Every coaching platform sells the branded app as the professional move: your name on a store listing, your colours on the client's phone. The subscription is the advertised price. The rest of the bill arrives after you sign up, and the app itself is the weakest part of the deal.
The advertised price is never the whole price
Kahunas gates its branded app to the $99 a month tier, the top of its ladder and the tier its landing page leads with. Its own help centre then explains that Apple charges $99 a year for the developer account, which it says is required so the app can be published under your ownership, and Google Play asks for another $25. Year one lands around $109 a month, before the tier does anything else.
Trainerize runs the same play in add-ons: a branded app for $169 with a $99 annual developer fee, on top of monthly extras for payments and video coaching. The headline number is the part you see before you pay. The invoice is the rest of it.
Clients do not install coaching apps
The install is where the store app dies. Industry research on app store behaviour puts a store install at roughly six clicks, with 20 to 30% of people dropping out mid-install and only 26 to 35% of store page views turning into installs at all. Eighteen per cent of people refuse to download anything when a browser alternative exists, and 80% of the downloads that do happen never become active use.
Above all of that sits a ceiling no store listing fixes: 96% of phone usage goes to a person's top ten apps. A coaching app opened a few times a week is competing with WhatsApp for a home screen slot, and the slot is not free.
Installed does not mean used
Even the installs that land go quiet fast. Clients are diligent for a week or two, then the app sits in the folder, a pattern the research calls app fatigue. Notification spam makes it worse. Kahunas fires up to five push notifications in five minutes with no granular toggles, so the client's real choice is alert-bombing or disabled notifications, and the coach's actual message gets buried either way.
The end of that road is documented too: coaches move their check-ins out to Google Forms and WhatsApp because that is where the client already looks.
What clients actually open is a link
The weekly check-in already travels as a message you send. The link version of that message opens a portal wearing your name and colours, handles the check-in with text, voice or video answers, and carries the reply in the same place. Clients never install anything, you pay no Apple or Google fee, and any phone that opens links can use it. The link is the container that matches what clients actually do, which is the whole job.
Where your brand actually lives
The client's weekly rhythm happens in the messages you send and the portal they open from them. The app-store icon is the expensive way to carry your name, and it competes with WhatsApp for a slot most clients never give it. Put the name where the weekly conversation already happens, and the app-store question stops being a question. The coaching is the product, and the icon was never the brand.