A TrueCoach alternative that starts free and never caps your roster.

The cap, in actual dollars.

Per-active-client pricing is cheap when you're small and gets pointed when you're not. Read from truecoach.co/pricing and checked 21 July 2026, TrueCoach's monthly plans run $29.98/mo for up to 5 clients (Starter), $69.98/mo for up to 20 (Standard), and $164.98/mo for up to 50 (Pro). Annual billing is lower: $26.34, $57.99 and $136.99/mo respectively. The friction isn't only the price — it's the step. Sign your 21st client and you don't pay a little more; you go from $69.98 to $164.98/mo, about $95 for that one client.

What happens past 50 we can't tell you honestly. Those three plans are the only ones TrueCoach publishes; underneath them the page says “Not seeing your perfect plan? Contact us for more pricing options,” while its own FAQ addresses coaches with more than 250 clients and points them to custom pricing. TrueCoach's page doesn't reconcile those two, so we won't invent a tier or a price for the 51-to-250 range — ask them directly.

VitalCoach flips the slope flat. Once you're on Pro at $79/mo, client number 6 and client number 60 cost the same in software: nothing extra, no tier jump, no ceiling. A full roster is exactly where flat pricing wins hardest, because that's where per-client tiers are most expensive. If you're still filling your first few seats, Solo at $19/mo for 5 clients (with AI generators included) is the honest comparison — and Free covers your very first client with no card at all, which TrueCoach doesn't offer.

Your processor vs one engine.

Here's the nuance most comparison posts skip — including, until today, this one. An earlier version of this page asserted that TrueCoach charges a flat 5% on client billing. That was wrong. We re-checked truecoach.co/pricing on 21 July 2026: all three plans list automated payments as a free, included feature, and the page's own FAQ says there are no extra fees beyond the plan price. So on the raw transaction cost TrueCoach is cheaper than us — you pay Stripe's published US online card rate (2.9% + 30¢) and, as far as its pricing page states, nothing to TrueCoach on top. We're not going to spin that. What you're buying with the difference is the model: with your own connected Stripe account you stay the merchant and keep the invoicing, failed-card retries, chargebacks and month-end reconciliation.

VitalCoach takes a flat 5% on client billing, and it's not a surcharge — it's the whole billing engine. We're the merchant of record: we collect from your client, retry the failed card in month four, absorb the chargeback risk and PCI compliance, and pay you 95% on the 1st of each month — bank deposit, PayPal, Wise, or paper check over $50. And on Pro there's a kicker: once 5% of your monthly client billings reaches $79, your Pro subscription is billed separately from your plan subscription, which it does not reduce. So instead of "subscription plus 5%," the 5% can erase the subscription entirely. Run your own roster through the pricing-guide math and compare the all-in numbers, not the sticker prices. Prefer your own processor? The 5% engine is opt-in.

Where TrueCoach is still the right call.

We'd rather you stay put than switch and churn back in a month, so here's the honest other side. TrueCoach is the established incumbent for one-on-one online coaching, with a mature, polished native client app your members may already know, a large built-in exercise demo-video library, and years of feature depth across messaging, habit tracking, and metrics. If your clients live in that app and love it, if you lean on its video library, or if you depend on a specific integration, that maturity is real and switching costs you some of it. VitalCoach is the newer, leaner option; it wins on a free tier, flat pricing, and bundled billing, not on breadth of integrations. Switch for the reason that actually hurts, not for the novelty.

How to move without breaking your roster.

There's no one-click import — you re-create each client and re-attach their programming, and clients sign in to the new platform. So don't migrate everyone on a random Tuesday. The clean playbook:

• Start free. Open a VitalCoach account and rebuild one program template you reuse often. Cost: $0 — no trial clock.
• Run one client end-to-end for two weeks. Log sessions, send a check-in, export a PDF — make sure the daily workflow fits your hands.
• Migrate at a billing boundary. Move the rest of the roster at the start of a billing cycle so client billing dates stay clean and nobody gets double-charged.
• Switch on billing when you pass 5 clients. Turn on the 5% engine once you're on Pro if you want us to handle billing end to end.

Two weeks of overlap is cheap insurance. The goal isn't to leave TrueCoach fast — it's to leave it once, cleanly, and not look back.