Flexar vs Glofox: Which Is Better for Australian Gyms? (2026)

Flexar publishes $249 a month and a flat 1.3% + 30c on a public page. Glofox publishes no price an Australian gym can act on. There is no Australian pricing page, every tier sits behind a request form, and no transaction rate appears anywhere.

That difference is the article. You can work out what Flexar costs your gym in about two minutes with a calculator. Pricing Glofox takes a sales call, and even after the call the biggest number is the one you understand least, because the money is moved by a third-party billing platform while the rate you actually pay is set by the software company sitting in front of it. Everything about Glofox below comes from their own pages.

What each platform is

Glofox started in Dublin in 2014 and was acquired in 2022 by ABC Fitness Solutions, a US company owned by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo. It is now sold as ABC Glofox. The product is aimed at boutique studios and its strongest suit is the member-facing app.

Flexar is an Australian gym management platform built in Brisbane for boutique and multi-service gyms: CrossFit boxes, Pilates and reformer studios, yoga, group fitness, martial arts and recovery. One monthly subscription, one published transaction rate, with retention, the CRM, rostering, marketing attribution and gym-type booking screens inside the plan.

What Glofox costs, as far as anyone can tell

Glofox lists four tiers on its plans page: Essential, Boost, Elite and Enterprise. Not one of them carries a price. Each says request pricing or contact us. There is no Australian pricing page, and when a starting figure has appeared on the site it has been in US dollars rather than ours.

Three things follow from that, and each one costs you something.

You do not know the currency. Glofox is owned by a US company and has no Australian pricing page, so whatever you are quoted is likely to be set in US dollars. If it is, your real cost moves with the exchange rate every month, on a bill you cannot forecast and did not choose to take a position on.

You do not know which tier you need. Online lead capture is a Boost feature, not an Essential one, so the entry price does not include the ability to capture an enquiry from your own website. A branded member app is an optional add-on on Essential and Boost, and only included once you reach Elite. Multi-location analytics is an add-on on every tier including Elite.

You do not know the transaction rate. There is no published Glofox transaction rate for Australia. Glofox does not run its own payment rails either, it integrates with third-party billing platforms that move the money, and the rate a gym pays is set by the software company rather than by the platform underneath it. So there is nothing for you to negotiate and nothing for you to look up. You are quoted a percentage on a call, and how that percentage was arrived at is not something you are shown.

Flexar is $249 a month for Standard and $349 for Custom, in Australian dollars, on a public page. The transaction rate is 1.3% + 30c and sits on the same page. There is a 30-day free trial with no card required, no setup fee and no lock-in.

The maths you can do, and the maths you cannot

Take a 300-member gym where members pay $50 a week. That is about $780,000 a year moving through your billing.

At Flexar's 1.3%, processing costs $10,140 a year. Add the $2,988 subscription and your total software cost is $13,128, and you knew that before you spoke to anyone.

Now try the same calculation for Glofox. The subscription is a request form. The tier you need depends on features that are not priced. The branded app is an add-on with no published cost. The transaction rate is quoted on a call, if you ask, and you have no way to check what sits underneath it. There are four unknowns in a four-part sum, and the one that costs you the most is the one you can see the least.

I could not find a published Glofox transaction rate for Australia anywhere, so there is no figure of theirs to put beside Flexar's. What can be shown is how much a rate is worth. One of the larger Australian billing providers advertises 1.99% + 30c on recurring card payments. On that same $780,000, the difference between 1.3% and 1.99% is $5,382 a year, nearly twice Flexar's entire annual subscription. That is the size of the number sitting behind a request form.

Why so few platforms publish the rate

For most gym platforms the transaction fee is not a cost passed through to you, it is a revenue line. Here is the mechanism. The platform signs a deal with a billing company at a wholesale rate, because it is bringing thousands of gyms and a great deal of volume through the door. It then decides, on its own, what to charge each gym. Nothing requires that number to match what the platform itself pays, and the difference, whatever it is, is collected on every membership payment your gym takes for as long as you stay.

