What Coacha Is
Coacha is a UK club and membership-management platform aimed at sports clubs, coaching businesses and kids club software buyers alike: attendance registers, member sign-up and consent forms, online and direct-debit payments, a member portal, and native iOS and Android apps. Its headline is a genuinely free Lite tier for clubs under 50 members, which is rare in this market and the reason “is Coacha free” is one of the most-searched questions about it. Above that free tier sit Premium at £36 a month and Custom at £60 a month, both currently discounted for new customers. This page verifies every figure directly against Coacha's own pricing pages, explains exactly what the free plan leaves out, and is honest about where a broader platform like Bizzly fits better and where it does not.
How Coacha Pricing Works
Coacha runs four tiers rather than the two-part licence-plus-fee model common elsewhere in this market: a permanently free plan, two paid plans priced by feature scope rather than member count, and a bespoke top tier. Payment processing is charged separately from all four.
Lite: free for life, up to 50 members
Lite is not a time-boxed trial: it is a permanently free plan, and it is more capable than most competitors' free tiers. Unlimited classes, registers and attendance tracking are included, along with online card payments via Stripe, direct debit via GoCardless, the member portal, and native iOS and Android apps. What is actually capped: 50 members, 1 staff or coach login, 1 sign-up form, 1 customisable form, 100 emails a month, and reporting described by Coacha itself only as “limited”.
Premium and Custom: priced by scope, not headcount
Premium is £36 a month (currently £18 a month for a new customer's first three months) and removes the member and staff-account caps entirely, unlocks unlimited emails, adds a third staff role, and upgrades reporting from limited to full. Sign-up and customisable forms stay capped at one each even on Premium. Custom is £60 a month (currently £30 a month for the first three months) and is where those form and role caps finally disappear: unlimited sign-up forms, unlimited customisable forms and unlimited staff roles, plus B2B invoicing and additional branding options. Above that, Custom Plus is priced on application for larger or multi-site operations, with the new-customer discount quoted against “your agreed price” rather than a public figure.
Payment processing, charged separately
None of the four plans include payment processing in the monthly fee. Card payments through Stripe cost 2.5% + 20p per transaction, and Coacha states this figure already includes Stripe's own cut rather than sitting on top of it. Direct debit through GoCardless costs 2.2% + 24p, similarly inclusive, with VAT already factored in. Cash, BACS transfers and standing orders are free. As of September 2026, Coacha is also running a 90-day 0% promotion on payment gateway fees for qualifying new customers, stacked on top of the plan-price discount.
Plans and Fees at a Glance
| Item | Estimated Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Coacha Lite | Free | Free for life, up to 50 members and 1 staff/coach account. Includes unlimited classes, registers, online payments (Stripe), direct debit (GoCardless), a member portal, iOS and Android apps, and basic branding. Limited to 1 sign-up form, 1 customisable form, 1 staff role, 100 emails a month, and "limited" reporting. |
| Coacha Premium | £36/month (currently £18/month for the first 3 months) | Unlimited members and unlimited staff/coach accounts, unlimited emails, 3 staff roles, and full reporting. Sign-up and customisable forms stay capped at 1 each. |
| Coacha Custom | £60/month (currently £30/month for the first 3 months) | Everything in Premium plus unlimited sign-up forms, unlimited customisable forms, unlimited staff roles, B2B invoicing, and additional branding options. |
| Coacha Custom Plus | Price on application | A bespoke plan for larger or multi-site clubs. No public figure: you need a sales conversation, and the 50% new-customer discount is quoted against "your agreed price" rather than a fixed number. |
| Card processing (Stripe) | 2.5% + 20p per transaction | Coacha states this figure already includes Stripe's own fee, so it is the full cost of taking a card payment, not a mark-up on top of Stripe. No VAT applies. |
| Direct debit (GoCardless) | 2.2% + 24p per transaction | Also stated as inclusive of GoCardless's own fee. VAT is included in the quoted rate. |
| Cash, BACS and standing orders | Free | Coacha charges nothing for payments taken and reconciled outside its card and direct debit rails. |
| New-customer payment promo | 0% for 90 days | Coacha currently waives its payment gateway fees entirely for the first 90 days for qualifying new customers, on top of the 50%-off plan promo. |
| Bizzly Base | £19/month (£190/year) | 50 bookings, 1 calendar, 10 pages, full drag-and-drop website builder, attendance registers, review collection, Stripe payments. No platform fee on bookings. |
| Bizzly Standard | £29/month (£290/year) | 200 bookings, 3 calendars, WhatsApp AI assistant (500 messages), waitlists, free trial sessions, custom profile fields, SMS reminders (50), Google Business Profile integration, Google Analytics. |
| Bizzly Pro | £49/month (£490/year) | Unlimited bookings and calendars, custom domain, branded email domain, merch store, per-venue pricing, WhatsApp 2,000 messages, 200 SMS/month. 14-day free trial, no card required. |
Read the plan-fee lines as scope decisions, not volume decisions. Coacha does not charge more as your membership grows within a tier, only when you cross the 50-member Lite ceiling or need more than one form template. The processing-fee lines are the part that scales with revenue, and they are published clearly on Coacha's own pricing page, which is worth crediting: several competitors in this exact market quote their equivalent fee only per club, on request.
