You Are Almost Certainly Underpriced

By OSJJ

Open Source Jiu-Jitsu

You Are Almost Certainly Underpriced

Why most academies undercharge, who you are actually competing with, and what it takes to charge what your academy is worth.

For any owner who suspects they should be charging more, looks at the academy across town for the answer, and quietly hesitates.

Most academies are underpriced by a substantial margin because they price against the wrong competitors. The academy across town is not your real competition. Your real competition is whatever your prospective member would otherwise spend the same hours and the same money on, and those activities charge significantly more than most Jiu-Jitsu academies. This piece walks through the right comparison, what you are actually selling, and the operational work that has to happen before any price increase can stick.

What is inside:

The honest starting point

Most academies are underpriced. Not by a few dollars. By a substantial margin. The reasons are predictable, the consequences are real, and the fix is more demanding than just raising your rates and hoping it works.

This article walks through three things every academy owner should understand about pricing: who you are actually competing with (it is not who you think), what you are actually selling (which is more than you usually claim), and what it takes to genuinely earn the higher prices you should be charging. That last part is the one most pricing conversations leave out, and it is the one that separates academies that successfully raise their prices from academies that try and watch members walk out the door.

The wrong comparison

Almost every academy prices itself by looking sideways. The owner glances at what the academy across town is charging. They see a number they recognize, maybe a hundred and twenty a month, maybe a hundred and fifty, and they price within twenty dollars of that. If they want to position themselves as a deal, they price under. If they think they are better, they price a little over. Either way, the reference point is the other academies in the market.

That reference point is wrong, and it is the single biggest reason our industry sits at the pricing level it does.

When two academies in the same market price relative to each other, they end up in a slow downward spiral. One drops their rate to attract a few price-sensitive prospects. The other matches it to defend their roster. The market gets trained to expect Jiu-Jitsu at a discount. Five years later, every academy in town is fighting over the same price-sensitive customer, none of them can afford the operational improvements that would actually grow the business, and every owner is working harder for less. Both academies lose. Their members do not even win, because the experience erodes over time as the budget for facility, instruction, and culture shrinks to match the pricing.

And here is what is actually true: those academies are not really each other's competition. The customer choosing between two Jiu-Jitsu academies in the same town is a small fraction of the prospective customer base. Most prospective members are not choosing between you and the academy across town. They are choosing between you and everything else they could do with the same money and the same hours of their week, and that comparison set is much bigger, much more expensive, and much more honest than what most owners price against.

The right comparison

Your real competition is the activity your prospective adult member would otherwise be doing on the same Tuesday night. Your real competition for kids is the season your prospective parent would otherwise enroll their child in. Look at what those activities actually cost, and you will see how badly the industry has mispriced itself.

For adults, the comparison set:

That is what your prospective adult member is actually comparing you to when they think about where to put their fitness and personal-development budget. They are not comparing you to the academy down the road. They are deciding between you and the OrangeTheory three blocks from their office. If you are priced at a hundred and twenty a month, you are not pricing yourself as a Jiu-Jitsu academy. You are pricing yourself as a discount fitness option, below the studio fitness brands, well below the premium gyms, and signaling to the prospect that what you offer is somehow worth less than what those brands offer. The prospect is reading the signal.

For kids, the comparison set:

Parents pay these numbers, every season, every year, because they value what their child is getting. They do not negotiate. They do not demand discounts. They sign up and they pay. Your prospective parent is comparing your kids program to those activities, not to the academy down the road. If you are charging less per month for kids Jiu-Jitsu than that parent pays for a single season of travel soccer, you are not undercutting the academy across town. You are undercutting the entire category of children's activities, and the parent absolutely notices. What they notice is that something must be wrong with what you offer if it costs less than baseball.

What you are actually selling

If we are competing with Pilates studios and travel soccer, we have to be clear about what we are offering that those things are not. Not better, the argument is not that Jiu-Jitsu is superior to other hobbies. The argument is that Jiu-Jitsu offers a different and broader bundle of value than fitness or activity alternatives can deliver, and that bundle is what justifies pricing at the same level or higher than those alternatives.