The gym has no part in that. You cannot ring the billing company and ask for a better rate, because your agreement is not with them, it is with the software. You are quoted a percentage and that is the end of it.

Which is why the figure stays off the website. A margin only works while nobody can see it. Publish the rate and a gym owner can hold it against the wholesale rates that are public knowledge in payments, and the gap becomes a question you have to answer. Keep it inside a private agreement and there is no gap, because there is no second number to compare it to. That margin also never arrives as an invoice you could query. It sits inside a percentage, and it grows on its own every time your gym does.

I spent ten years in the gym industry before I built Flexar and I did not know this was happening to me. That is not a figure of speech. I was paying it, I could not see it, and it was one of the reasons I started building.

Flexar bills members directly rather than reselling someone else's rate with a markup inside it, which is the reason the number can go on a public page at all. It is 1.3% + 30c, the same on every card type and on bank payments, and the same for every gym on the platform. Nobody is quoted a special number on a call. Flexar absorbs the higher cost of premium cards such as Amex so the rate does not move depending on what your members tap. That is why the figure is allowed to sit in public.

There is a second fee worth asking about. When a direct debit fails, most billing systems charge the member a dishonour fee, and the member assumes the gym set it. Flexar verifies the funds are there before taking a bank payment so fewer debits fail at all, retries automatically when one does, and never charges a dishonour fee of its own. A member's own bank may still charge them, which no software controls.

What Glofox does not have

Glofox is a capable product and its member app is the part it is known for. It has class booking, waitlists, automated messaging, CRM tools, reporting, access control and staff scheduling.

Working from its own features page, these do not appear:

Any gym-type configuration at all. No reformer bed or spot selection for a Pilates studio. No WOD library or PR tracking for a box. No belt rank or sparring tools for a martial arts academy. One booking grid, whatever kind of gym you run.

A benchmarked gym health score. Reporting shows you your own numbers. Nothing tells you whether a 5% monthly cancellation rate is normal for a studio like yours or a problem to act on this week.

Pro-rata, daily-rate billing. A member who joins on the 20th or freezes for nine days is not charged to the day.

Member self-suspension. No way for a member to pause from the app, so every freeze request lands on your front desk.

A member perks programme. No partner discounts to give members a reason to keep the app installed between sessions.

Flexar has all five. Booking screens change by gym type, so a Pilates studio gets a floor-plan bed picker, a box gets named WODs with 5RM and PR tracking, a martial arts gym gets belt rank and a sparring partner finder, and a recovery centre gets per-station capacity. FlexScore benchmarks your gym against others on the platform across retention, financial, operations, community and growth. Billing is pro-rata to the day, members pause their own membership with a visible day counter, and the perks tab carries discounts Flexar negotiates on behalf of members across many gyms.

What Flexar includes that Glofox sells as an add-on

The branded member app is the clearest example. On Glofox it is an optional add-on on Essential and Boost, and only bundled once you reach Elite, which is the second-highest of four tiers and has no published price. On Flexar the white-label iOS and Android app, published to the app stores under your own name, is inside the $349 Custom plan with no setup fee.

Automated sales engagement is the same pattern, an add-on on the lower tiers. So is multi-location analytics, which stays an add-on even on Elite.

Flexar includes the CRM and lead pipeline in the base plan. Every enquiry moves through named stages, from first contact to tour booked, trial, and then converted or lost, so you can see where people stall instead of guessing. Leads from your Meta ads land in the pipeline directly rather than in someone's inbox. Flexar measures how long each enquiry waits for a first reply, which is usually the number that decides whether a lead converts at all. Follow-up sequences then chase new enquiries and lapsed members automatically, with a cooldown so nobody gets contacted twice in the same week.

Then the retention engine: FlexScore plus AI smart alerts that watch attendance, payment and booking patterns and compare each member against their own history rather than a blanket rule. A three-times-a-week regular dropping to once gets flagged on the dashboard, so a coach can have a quiet word before they walk onto the floor.

