Our Real Tech Stack: Three Ways to Run It, One Honest Number Each

Most wellness pros treat their tech stack like a junk drawer. A tool here because someone recommended it two years ago. A subscription there because a free trial turned into a habit. Nobody has actually audited the whole thing in a year, and nobody wants to.

That is not a tool problem. That is a business model problem.

So instead of another "top 10 apps for coaches" listicle, we ran our own stack through the exact calculator we built for members, at three different stages of growth, and we're publishing the receipts.

Heads up: some of the links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. We only list tools we actually use.

There Is No One Right Stack

A member in week one and a member with a team behind them should not be paying for the same tools. So the calculator has three starting points. Pick the one that matches where you actually are, not where you wish you were.

Tier 1: Bare Minimum Stack

This is the stack for a brand-new member who has not enrolled a founding member yet. Nearly everything free tier, nothing wasted.

Worth being honest about the trade-off here: Google Meet is fine for a solo call but is not built for holding a group. And Google Forms as your assessment is a stopgap, not a real diagnostic. Both are correct choices for month one. Neither is meant to be permanent.

Tier 2: Typical WPA Member

This is the stack once you are actually running a club, not just building one. This is what we run day to day.

ScoreApp is the one line here we treat as core to the method, not a discretionary upgrade. It scores and qualifies leads and segments people automatically. Budget for it once you're generating leads, don't wait for it to feel affordable.

Tier 3: Pro with Team

This is the only tier that adds team and operations tools. Turn these on once revenue is steady, not because a sales page told you it's urgent.

Notice what did not change here: Skool, Claude, Canva, Loom, Zoom, and ScoreApp are identical to the Typical stack. Adding a team does not mean rebuilding your foundation. It means adding exactly three things on top of it: a custom email and shared Drive, a dedicated website, and a real email marketing platform.

What Stays True Across All Three Tiers

• Claude drafts, it does not host. Copy and pages get pasted into your existing site builder, never published as a standalone hosted file.
• No self-hosted anything, at any tier. Custom HTML, GitHub Pages, Netlify, S3, WordPress.org. All of it trades a visual editor for a tech project, and for most wellness pros that costs more in time than it ever saves in dollars.
• Sunk cost is not a reason to switch. Already have a scheduler wired into your site and emails? Keep it. That is true whether you're on Bare Minimum or Pro with Team.
• ScoreApp is the one paid tool we treat as method-critical the moment you're generating leads, not a someday upgrade.

Want to run your own numbers instead of ours? Try the interactive Tech Stack Cost Calculator here. Toggle on what you're actually using and see your real monthly overhead, and how much of one member's fee it takes to cover it.

Pricing above is a rough estimate as of mid-2026. Tools change plans and pricing without warning, so check current pricing before you commit rather than trusting a blog post to stay current forever.