs, and are marked as such wherever they appear. The $100 sale figures are arithmetic on their published rates, not a worked example they publish. The calculator needs a count of transactions, so it divides your monthly revenue by an average sale size you set yourself; PushPress publishes no figure for that and neither do we.
One claim here is about their documentation rather than their software. Their help center publishes an index of every article it holds, and that index carries no entry for a season, a semester, a term or a make-up credit; the nearest article is the one on classes with a start and end date. That says what they document, not what their software can be made to do, so ask them.