The true cost of ownership

Compare six numbers rather than one:

1. The monthly plan, at the tier that actually has the features you need.
2. The currency it is billed in, and what that does to your costs when the exchange rate moves.
3. The transaction fee, who actually sets it, and whether any of it is a margin the platform adds on top of processing.
4. What your member is charged when a payment fails.
5. Contract length and what leaving costs.
6. The add-ons: a branded app, sales automation, analytics, and anything else outside the tier you were quoted.

With Flexar you can fill in all six from a public page. With Glofox you cannot fill in one of them without a sales call, and the largest of the six is a number you are quoted rather than shown, with no way to check how much of it is processing and how much is margin.

Migrating from Glofox to Flexar

Flexar imports members, memberships, attendance history and payment details where the previous provider allows it, so members are not asked to re-enter their card. Standard is self-serve with guides and support, and Custom includes done-for-you migration.

Ask three questions before you move anywhere: can I export all member and payment data, how long is the notice period, and what does cancellation cost. Get them in writing. A platform confident you will stay makes leaving easy.

Which should an Australian gym choose?

Flexar, and pricing transparency is the reason before you reach a single feature. You can price Flexar for your gym from a public page in two minutes. You cannot price Glofox at all without a call, in a currency that is probably not yours, at a tier you cannot identify, on a processing rate you are quoted rather than shown and cannot check.

Then there is what the plan contains. Gym-type booking screens, a benchmarked gym health score, pro-rata billing, member self-suspension, a perks programme, the CRM and lead pipeline, and the white-label app on Custom. Several of those do not exist on Glofox, and the ones that do are add-ons or upper tiers.

If you are weighing the category more broadly, the best gym management software in Australia covers the whole market, and Flexar vs Mindbody runs the same exercise against the largest platform in it.

Key takeaways

• Glofox publishes no price an Australian gym can act on. There is no Australian pricing page and all four tiers sit behind a request form. Flexar publishes $249 and $349 in Australian dollars.
• Glofox does not bill members itself, it sits on top of third-party billing platforms. The platform agrees a wholesale rate with them and then sets what the gym pays, so the number you are quoted can carry a margin you cannot see. Glofox publishes no rate. Flexar bills members directly on a flat 1.3% + 30c, the same on every card type, on bank payments, and for every gym on the platform.
• On a 300-member gym paying $50 a week, the difference between 1.3% and the 1.99% an Australian biller advertises is $5,382 a year, nearly twice Flexar's annual subscription.
• Glofox has no gym-type booking screens, no benchmarked gym health score, no pro-rata billing, no member self-suspension and no perks programme. Flexar has all five.
• The branded member app is an add-on on Glofox until the Elite tier. Flexar includes the white-label app in its $349 Custom plan with no setup fee.

Key facts

• Glofox publishes no Australian price. All four tiers, Essential, Boost, Elite and Enterprise, require a pricing request, and there is no Australian pricing page.
• Glofox integrates with third-party billing platforms rather than processing payments itself. The gym does not negotiate with those platforms, it pays the rate the software company sets.
• Online lead capture is a Boost-tier feature on Glofox, so the entry plan cannot capture an enquiry from your own website.
• The Glofox branded member app is an optional add-on on Essential and Boost, and included only from Elite. Multi-location analytics remains an add-on on every tier.
• Flexar publishes $249 a month for Standard and $349 for Custom in Australian dollars, plus a flat 1.3% + 30c transaction rate, with a 30-day free trial and no lock-in.

See how Flexar compares

Both figures that decide your cost are on one page: the Flexar pricing page carries the plan fee and the transaction rate together, and the comparison page runs the feature set side by side. If you run a reformer studio or a box, the Pilates and CrossFit pages show how the booking screens change. The 30-day trial needs no card.

Joel Miranda is the founder of Flexar, gym management software built for Australian gyms, studios and CrossFit boxes.

Published 9 August 2026.