Pilates makes your body stronger. So does Jiu-Jitsu. Hot yoga teaches breathwork and mind-body awareness. So does Jiu-Jitsu. OrangeTheory provides community and accountability. So does Jiu-Jitsu. Travel soccer teaches kids discipline and teamwork. So does Jiu-Jitsu.

The difference is that Jiu-Jitsu also teaches things those alternatives cannot:

Real self-defense capability

Not as a marketing claim. As an actual outcome. A trained Jiu-Jitsu student knows what to do if a stranger grabs them, takes them to the ground, or tries to control them physically. Pilates cannot deliver that. No other studio fitness program can.

Resilience under pressure

Few experiences in modern life put a person under sustained physical and mental pressure with another human being trying to control them. Jiu-Jitsu does this every single class. The resilience that builds, in adults and especially in children, transfers to work, school, relationships, and crisis in ways no other hobby can match.

Discipline and humility as a practice

The mat is one of the few places left where ego gets handed back to a person regularly, and they have to choose how to respond. That experience is rare in modern life. The student who absorbs it changes how they show up in every other room they walk into.

Self-reliance and personal agency

Knowing you can take care of yourself, physically and otherwise, is a quiet kind of confidence that shapes how a person carries themselves through life. Children who grow up with this carry it forever. Adults who develop it later often describe it as one of the most consequential changes they have ever made.

A real community across years

Most fitness memberships are transactional. A Jiu-Jitsu academy is the rare place where the people training next to you on Tuesday are people you will know for a decade. The depth of the relationships forms differently because of what you are doing together. The physicality of the art is part of why, you are trusting your training partner, every single class, not to hurt you in positions where they easily could. They could choke you unconscious. They could break your arm. They do not, because the agreement between training partners says they will not, and they uphold it every time. People who have trained together for years have given each other that quiet gift hundreds of times. The trust that builds from it is difficult to manufacture in any other activity. And the community that grows on top of that trust is unusual in a way worth naming, the mat is one of the few civilian spaces in modern life where the things that sort people in the outside world (job title, income, education, background, even what is on a person's record) genuinely do not matter for the hour you are training together. A police officer and someone who has done time roll on the same mat, shake hands, and walk out as training partners. A surgeon trains next to a contractor. The only thing that matters is how a person shows up. That kind of equality is rare in civilian life. It is part of what the academy actually provides.

Look at that list and then look at what Pilates offers, what OrangeTheory offers, what travel soccer offers. Every one of those alternatives delivers a slice of what you deliver. None of them delivers all of it. That breadth is what you are selling, and it is what justifies pricing at the level of premium fitness or premium children's activities, not below it.

There is one more asset on that list that almost no other activity can offer, and it deserves its own line: the quiet personal security that comes from knowing you can handle yourself. The grounded confidence of a person who has trained for years carries into how they walk through the world, how they handle pressure at work, how they respond in a crisis, how they show up in their relationships. That kind of security cannot really be put a price tag on, and it is one of the most consequential things the academy ends up producing. That observation deserves more than a paragraph, and a separate article in this library will take the time to explore it properly. For the purposes of the pricing argument, it is enough to say that it belongs on the list of what your academy actually offers, and most owners are charging as if it does not.

You have to earn the price

Here is the part most pricing articles leave out, and the part that separates owners who successfully raise prices from owners who try and watch members walk out the door. You cannot charge premium prices in a facility that does not look and feel premium. The customer's perception of value is shaped by everything they see, not just the technique on the mat. An academy with cracked mats, dirty bathrooms, disorganized front-desk operations, scattered communication, and a generally tired appearance cannot charge Pilates-studio prices no matter how good the instruction is, because the customer's eye and nose are telling them a different story than your pricing is.

Most underpriced academies are also operationally underbuilt, and the two problems are related. The reason owners drift toward discount pricing is partly that they know, somewhere underneath, that their academy is not quite at the level a premium price would require. Charging less feels safer. The customer cannot complain about the bathroom if they are only paying a hundred and twenty a month. But that defensive posture is exactly what keeps the academy stuck. Lower prices fund lower facility quality, which justifies lower prices, which funds lower facility quality. The downward spiral is not only between competing academies. It is also inside a single academy that has lost faith in what it is offering.

