Last January, Rachel walked into my office holding a tablet like she was about to sell me a timeshare. She wasn’t — she was selling me on an idea. Rachel runs small-group training at Cutting Edge Fitness Clear Lake, and she wanted two Tonal home gym units in our empty studio.
Rachel already owned a Tonal at home, so she wasn’t guessing. “I’ve never been more consistent with strength training,” she said. That carried a lot of weight with me, because Rachel isn’t a fad-chaser. She’s the trainer members request by name.
Still, I’ve been the person tracking equipment invoices here for six years. My job is asking the unglamorous question: what does this cost over five years, not just in the first month?
The side-by-side that changed my mind
Sarah, our general manager, had set an equipment budget of $10,000 and made it clear the studio had to be ready by March. So I didn’t want to dismiss the Tonal pitch — I wanted to test it the way I test everything: with a cost comparison.
For the two Tonal units Rachel wanted, the prices listed on Tonal’s website as of January 2025 looked roughly like this:
- Two Tonal units: about $3,995 each, or $7,990
- Delivery and installation: around $495 per unit, or $990
- All-Access membership: roughly $600 per unit per year, or $1,200 for the first year
That put year one at about $10,200 before tax. It already blew past our equipment budget. And the subscription doesn’t stop after year one, so over a five-year window, we were looking at nearly $15,000 in total cost.
The other option was a commercial setup: one power rack, an Olympic barbell, a set of bumper plates, a bench, and a 5–50 lb dumbbell set with a rack. The quote from our equipment supplier came to $8,400, delivered and installed. No subscription. No monthly fee if someone forgot to train for a few weeks.
When I compared those numbers side by side, I finally understood why the details matter more than the sticker price. Tonal isn’t an absurd purchase. It’s a well-designed consumer product. But it would serve two members at a time in a studio that needed to handle classes. The commercial setup could handle 15 people in the same amount of floor space.
So the “cutting-edge” option wasn’t actually cutting-edge for our business. It was a beautiful bottleneck.
The audio trap, and the Jabra speaker that fixed it
Meanwhile, a much smaller purchase was teaching me the same lesson in the front office.
We needed a speaker for the consultation room. You know the scenario — trainers run intro calls, play a little music, maybe present a program on a laptop. I figured any basic Bluetooth speaker would do, so I bought a $39 one.
It was fine for about three months. Then the volume started distorting during a call with a corporate client. Exactly the wrong moment for it to sound like a drive-thru intercom.
I replaced it with a $49 speaker. That one lasted a bit longer, but it gained an annoying buzz. By month nine, I had spent roughly as much on budget speakers as the decent option would have cost in the first place. Rookie mistake.
That’s when I bought a Jabra speaker — the Speak 710, specifically. It cost more than I wanted to spend, around $250 at the time. But it has now survived two years of daily calls, background music, and the occasional dropped charger. I’m not an audio engineer, so I can’t explain the acoustics. What I can tell you from a procurement perspective is that replacing cheap things is usually more expensive than buying one durable thing.
I’ve started calling that the “Jabra rule” whenever someone on the team suggests a budget version of something we use daily.
The Google Slides moment
Here’s the part that almost unraveled the whole project.
In mid-February, I had to present the final proposal to Sarah and the ownership group. I had built a clean slide deck in Google Slides. I had the numbers, the comparison chart, and the delivery timeline. I even had a backup plan for the studio sound.
The only problem was me. I wanted to keep my talking points visible on my screen while the slides showed on the projector, and I had absolutely no memory of how to show speaker notes on Google Slides.
I pressed F5. Nothing. I double-clicked the slides. I opened a third tab and started typing the question into Google. Then I saw Maya from the front desk walk by and waved her in.
“It’s the little arrow next to the Present button,” she said. “Choose Presenter view.”
That was it. Twenty seconds. I had almost shown up to the most important presentation of the quarter without knowing the feature that would keep me from rambling.
The meeting went fine. Sarah approved the order. But that moment stayed with me, because it was another version of the same trap: I had focused so hard on the equipment purchase that I ignored my own preparation costs. The fanciest gear in the world doesn’t help if you can’t present the plan clearly.
The order and the login black hole
One more small detail, because every project has one.
After we placed the order, I needed to track the delivery date. The supplier’s portal said to use my Cutting Edge login — the same one from our previous order. Except the account was connected to an old email address from a former employee.
I reset the password, got locked out, reset it again, and eventually found a support ticket from two years ago with the right account details. It cost me an afternoon. It also reminded me that account access information belongs on a handover checklist, not in someone’s head.
Minor stuff. But minor stuff adds up.
What I’d tell another facility manager
The studio opened in early March. Rachel was skeptical for the first week, mainly because she thought we were passing on something that would make the space feel futuristic.
Then she ran her first class of 12, and everyone had room to work.
Here’s what I would do again:
- Ask what the equipment costs over five years, including subscriptions and installation.
- Resist the temptation to put consumer gear into a commercial space, even if it’s the brand everyone talks about.
- Budget for the unsexy parts: speakers, account access, staff training, and old-fashioned preparation.
This approach worked for our facility because our studio is a relatively small multi-purpose room. If you’re building a 5,000-square-foot performance center, the math might point somewhere different. Your mileage may vary.
I’m not a personal trainer or a technology strategist. I just buy things, track invoices, and ask annoying questions. This project worked because Rachel wanted something excellent, and I wanted something that still made sense in year three. It turned out we were both right — we just needed the right math to see it.
I still think Tonal is a great option for someone’s home. Our decision wasn’t about the product. It was about what a commercial facility actually needs.
Call it a lesson in total cost of ownership. Call it the Jabra rule. Call it the twenty seconds I spent Googling speaker notes. The label doesn’t matter. The principle does: know what the whole thing costs, not just what it costs on day one.
