Coaching income calculator: what mix of clients gets you to your number

Your income goal divided by what one client pays you is the whole business plan, and most coaches have never actually done the division. The calculator above does it across the three ways coaches usually sell, and shows what you keep once the fees come off.

There are no competitor prices on this page. Two of the platforms we would compare against quote on a slider we could not verify today, and a number we cannot stand behind is worse than no number at all.

Why the mix matters more than the rate

Every pricing guide tells you to raise your rate. That is usually right and it is not the whole picture, because a coaching business is not one product, it is normally three.

One to one is your highest rate and your lowest ceiling. It is bought by people who want your attention, and attention does not scale. Twenty of these is a full week.

Small group is the middle. Two to six people on one plan, one session, one set of programming. The rate per person drops and the rate per hour of your time goes up, which is the trade that makes it worth running.

App only is programming, check ins and messaging with no live session. The lowest rate and by far the highest ceiling, because your delivery cost per client is measured in minutes rather than hours.

Most coaches who are stuck have all their income in the first bucket and all their spare capacity in the third, and they have never modelled what moving a few people between them would do. That is the gap this calculator exists to show.

Working backwards, properly

Pick the income you want. Not what you think is realistic, the actual number that makes this worth doing.

Now look at what closes the gap. If it is four more app only clients at 79 dollars, that is a marketing problem and a solvable one. If it is forty more, your rate is the problem and no amount of posting will fix it.

That is the whole value of doing it this way round. The gap tells you which lever to pull, and most coaches pull the marketing lever when the pricing lever was the one that was stuck.

What comes off the top

The calculator shows three deductions because these are the three that are actually predictable.

The platform fee. When a client pays you through BryksBuilt the charge goes to your own Stripe account and we take 2 percent of it. Not a cut of your business, a fee on the transaction, and it only applies to money you collect through the app. Clients you invoice elsewhere or invite by hand cost you nothing beyond the plan.

Stripe's processing fee. Theirs, not ours, and it is separate. We do not model it because it varies by country and card type, and guessing would make the take home number wrong in a direction that flatters us.

Your plan. Free to 5 clients forever. After that the calculator picks the cheapest plan that holds your roster and shows what it costs at that headcount.

Tax is deliberately absent. It depends on where you are and how you are set up, and a calculator that guessed at it would be more confidently wrong than useful.

The number nobody calculates

Hours. Twenty one app only clients is not twenty one hours, but it is not zero either, and the coaches who burn out are almost always the ones who filled the low end of their roster without ever counting the check ins.

Before you commit to a mix, take the client count it produces and multiply by the minutes you honestly spend per client per week. If that number is bigger than the time you have, the mix is wrong no matter what the income says.

Running it is the other half

Knowing you need 41 clients is the easy part. Delivering to 41 people without dropping any of them is the job, and it is a software problem long before it is a work ethic problem.

BryksBuilt gives you the roster, the programs, the check ins, the messaging, the retention trends that tell you who is slipping before they cancel, and payments through your own Stripe. Free for your first 5 clients.