How to Price a Class Pack Against Your Membership (2026): Drop-Ins, 10-Packs, Expiry

Price a class pack from your membership, not from the studio next door. Work out what a regular actually pays per visit on your unlimited membership — the monthly price divided by eight to ten visits — and put the pack's per-class rate above that number and below your drop-in. A 10-pack should land at roughly 80–90% of the drop-in rate per class, a 20-pack at 70–80%, and the membership should win for anyone who comes twice a week. That one rule keeps packs from cannibalising memberships, which is the mistake I see most.

I'll work it through on one yoga studio at Dubai prices, then in dollars, and cover the two decisions the pricing guides skip: how long a pack should stay valid, and what happens to the credit when someone cancels. If you run a gym floor in India with a few classes on the side, the rupee version of this arithmetic is in our group classes guide.

What do classes sell for in 2026?

Get the real range down before you price anything, because "what feels right" is usually what the studio you trained at charged five years ago. These are published 2026 figures, and every pack figure is the whole pack — I've put the per-class rate next to it because that's the number you'll actually be comparing.

Two things in that table are worth more than the numbers. Zen Yoga's 10-pack works out at AED 93 a class against a AED 115 drop-in — an 80% ratio, which is exactly where a 10-pack should sit. And Zoga's monthly membership at AED 1,890 only beats its own 12-pack once a member comes seventeen times in the month. That isn't a mistake if the membership is deliberately positioned as a premium, all-access product. It's a mistake if they expected regulars to pick it, because at twice a week the pack is cheaper.

How do you price a class pack against a membership?

You're pricing three things at once, and they only make sense relative to each other: the drop-in, the pack, and the membership. The drop-in is the ceiling. The membership sets the floor, but not at its sticker price — at what a regular pays per visit. So start there.

Take a studio with an unlimited membership at AED 950 a month. Pull the real attendance out of your booking data, not the number you hope for. Most studios find their members come eight to ten times a month; the ones who come sixteen are rare and they're the ones you love. At eight visits, that membership costs AED 119 a class. At ten, AED 95.

Now the drop-in. Say AED 130 — above the market's AED 115–125 because a drop-in is priced to be the thing nobody chooses twice. And the packs: a 10-pack at AED 1,050 (AED 105 a class, 81% of drop-in) and a 20-pack at AED 1,800 (AED 90 a class, 69%).

Read the last column. At ten visits a month the membership beats the 10-pack, and at twelve it beats the 20-pack. That's the shape you want: the pack is the better deal for the occasional visitor, the membership is the better deal for the regular, and the crossover sits at about ten visits. If your membership only wins above fifteen visits, your regulars will buy packs, your recurring revenue will sag, and you'll have taught your best customers not to commit.

The other check is the 20-pack. Its per-class rate should never fall below the membership at twelve visits, or you've built a discount for exactly the people who would have paid full price. AED 90 against AED 79 passes. AED 75 wouldn't.

One rule of thumb to carry: 10-pack per class at 80–90% of drop-in, 20-pack at 70–80%, membership price no more than eight times the 10-pack's per-class rate. Get those three and the ladder holds.

How long should a class pack stay valid?

Long enough that a normal person can use it, short enough that it isn't a permanent liability. Industry practice runs 30 days on a 5-pack, 60 on a 10-pack and 90 on a 20-pack according to vibefam's 2026 guide; Dubai studios more often go three to six months, and some US chains set six months on every pack. There's no right answer, but there is a right method: expected frequency × credits × 1.5. A 10-pack bought by someone who comes once a week needs ten weeks; give them fifteen, call it 100 days, round to the quarter.

The temptation is to set it short and pocket the breakage — credits that expire unused are pure margin. Resist it. An expired pack with four classes on it is the single most reliable way to lose a customer, and they tell people. A pack expiring in seven days with credits left should trigger a message to the member, not a quiet write-off. If your software can't send that on its own, put it in the calendar by hand.

The related decision is rollover: when someone buys a new pack, do the leftover credits on the old one carry over? Most studios say no, and that's fine as a default — say it on the price list. The studios that say yes tend to be the ones selling bigger packs, because it removes the one objection to a 20-pack.

What happens to the credit when a member cancels?

This is the question nobody prices for and everybody argues about at the desk. Write it down before you sell the first pack. There are four cases and a working policy handles each one:

• Member cancels before the cutoff — usually eight to twelve hours before the class — the credit goes back on the pack. This is the default almost everywhere and the one your members will assume.
• Member cancels after the cutoff, or doesn't show — the credit is used. Full-price studios like [solidcore] apply the same rule to unlimited members as a late-cancel fee; on a pack the credit is the fee. Hold this line, or your capacity numbers mean nothing.
• The desk cancels for a member after the cutoff — your call. Some studios return it as a goodwill gesture, some treat it exactly like a no-show. Pick one and make it a setting, not a judgement call per member.
• You cancel the class — every credit goes back, no exceptions, and the member hears about it before they've driven over.

The cutoff itself is a per-class decision, not a studio-wide one. A 6 am reformer class with eight beds needs twelve hours; an evening mat class with thirty spots can live with two. Set it where the waitlist still has time to fill the spot, because that's the whole point of a cutoff.

Is a drop-in just a one-class pack?

Yes, and treating it that way simplifies everything. A drop-in is a pack with one credit and a short validity — 30 days is plenty. Same booking rules, same cancellation rules, same place in the app. The only thing that changes is the price, and the price is deliberately the highest per-class number on the list.

Keep drop-ins small as a share of revenue. vibefam's benchmark for a healthy single-location studio is 60–70% recurring memberships, 20–30% packs, and 5–10% drop-ins and marketplace bookings combined. If drop-ins creep past ten percent, you've either priced them too low or you're not converting them — a visitor on their third drop-in has paid AED 390 for three classes, when a 5-pack at AED 510 would have given them five. The desk should be saying so on the second visit.

The marketplace question — ClassPass and the like — is the same logic with worse economics. Their per-booking payout to the studio is well under a drop-in, so the guides that cover it all say the same thing: keep it under five percent of revenue and use it as a lead source, not a channel.

Packs sell entry, memberships sell retention

The mistake behind most broken price lists is treating packs and memberships as competing products. They aren't. A pack is how someone who won't commit gets in the door and builds a habit; a membership is what you move them to once the habit exists. vibefam puts the retention gap at around 34% in favour of members on auto-pay over pack buyers, and whatever the exact number is at your studio, the direction won't surprise you.

So the desk conversation is the product. When a 10-pack holder is on their last credit, that's not a renewal — it's the moment to say "you've done nine classes in seven weeks, the membership would've cost you less." That line needs two things to land: the balance visible to the member in the app so it isn't news, and the desk knowing the day it happens. We built class packs around exactly that — the credit comes off at booking, goes back on an early cancel per the rules you set, the member sees "3 left" every time they book, and the desk gets a running-low list instead of a surprise. But the pricing logic in this post works on a spreadsheet too, as long as someone is actually watching the balances.

The member's side of that — what they see, and how a pack sits beside the membership in the app — is covered in the member app page if you want the screenshots.

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