Ask what a personal trainer costs and the answers arrive without shape: a per-session rate here, a monthly subscription there, a free app claiming to do the same job. Those numbers are not comparable, because they are prices for different products.
Here is the honest version of the range, and then the more useful question underneath it. What are the duties you pay a coach to perform, and which of them can be bought another way?
How much does a personal trainer cost?
One-to-one strength coaching runs roughly €150 to €200 a month. That is the going rate for a coach who writes your program, adjusts it as you go, and answers when you ask why. The larger online coaching platforms sit at the top of that band and above it, and their hand-picked coach tiers run considerably higher.
In-person training is priced differently again, sold by the session rather than by the month, so it does not sit on the same axis at all. Part of what you buy there is an hour of someone’s physical attention, and that turns out to be the duty with no software equivalent.
At the other end sit two cheap tiers that are cheap for a reason worth stating plainly rather than sneering at: they are not selling coaching. A logbook stores what you did and is mostly free. A fixed-template app hands you one published method and runs it, from free to about €16 a month. Both are honest products, and if you are content to author your own programming, or to run a published method as written, they are the right purchase.
Between those and the human coach sit the software coaching apps, roughly €10 to €49 a month, which claim some version of the coach’s job. Whether any given one delivers it is the whole argument, and it is settled duty by duty rather than in the abstract.
What the money actually buys
A good coach performs four duties. Naming them is the point, because once they are named you can ask which ones you are getting at any given price.
Programs. Someone decides what you do, in what order, at what weight, for how many reps. Not a template chosen off a shelf, but a program built around your goal, your equipment, and the lifts you care about. This is the duty most buyers think they are paying for, and it is the one software commoditised first.
Adjusts. This is the duty that actually costs money. Two or three weeks in, the program you are running is not the program you started: you slept badly, you travelled, you missed a Thursday, you hit an extra two reps on a set that was meant to be hard. A coach absorbs all of that and rewrites what happens next.
A published template does adjust, and pretending otherwise is the fastest way to lose anyone who has run one. Most of the well-known ones move the working weight off your demonstrated reps, ladder the rep scheme before they reset, and specify what to do after a bad block. What a template cannot do is re-plan the week around what actually happened. It does not know you skipped Thursday, does not reorder Saturday because Wednesday ran long, and does not carry any of it into next month. It adjusts one axis at a time, and only if you execute the rules yourself.
Explains. A good coach tells you why today’s weight is today’s weight. This sounds like a courtesy and is not. A program you do not understand is a program you quietly stop trusting, and a program you stop trusting is one you abandon in week five.
Remembers. Your coach knows your training history, your bad shoulder, the lift you want to hit before your birthday, and that squats after a night shift never go well. That memory is why the tenth month of coaching is worth more than the first.
What stays with the human
Three things, and they are not small.
The room. A coach watching you lift sees the rep that rounded and the knee that caved, and then does the harder half: picks the cue that fixes it for you, and swaps to a box squat or a pin press until the pattern holds. That half feeds back into the programming, which means “programs” is only fully software-shaped for the part that runs on numbers you already have. No software does this, Sterka included, and any product implying otherwise is selling something it does not have.
Triage. When the shoulder complains, a coach decides whether this is a training problem to manage or a referral to make. Software can work around what you have told it to avoid. The judgment call is a person’s, and it should stay one.
The appointment. Someone who notices on Thursday that you did not show is worth more than any notification. The program you keep running beats the better program you skip, and paying a human is an effective way to buy that. Software is cheaper at it and never forgets to ask, but it is not the same mechanism and it would be dishonest to price it as though it were.
Which duties software can honestly take over
Programming is arithmetic performed against your history and your goal, and arithmetic is what software is for. Current guidance is settled enough to encode on how much, how heavy, how hard, and how often, and honest about where it is not: the numbers it lands on can be applied consistently, and a deterministic engine will not have an off day or forget what it prescribed you in March.
Adjusting is the same story with more inputs. Sterka’s engine reads how your last session went, what each muscle has absorbed recently, and what you have told it about your equipment and your constraints, then authors the next session from that. Miss your reps twice in a row on a lift and it steps the working weight down rather than asking you to grind the same number a third time. That is a coaching decision, and it is one arithmetic can make.
Explaining is where software has an advantage over the human it is imitating, because the engine never gets tired of the question. Sterka puts the why on record every session: which muscles drove the selection, why the weight moved, what your last session changed. You can also run the arithmetic yourself with the wave planner and check it.
Remembering is the cheapest of the four for software and the most expensive for a human, since it is the duty that requires paying attention across months. History, constraints, and the reasoning behind past decisions persist by default.
So: the duties that run on numbers scale, and the ones that need a person stay with the person. What Sterka does is most of the job a coach charges €150 to €200 a month to do, minus the eyes on your technique, minus the call about when to send you to someone else, and minus the standing appointment. Those carve-outs are not modesty. They are the line between what can be bought for the price of a couple of protein tubs and what needs another person.
So what should you pay?
If you can afford a good coach and you want eyes on your technique, hire one. That is the honest recommendation, and the €150 to €200 is worth it. Anyone selling you software should be able to say that without flinching. Note also that packages at that price often include nutrition and regular check-ins, which is a wider service than any strength-training app is offering you.
Most people who train seriously are not in that position, and the real choice is narrower: pay nothing and author your own programming, pay a little for a published method and run it as written, or pay a little for a program that re-plans around the week you had and shows its reasoning. The first is a genuine option if you enjoy the work of programming. The second is a genuine option if the method suits you and your life is regular enough to run it as printed.
The third exists because most training lives are not that regular, and because re-planning around the week you had is the one thing a published method cannot do for you, however well it is written.