Free tool / Clinic economics
Aesthetics clinics buy clients expensively — paid social, offers, Groupon-style discounting — and then lose them quietly. This ledger prices what a client is actually worth against how you got them, and prices the membership model honestly, including the case where membership loses money.
Calculating…
No membership offered. Everyone pays full price.
Annual clinic contribution
$0
This year's new-client cohort, lifetime value less acquisition cost.
Membership offered. 22% of new clients join it; the rest stay à la carte.
Annual clinic contribution
$0
Blended across joiners and non-joiners, same client volume.
A 100-client cohort, shrinking month by month for 24 months under each book of business. The gap between the curves is retained revenue the membership book keeps that the à la carte book loses.
Retained-revenue difference over 24 months, this cohort: $0
| Month | À la carte survivors | Membership survivors |
|---|
This is a simple constant-hazard curve: the same monthly churn risk every month. Real cohorts churn fastest in the first 90 days after a visit, so the first three or four columns here are optimistic compared with what a clinic usually sees.
Discounting a treatment doesn't cut its cost to deliver — the discount comes straight off margin. This is the extra visit frequency a member needs to produce before that discount has paid for itself.
0%
more visits, needed
—
Right now 0 clients a month leave without a next visit on the books. Here is what closing that gap is worth, priced against what the same dollars would buy in more acquisition — at your current cost per client, which usually rises with volume, not this tool's flat assumption.
+5 points of rebooking
$0 / yr
+10 points of rebooking
$0 / yr
Four single-variable moves, each applied on top of your current numbers, ranked by their effect on the membership book's annual contribution.
| Lever | New annual contribution | Change |
|---|
The case membership vendors don't show you
Assume membership changes nothing about how often people visit or how long they
stay — the joiners are simply the clients who were already coming at this pace, now
paying less for it. At your numbers, that's
0 members a year, each worth
$0 less in annual margin than they were worth à la
carte — a total of $0 a year in pure discount
given away for nothing. This is the failure mode. It is why membershipVisitUplift
and membershipRetentionUplift above are assumptions you must measure at
your own clinic, not numbers to trust from a slide deck.
What it costs to deliver a treatment — product, room time, injector time — does not fall because the price did. So a membership discount comes off margin dollar for dollar, not proportionally. Margin per visit = price − (first visit value × (1 − gross margin)).
Your 12-month retention rate implies a constant monthly chance of staying: monthly survival = (annual retention)1/12. Under that constant hazard, expected lifetime in months = 1 / (1 − monthly survival). This is deliberately the simplest model that is still auditable by hand — see the caveat below.
LTV = (annual gross margin per client ÷ 12) × expected lifetime months. The membership monthly fee is treated as close to 100% contribution, since it isn't tied to a service cost — that assumption is stated, not hidden.
Offering membership doesn't convert every client — only your modelled uptake percentage joins. The "membership" column is that uptake share on member economics blended with the remainder on unchanged à la carte economics, at the same total client volume as the à la carte column.
Annual clinic contribution = new clients this year × (lifetime value − acquisition cost). It is the lifetime worth of one year's new-client cohort, not a steady-state population model — a simplification chosen for legibility, and one the caveats below name explicitly.
Every one of the sources above is published by a company that sells med spa
scheduling, marketing or membership software — they have a commercial interest in
the story their numbers tell. Treat them as directional, not audited fact, and this
tool's own defaults land deliberately below the "healthy" band, because the clinics
who need a tool like this are the ones underperforming it. Replace every default
here with your own point-of-sale numbers before trusting the output.
membershipVisitUplift and membershipRetentionUplift
specifically are things you must measure at your own clinic — nobody has published
an honest, vendor-independent number for either, and vendor-published membership
statistics come from companies selling membership software.
Not the ticket price of their first visit — the lifetime margin they generate before they churn. At this tool's defaults (68% gross margin, 2.4 visits a year, 42% still active at 12 months), one à la carte client is worth roughly $507 in lifetime margin against a $90 acquisition cost, a 5.6:1 return. Move 12-month retention up 10 points and that number moves more than a much larger increase in ad spend would.
Sometimes — and only if membership changes behaviour, not just price. If the clients who join were already visiting at that frequency, a 15% discount is pure margin loss with nothing to show for it. Membership only pays for itself when it drives genuinely extra visits or keeps people active longer than they would have stayed anyway. Model both scenarios before committing pricing to it.
Start at checkout, not with a loyalty app. Clinics that rebook the next appointment before a client leaves the building convert markedly higher than clinics that wait for the client to call back, and a 12-month retention rate is largely built or lost in the first 90 days after a visit. One point of rebooking rate compounds into more annual value than a proportionally large rise in acquisition spend.
Enough that the discount it buys pays for itself in extra visits, not so much that it just subsidises clients who were coming anyway. At a typical 68% service margin, a 15% membership discount needs roughly 28% more visits a year from a member to break even on margin alone — before the monthly membership fee is even counted as separate recurring revenue on top.
Rarely, and it gets worse as retention erodes. Discount-led acquisition selects for discount-led clients — people trained to expect an offer, who churn once it ends. Model a $300 cost-per-acquisition discount campaign at typical margins in this tool and the client needs at least 33% 12-month retention just to repay that acquisition spend. Below that line, the channel is buying volume, not buying value.
It sets the cost basis for every treatment, full price or discounted. The clinic's cost to deliver the service doesn't change with the price charged, so the tool needs one anchor value to work out what a visit actually costs to deliver, and that anchor is the full, undiscounted price.
Rebooking rate is a single moment: did they leave with their next appointment on the calendar. Annual retention is the outcome twelve months later. They are related — rebooking is the strongest single predictor available at the point of service — but they are not the same number, which is why the ledger asks for both.
Because that's what actually happens when a clinic "offers membership" — most clients still don't join. Showing membership economics as if 100% of clients were members would overstate the model's own case. The blend uses your uptake percentage on member economics and the rest on unchanged à la carte economics.
Rising acquisition cost as volume scales, seasonality, provider-level capacity limits, treatment mix shifts, and the first-90-days churn spike the cohort ribbon already flags. It is a planning model, not a forecast — treat every figure as a starting point to check against your own point-of-sale data.
This ledger prices what a client is worth. Two more free tools price what you charge for the work, and what a no-show actually costs.