Ex-Finance Bro Builds ‘Zillow for Gyms’ to Bring Pricing Transparency to NYC’s Fitness Scene

As click-to-cancel laws come for fitness, an anonymous founder has built a free site that lays out New York City’s gym prices and hidden fees up front, sparing prospective members phone calls and the hard-sell tour. Here’s what we learned

Anyone who has gone hunting for a gym in a big city knows the deal. Membership pricing is often gated behind a facility tour and doesn’t surface until the end, when the hard sell comes and there’s suddenly a “special rate” that expires that afternoon.

Then there’s the “complimentary” trap, where a free fitness assessment or class is really the opening move in a used-car-lot close.

It’s a hassle for anyone, but especially for younger fitness consumers, who balk at anything less than transparent pricing and would sooner text than call (let alone show up in person) to find out what a gym costs.

For one 29-year-old, that pain point became the thing worth fixing. 

The result is GymPricing.com, a free directory that compares what New York City’s gyms charge, including hidden fees and what equipment they offer. The site currently covers all five boroughs, from Manhattan to Staten Island.

As of now, the creator behind it would prefer you not know his name.

Not yet, at least. 

GymPricing.com’s founder, who grew up in the South, loves fitness and spent years working in finance before recently walking away, wants to keep a low profile while the site finds its footing.

What he’ll talk about freely, though, is that like a lot of people his age, he’s worn down by the New York gym search.

He’d moved to New York City twice and, each time, struggled to find a good local gym to call his third place.

“Because it’s so dense in New York City, there are so many types of gyms,” he said. “It’s really overwhelming, especially for new people coming to the city.”

It’s a shared misery, not just for transplants but for native New Yorkers, too.

A quick scroll through r/AskNYC, a Reddit forum that draws more than 500,000 visitors a week, shows how common the question has become. In a single month, New Yorkers posted nearly 20 versions of it: where to find a “meathead” gym, a women’s-only lifting space, a spot with a pool, a boxing gym, somewhere with “actual community” and, of course, the eternal Equinox-versus-Life Time debate.

“The most important thing to me was price. The second was equipment,” he recalled of his own gym hunt, which he described as tedious. 

He did eventually land a gym, by the way — one he’d rather not name. It is, ironically, a gym that doesn’t list its prices online.

The site’s founder also has a background in math and computer science, which made him well-suited to build the site himself, plus an entrepreneurial pull that wouldn’t quit until he gave it a shot. 

Now he’s devoted to it full time and said he has received a lot of positive feedback so far. The site pulls its data from the gyms’ own websites through a script he wrote that runs daily, refreshing prices across the city.

He first released GymPricing.com in January, on a New York City subreddit and has been sharing it on social media platforms, including Facebook.

AI has been useful on the back end, though you won’t see much of it up front, even if he eventually adds written content to the site.

“There’s so much AI-generated content out there,” he said. “I feel like people are getting fatigued, and they need something real. They need something that is written by an actual human.”

Transparency is one of his core pillars, a countermeasure to gyms that advertise a monthly rate, then tack on sizable annual and processing fees at checkout.

“If I see a gym doing that, I don’t really want to give them my money,” he said. “I’d rather give my money to someone who was upfront with me from the beginning, even if it’s expensive.”

Transparency Around Gym Pricing Becomes a Political Issue

The site is pushing on a door that is slowly opening. New York is set to become the first U.S. city to adopt a “click-to-cancel” rule for gym memberships, effective Oct. 1, part of a consumer-protection push from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration. A separate proposal that would force businesses to advertise all-in prices is still in public hearings.

The frustration isn’t lost on the industry’s own advocates. At ATN’s Innovation Summit in June, Mike Goscinski, chief of staff of the Health & Fitness Association (HFA), described introducing himself to lawmakers and then asking if he could help them cancel their kids’ gym memberships. HFA’s own polling backs up the sentiment, with their polling finding two-thirds of the public thinks quitting a gym is too hard.

More than 500 gyms and studios across upwards of 130 New York neighborhoods are now listed. Gym owners can claim a listing for free and fill in the details, such as intro offers, day passes, class schedules, amenities and photos and pay for featured placement at the top of neighborhood and category results. Leads from visitors who ask to be connected go straight to the gym. There’s also a pricing report that shows an operator where its all-in rate sits against every competitor within walking distance.

Verified reviews are also on the roadmap, with GymPricing.com’s founder wanting the site to serve as a “transparent source of truth.” So far, his growth has been organic, with all his traffic coming from Facebook and Reddit, he said. He hasn’t spent a dollar on advertising.

Beyond opaque pricing, another of his criticisms is the nonstop spam from some of the biggest operators. Reach out to one for pricing details, he said, and the texts and emails come daily – a gripe he said his friends also share.

He gets roughly five spam calls a day as it is, he said, and doesn’t need a gym adding to the pile.

“In my mind I’m just going to categorize them as spam, which is what you don’t want to do as a business owner,” he said. “That’s one thing they might be getting wrong. I understand you need sales tactics, but maybe there’s a better way to do it.”

For now, New York will be the proving ground for GymPricing.com.

“If it doesn’t work in New York City, it’s not going to work anywhere else,” he said. “And if it does really well, then I’d consider going to other metros — Chicago, Boston, Miami.”