Before building Formline, I ran the research side of another trainer software company that didn’t make it. The one thing that project gave me, that no subsequent experience has replaced, was a stack of 100-plus conversations with working personal trainers about the tools they use day to day.
I have my own notes from those calls. I still go back to them. The complaints that showed up in almost every conversation aren’t the ones that show up in G2 reviews or marketing comparison pages. They’re sharper, more specific, and more revealing about the state of the industry. Here are the five I heard most often.
1. The per-client pricing tax
Most coaching platforms price by client count. Five clients on the starter tier, 20 clients on the mid tier, 50 on the pro tier, unlimited on the top tier. Sounds reasonable on a pricing page. Feels terrible in practice.
The reason is that client counts don’t climb smoothly. A trainer goes from 18 clients to 22 because two new onboards landed the same week. That triggers a tier upgrade. The price doubles. The coach has earned an extra $400 of monthly revenue and the software cost has just gone up by $30. The software should be the cheapest problem in the room, not a recurring friction point with every bit of growth.
Every trainer I spoke to who had moved platforms at least once had done it partly because of this. “I don’t want to think about my client count when I think about my software.” That sentence, almost word for word, from four different people.
2. Program builders that don’t save time
The promise of coaching software is that the program builder saves you time. Templates, copy-forward, exercise libraries, auto-populating set and rep schemes. In theory this should be a huge productivity win. In practice, most trainers I spoke to said the program builder took them longer than doing the same thing in Google Sheets or Notes.
The reasons vary. Some builders require more clicks per exercise than typing the same thing in plain text. Some have search functions that don’t find exercises that are clearly in the library. Some make small edits (change a rep range for one client in one week) into full workflows involving multiple screens. Some don’t allow copying a block from one client to another. Some do, but the copy strips out all the notes.
The pattern I heard: trainers build the program in a spreadsheet, then transcribe it into the platform because the platform needs to be the delivery mechanism. This is a devastating indictment of the platform. The platform has one core job to do and the trainer is doing the job twice.
3. Chat that isn’t chat
Every coaching platform has messaging. Almost none of them have messaging that feels like messaging. Trainers described the in-platform chat variously as: slow, awkward, missing notifications, duplicated across devices, bad at attachments, unable to show read receipts, unable to do voice notes, unable to support group threads, unable to archive older conversations.
The universal workaround is WhatsApp. Every single trainer I asked had at least some client communication in WhatsApp. Most had all of it. The platform’s chat was used for “official” check-ins, which a lot of trainers admitted they dreaded writing because the context of the conversation was over in WhatsApp.
A coaching platform that doesn’t own the conversation doesn’t own the relationship. And the reason they don’t own the conversation is that the chat is bad. It’s not that trainers prefer WhatsApp. It’s that WhatsApp is better than the alternative.
4. Client apps the clients don’t open
Every trainer I interviewed had at least one story about a client who didn’t engage with the client app. The frequency of stories like this was the single biggest predictor of the trainer’s attitude toward the platform as a whole.
The specific complaints: the app took too long to load. The app required the client to log in every time. The app’s program view was hard to scroll through during a session. The app didn’t show previous performance clearly. The app crashed. The app asked for permissions the client didn’t want to grant. The app pushed too many notifications about features the client didn’t use. The app felt corporate, like software a gym chain would force on them.
When a client doesn’t open the app, the trainer loses the trust and credibility of the tool in one move. Every time the client trains without the app, the trainer’s workflow is compromised. This is the thing that most reliably destroyed a coach’s relationship with their platform in the conversations I had.
5. The feeling of being on a treadmill
The most abstract complaint, but the most consistent. Trainers described a feeling of being on a treadmill with their software. Every few months, a new feature appears. Every few months, a price goes up, or a feature they used to have moves to a higher tier. The trainer adapts, tells their clients about the change, updates their workflow. A few months later, another change. Another adaptation.
The underlying feeling: “This platform is run by people who don’t understand my business, and every change they make is in service of their own growth, not mine.” I heard this from both new trainers and coaches with decades of experience. It wasn’t about specific features. It was about trust.
A platform that earns trust doesn’t keep shifting the ground under the coach’s feet. It doesn’t split features across tiers to force upgrades. It doesn’t add complexity in the name of innovation. It picks a shape and holds it.
What I took away from all of this
The complaints above aren’t controversial. Most platforms know about all five. What interested me, and what shapes how we think about Formline, is that the complaints are all about the same underlying thing: trainers feel their software is working against them. Not just imperfect. Actively working against them.
That framing is what we built around. If you want the long version of what it produced, the rest of what I write here will fill that in over the coming months. The short version: flat pricing, a program builder that actually saves time, chat that feels like chat, a client app clients will open, and a platform that picks a shape and holds it.
That’s the bar. It’s taller than it looks.