What the Free Lite Plan Leaves Out (and When You Outgrow It)
Coacha Lite is generous by free-tier standards, but four limits are worth planning around before you build a club's admin workflow on it.
- The 50-member ceiling. This is the hard stop. There is no partial or overage pricing. Cross 50 members and the next login prompts an upgrade to Premium at its full rate (or the current promotional rate for new customers).
- One staff or coach account. A treasurer, a second coach, or a parent helper cannot get their own login on Lite. For any club run by more than one person with admin access, this is often the limit that bites before the member cap does.
- One sign-up form and one customisable form. Fine for a single squad or class. A club running a beginners group and a competitive squad with different registration questions, medical fields or waivers needs a second form template, which Lite and Premium both cap at one: only Custom unlocks unlimited forms.
- Capped emails and limited reporting. 100 emails a month is enough for occasional broadcasts to a small membership, not for weekly newsletters to parents or regular season communications. Reporting on Lite is described by Coacha itself only as “limited”, against “full” on Premium and above.
Total Cost: A Worked Example
Take a mid-sized club: 80 members (past the Lite ceiling), two coaches needing their own logins, collecting around £2,000 a month via card payments and £1,500 a month via recurring direct debit subscriptions.
| Item | Estimated Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Plan fee | Coacha Premium £36 · Bizzly Standard £29 | A club of 80 members clears Coacha Lite's 50-member cap, so Premium is the fair comparison, at its full (non-promotional) rate. |
| Card processing on £2,000 of monthly payments | Coacha ~£50 · Bizzly ~£50 | Coacha's quoted 2.5% + 20p already includes Stripe's cut, so on ~80 transactions this lands close to what Bizzly members pay through standard Stripe processing. |
| Direct debit on the rest, say £1,500 | Coacha ~£38 · Bizzly n/a | Coacha's 2.2% + 24p GoCardless rate on recurring subscription collection. Bizzly has no native Direct Debit rail; a tenant can enable Bacs Direct Debit inside their own Stripe account, which carries its own separate Stripe pricing. |
| Website | Coacha £0 to £25 · Bizzly £0 | Coacha's member portal and apps are not a public marketing website; most clubs run a separate Wix, Squarespace or WordPress site. Bizzly's full site builder is included on every plan. |
| Monthly total | Coacha ~£124 to ~£149 · Bizzly ~£79 | The Coacha range depends on whether you also pay for a separate website. The gap here is driven by the plan fee and the payment-processing rate, not by a platform booking fee: neither vendor charges one. |
At 80 members with two coach accounts, Premium at its full £36-a-month rate is the realistic comparison (the promotional £18 rate only applies for a new customer's first three months). Processing fees on £2,000 of card payments and £1,500 of direct debit collection add roughly £88 a month, since Coacha's quoted rates already include the underlying Stripe and GoCardless costs. All in, this club is looking at roughly £124 a month on Coacha, or nearer £149 once a separate website is counted, against about £79 a month on Bizzly Standard with the site included, though Bizzly has no native direct-debit rail equivalent to GoCardless.
How it scales
Because Coacha's plan fee is flat once you are past Lite, the comparison changes mainly with payment volume, not membership count. Double the payment volumes in this example to £4,000 card and £3,000 direct debit and the processing-fee lines roughly double too, while the plan fee itself stays at £36 (or £60 if you also need unlimited forms). That is the mirror image of a platform charging a percentage on top of a modest licence: Coacha's two paid processors are genuinely usage-based, but its plan tiers are not.
Where Bizzly Fits
Bizzly is a broader service-business platform that covers sports clubs and kids activity providers rather than a club-membership specialist. Plans are £19, £29 and £49 a month, payments run through your own Stripe account, and it is a global, multi-currency product. Like Coacha, Bizzly charges no platform fee on bookings: you pay standard processing rates and nothing else.
The website is in the plan, not a member portal bolted onto one
This is the structural difference that matters most. Coacha gives clubs a member portal and mobile apps, but not a public marketing website. Most Coacha clubs run a separate Wix, Squarespace or WordPress site alongside it. Every Bizzly plan, including the £19 Base tier, includes a fully flexible drag-and-drop website editor covering the whole public site: home page, class or session pages, venue pages, policies. There are 26 components to drop in, including the booking calendar, timetable, plans, a store and cart, testimonials and the entire customer portal, so the marketing site and the booking system become one product on one bill. Styling runs from a global theme down to a raw CSS inspector on an individual element, every page carries its own SEO settings with a search-result preview, and edits are captured as version snapshots you can roll back.