If you want to charge what your academy is worth, the academy itself has to look and feel worth it. That means:

Cleanliness, every day

Mats wiped between classes. Bathrooms genuinely clean, not just acceptable. The smell of the academy under control. The reception area uncluttered. If a prospective member walked in cold and stayed five minutes, they should leave with the impression that this place is cared for.

Facility upkeep

Mats in good condition, not cracked or duct-taped. Walls, paint, and signage looking intentional rather than improvised. Equipment maintained. Lighting that does not feel like a warehouse. Air conditioning that actually works.

Front-desk professionalism

Someone present, attentive, and trained. Communication with members that is timely, clear, and consistent. Membership paperwork, hold requests, cancellations, all handled the same way every time. The administrative side of the academy operating as well as the technical side.

The intro experience

The first impression a prospective member gets has to match the price you are asking. A structured intro class, a clear conversation about the membership, a confident close. (See the article on the intro class for the deeper breakdown.)

Instruction that justifies it

The actual teaching has to be at a level that supports the price. Not just good technique, good pedagogy. Classes that progress logically. Coaches who can explain, not just demonstrate. A curriculum the academy can point to as the structured path the student is on.

None of this is glamorous. None of it is the part owners want to think about. But this is what separates an academy that successfully charges premium prices from one that tries and gets pushed back down. Charging more than your facility supports is asking your members to subsidize your aspirations, and they will not do it for long.

What this looked like at my own academy

A few years ago, my own academy was priced where most academies are priced, within the range of what other Jiu-Jitsu academies in the market were charging. We raised our tuition by almost fifty percent. Not in tiny increments. A real increase, made in one move.

Our close rate went up.

That is the part of the story owners need to hear. We did not lose members. We did not see a drop in trial conversions. The opposite happened. The prospects who walked in after the change took the academy more seriously than the prospects who had walked in before. The price itself was part of what told them this was a real place, doing real work, and worth their commitment. The lower number had been signaling something we had not intended to signal.

The other side of that story is the operational work that came before the price increase. We had spent the prior year sharpening the systems, the cleanliness, the front-desk operations, the intro experience, and the overall feel of the academy. The price increase was not a standalone move, it was the back half of a project that had started with the facility. By the time we raised the rate, the academy looked and felt like a place that could justify it. That is the order this has to happen in. Earn it first, then price for it. Doing it the other way around is where owners get burned.

The mechanics of how that pricing was structured, monthly versus other billing cadences, contract length, family discounts, and the rest, is its own article for another time. The point that matters here is that the increase itself produced more closes, not fewer, because the academy had earned the right to ask for it.

Three questions worth asking yourself honestly

If you read this far and want to do something useful with it, sit with these three questions. They are not designed to push you toward any particular number. They are designed to help you see your own pricing clearly.

What this article is not arguing

This piece is not arguing that every academy should charge the same price. Markets vary. A rural academy or a working-class market may genuinely not support the same pricing as an urban or upper-middle-class market, and the right price in those markets is lower than in others. The principle holds in any market: charge what your market can bear at the level of premium activity alternatives in that same market, and do not let competitive pressure with other academies push you below that floor. The number changes by market. The reasoning does not.

This piece is also not arguing that price increases are easy or risk-free. They are not. They require the operational groundwork above, careful communication with existing members, and a clear-eyed view of who in your current roster is paying for what. The mechanics of doing a price increase well is its own topic and its own article. What this piece argues is the prior question: that the price you should be charging is almost certainly higher than the one you are charging now, and that the comparison set most owners use to justify their current pricing is the wrong one.

The bottom line

Most academies are undercharging because they are looking sideways instead of forward. They are pricing against the other academies in their market instead of against the actual alternatives their prospective members are choosing between. The result is an entire industry that has trained itself to sit at fitness-commodity prices while delivering something much closer to professional services.

The fix is two-part: change what you are comparing against, and earn the price you want to charge by building the academy that justifies it. The academies that do both consistently outperform their markets. The academies that try to do only the first, raise prices without doing the work, lose members and conclude (incorrectly) that the higher price was the problem. The price was not the problem. The gap between the price and the experience was.

Charge what your academy is worth. And make sure your academy is worth what you are charging.

Open Source Jiu-Jitsu

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