Quick personal context: I lift. Not CrossFit, but close enough that I have friends in the community and I've seen the inside of four different boxes over the years. All four ran Wodify. All four complained about Wodify pricing.
The specific friend who asked for this tool owns a small box in Bremerton, Washington. 68 athletes. He was paying $4/athlete/month to Wodify, which is about $272/month. Then his coach's hours got cut because margins were thin. The software was costing more than the part-time coach.
boxops is the ops stack for that box, and boxes like it.
What It Does
- Athletes + benchmarks. Each athlete: membership, foundations-complete status, benchmark scores (Fran, Murph, Cindy, Helen, Grace, Diane). Rx vs scaled tracked separately. PR history with date.
- WODs + leaderboards. Plan a week ahead. Class starts: athletes log their score. Auto-leaderboard per class + per week. Compare against your own PR and against the box.
- Foundations onboarding. New-athlete progression through basic movements (air squat, deadlift, press, clean, snatch). Coach signs off each. Athlete graduates to regular classes only when complete.
- Competitions. Register athletes for local or regional comps. Event-by-event results. Team-of-4 pairing. Historical participation.
- Memberships. Unlimited, 3x/week, 10-visit packs. Stripe auto-pay. Freeze / cancel flow. Family discount. Attendance vs plan allowance.
The WOD Leaderboard
This is the feature every CrossFit athlete actually cares about. They don't care about your membership tiering. They care whether they PR'd on Fran today and how their time compares to the rest of the box.
boxops renders the leaderboard as a phone-friendly page that athletes bookmark. Morning class logs in, sees their ranking, sees the top time for the day. Evening class comes in, sees what they're chasing. The social dynamic is half the point of a CrossFit community, and the software should lean into it.
Benchmark Tracking
The classic CrossFit benchmarks (the "Girls," the Heroes, the monostructural staples) have known test-retest semantics. Athletes re-do them every 3-6 months to track progress. boxops stores every attempt with date, time/weight/rounds, and Rx-vs-scaled. The athlete's profile page shows a timeline of their Fran times over two years. The motivational effect is real.
For coaches, the aggregate benchmark data is programming gold. "Average Fran time in the box trended up last quarter — did we get slower? Or did we get more beginner sign-ups dragging the mean?" Real answers, from the data the box already has.
Foundations
New-athlete onboarding is the single most-undercoached part of most boxes. An untrained athlete walks in, signs up, gets thrown into a regular class, and either hurts themselves on a squat clean or never comes back. Boxes that do foundations well have 3x the retention of boxes that don't.
boxops models foundations as a checklist of movements with required coach sign-off:
- Air squat.
- Front squat (bar only).
- Overhead squat.
- Deadlift (PVC, then bar).
- Press / push press / push jerk.
- Power clean.
- Power snatch.
- Kipping pull-up mechanics.
Each has to be signed off by a coach before the athlete gets cleared for regular classes. The athlete's page shows their progress; they can see they're 6/8 through foundations and what's left.
Stripe Memberships
Stripe handles the actual card-to-bank part. boxops sits on top with the business logic: unlimited vs 3x/week vs 10-pack, family discount rules, freeze semantics (pause a membership for travel/injury without canceling), cancel flow with exit-interview (why are you leaving? actual useful data).
The attendance-vs-plan-allowance check runs on check-in. If a 3x/week athlete tries to check into their 4th class of the week, the coach sees a prompt ("this is 4/3 — charge drop-in rate?"). Drop-in is an actual revenue stream in most boxes.
Pricing
- Self-host: $0. Full features. Run on a box-owner's laptop or a $5 VPS.
- Hosted Pro: $79/mo. Managed, athlete mobile leaderboard, Stripe auto-pay, competition sign-up workflow, email support.
- Multi-box: $199/mo. Multi-box accounts, affiliate-wide leaderboards, coach-payout splits, SSO.
For the box I built this for: 68 athletes at $4 each = $272/month. boxops Hosted Pro = $79/month. Net savings: $193/month, roughly 6 hours of his coach's time back.
The box owner's job is coaching, community, and keeping the lights on. Software is overhead. Overhead that costs more than the part-time coach is a problem.
Who It's For
CrossFit affiliates, functional-fitness boxes, HIIT studios with a benchmarking culture. Not for boutique bootcamp franchises (they want corporate software). Not for mega-gyms (they want MindBody). In between, boxops fits.
Related
shiftfill for coach scheduling. musicschool for the 'track student progression' parallel. familyhub for box-owners managing the business from the kitchen table.
Repo: github.com/Dangercorn-Enterprises/boxops.
What's On the Roadmap
Three asks from beta box owners that are next up:
Programming module. Block programming (4-week strength block, 8-week competition prep block). Auto-suggested WODs based on where the program is in the cycle. Coaches edit and publish weekly.
Athlete check-in via QR. Print a QR poster at the door. Athletes scan to check in for class. Auto-attendance, no front-desk required.
Open-leaderboard mode. During the CrossFit Open, every box's scores are public. boxops could publish a per-affiliate leaderboard during Open weeks, fed by the same WOD scoring already in the system.