Subscriptions, packs and season billing, side by side
Bizzly runs monthly plans with booking quotas, session credit packs with expiry dates, one-off term and holiday-camp packs with mid-block pro-rating for late joiners, and season subscriptions that auto-roll members into the next season with a configurable cancellation policy. Coacha's published feature set covers recurring subscriptions well but does not publish equivalent term-pack or season-roll mechanics. Booking is payment-gated on Bizzly too: if billing lapses, booking access is removed automatically.
What Bizzly genuinely does not do
Be clear-eyed about the gaps. Bizzly has no native iOS or Android apps, only a responsive web app: Coacha's apps are a real advantage for clubs whose members expect an app icon on their phone. Bizzly has no native Direct Debit rail; a tenant can enable Bacs Direct Debit inside their own Stripe account, but it is not the built-in GoCardless integration Coacha offers on every plan including Lite. There is no purpose-built safeguarding or child-protection form set: the nearest equivalent is a custom registration form you build yourself. There is no B2B invoicing tool, and sibling or family discounts run through Stripe discount codes rather than being detected automatically the way Coacha handles them. And there is no free tier: Bizzly offers a 14-day trial instead of a permanently free plan for small clubs.
Bizzly vs Coacha: Feature Comparison
| Feature | Bizzly | Coacha |
|---|---|---|
| Online booking and registration | ||
| Attendance registers | ||
| Waiting lists | Standard plan+ | |
| Free trial sessions as bookable services | Standard plan+ | Not a distinct feature |
| Member sign-up and consent forms | 1 form on Lite/Premium, unlimited on Custom+ | |
| Card payments (Stripe) | ||
| Bacs Direct Debit | Via your own Stripe account, if enabled | Native, via GoCardless |
| Subscriptions, session packs and season packs side by side | Recurring subscriptions; packs not published | |
| Season subscriptions that auto-roll, with configurable cancellation policies | ||
| Payment-gated booking quotas | Not published | |
| Fully flexible drag-and-drop website builder | ||
| Native iOS and Android member apps | ||
| WhatsApp AI assistant answering enquiries | Standard plan+ | |
| Safeguarding / child-protection fields and consent capture | Via custom registration forms | Purpose-built |
| B2B invoicing | Custom plan+ | |
| Full brand customisation (colours, logo) | ||
| Review requests, moderation and publishing to your site | ||
| Sibling and family discounts | Via Stripe discount codes | Built in |
| Store and merch sales | Pro plan | All plans |
| Platform fee charged on every booking | None from Bizzly | None from Coacha |
| Card processing fee | Stripe standard rate | 2.5% + 20p (Stripe, includes Stripe's own cut) |
| Direct debit processing fee | n/a (no native Direct Debit) | 2.2% + 24p (GoCardless, includes GoCardless's own cut) |
| Member cap on the entry tier | 50 bookings/month on Base | 50 members on Lite |
| Free tier | Lite, free forever, up to 50 members | |
| Free trial | 14 days, no card | None published; free tier instead |
When Each Is Worth the Money
Coacha earns its price if:
- You are under 50 members and want a genuinely free, full-featured plan rather than a time-limited trial
- Your members expect a branded mobile app, not just a mobile-friendly website
- You collect subscriptions by Direct Debit and want GoCardless built in rather than configured separately
- Safeguarding and consent capture for young or vulnerable members is central to how you run sign-up
- You need built-in sibling or family discounts without setting up discount codes yourself
Bizzly is the better fit if:
- You want your website and your booking system to be one product on one bill, with the whole site editable page by page
- You need memberships, credit packs and term or season blocks side by side, with mid-term pro-rating and seasons that auto-roll
- You want booking access tied automatically to payment status, so lapsed members cannot keep booking
- You want a WhatsApp AI assistant answering enquiries and taking bookings around the clock
- You are past the free-tier ceiling anyway and want a flat, published cost with no percentage-scaling processor fee to model
Verdict
Coacha's free Lite plan is one of the most genuinely usable free tiers in UK sports club software: not a crippled demo, but a real product capped mainly on headcount, staff accounts and form templates. For a club under 50 members with one coach and one type of session, it is very hard to argue against. The Premium and Custom tiers are fairly priced for what they unlock, and the payment-processing rates are published plainly rather than quoted on request, which is more transparent than much of this market.
Bizzly is the stronger fit once what you actually need is a proper public website married to booking and billing, subscription and term-pack billing running side by side, and payment-gated access enforced automatically: all for one flat fee with no percentage taken off the top. It is the wrong choice if native mobile apps, built-in Direct Debit collection, or purpose-built safeguarding forms are non-negotiable for your club. Work out whether you are really under 50 members and one coach, price the plan you will need in a year rather than today, then compare. See current plans on the Bizzly pricing page, or read our kids club subscription software guide for how the billing model works for activity providers specifically.