"We sell protein and creatine. First-time buyers grab a tub, use it, and we rarely see them again. We keep being told subscriptions are the answer. So what do we actually charge for one?"
It is the right question. A subscription price is not a marketing decision; it is a cost stack decision that marketing has to live with. Here is the direct answer, on the illustrative model below: you price the monthly delivery at £39.99 including VAT against a £44.99 one-off tub. Every delivery carries £17.30 of delivery-level cost, leaves £16.03 of contribution, and pays back a £60 acquisition cost in just under four deliveries. The customer sees £1.33 a serving. You keep about 53p of it, and that pair of numbers is where sports nutrition subscriptions are won and lost.
Every figure below is an illustrative example with synthetic numbers, not any client's books and not supplier quotes. Your costs will differ, so steal the method and swap in your numbers.
Here's the Short Version
- Many sports nutrition customers compare prices by the serving, so price it by the serving: £39.99 for a 30-serving tub is £1.33 a serving, and this model keeps about 53p of contribution per serving
- Every delivery has to carry its whole cost stack: formula, tub, packaging, postage, payment fees and software total £17.30 here
- Price around 10% below your one-off price (£39.99 against £44.99); the discount costs £4.17 net of VAT on every delivery
- A £60 acquisition cost pays back in 3.7 deliveries at £16.03 of contribution, so keep contribution at £15 or more per delivery to keep payback within four
- Qualifying sports drinks and drink preparations are standard rated, so one sixth of a VAT-inclusive price is output VAT once you are registered; if you are approaching the threshold, model output and recoverable input VAT now
- If your creator programme pays on renewals too, a 10% rate takes a fifth of your contribution every month
- The government expects the new subscription contract regime to commence in spring 2027: reminders, straightforward exits and extra cooling-off rights. Build those flows now while they are cheap
Price the Serving, Not the Tub
Sports nutrition has a language of its own. Many customers compare prices by the serving, because the serving is what does the work: the protein hit after training, the creatine at breakfast, the electrolytes on a long ride. Show the serving price alongside the tub price.
One 30-serving tub per monthly delivery suits a customer taking a serving a day. The numbers fall out like this.
| Per serving, one monthly delivery | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Price the customer pays | £1.33 | £39.99 divided across 30 servings |
| Net revenue after VAT | £1.11 | £33.33 of net revenue across 30 servings |
| Delivery-level cost | 58p | The £17.30 cost stack, spread across 30 servings |
| Contribution per serving | 53p | The money that pays for the customer you bought |
Fifty-three pence a serving is the whole business in one figure. If your costs creep and that number drops below 50p, no pricing table saves you. Fifty pence a serving across a daily user is about £15 a month of contribution, the floor this model needs. If a competitor's price implies 40p of contribution per serving on your assumptions, their cost stack, acquisition economics or retention may differ from yours. Check the comparison before you follow.
Usage sets your cadence. A 30-serving tub lasts about 30 days for a once-a-day customer and 15 days for a twice-a-day customer. Get the cadence wrong and tubs can stack up, giving customers a reason to pause or cancel. When deliveries land faster than the customer consumes, the next charge feels like waste. Ship to usage, not to your cash flow. If your average customer takes two servings a day, ship every 15 days or build a bigger tub, and say why in the customer portal.
The Cost Stack of One Delivery
Cost the delivery honestly, because the price can only be as good as the stack underneath it. Here is the illustrative stack for one 30-serving delivery. Replace the lines with your real quotes. All costs in this VAT-registered model are stated net of any recoverable input VAT.
| Cost line per delivery | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Formula, tub, scoop and seal | £11.00 | A 30-serving sports blend, bought at volume |
| Outer packaging and insert | £0.80 | Carton, label and a training plan card |
| Fulfilment and tracked postage | £4.20 | Pick, pack and a tracked delivery; sports tubs are heavy |
| Payment processing | £0.80 | Assumed 1.5% plus 20p on £39.99, a standard UK card rate |
| Subscription software and transaction fees | £0.50 | Allocated app fees per delivery |
| Delivery-level cost stack | £17.30 | Variable costs plus allocated app fees per delivery |
Read the stack the way a founder should. The product itself is just under two thirds of the cost of getting it to the customer. Postage, payment fees and software add £5.50 between them, nearly a third of the stack. These costs are easy to miss when you compare your price with a competitor's tub. Fulfilment and payment fees are selling costs, not product costs, so never bury them in inventory value and let your gross margin flatter you.
Two lines deserve a second look. Payment processing is modelled at 1.5% plus 20p a transaction, Stripe's published rate for standard UK cards. Stripe lists higher rates for premium UK cards, EEA cards and other international cards, and it adds 2% where currency conversion is required. Subscription apps can combine fixed monthly fees with usage or transaction charges. Recharge's Starter plan is $99 a month, and Skio's Scale plan is $499 a month on annual billing, or $599 month to month, plus 1% and 20 cents for orders involving a subscription. Spread your contract across your deliveries and put the real number in this line. If your parcels are heavy or your courier rates rise, the postage line moves first, and it moves your price.
What the Subscription Discount Really Costs
A subscription needs a visible reason to exist next to your one-off tub: the customer has to save something for committing. But on this standard-rated sale, every £1 including VAT that you shave off the price removes about 83p of net revenue and contribution if variable costs do not change, and it comes out on every delivery. The discount is a material recurring decision in the model.
Start from the one-off price, say your tub sells for £44.99. Price the subscription at £39.99 and the discount is £5.00, about 11%, enough to feel real without gutting the maths. That £5.00 including VAT is £4.17 of net revenue, all of it contribution, given away on every delivery for as long as the customer stays. An additional 20% first-delivery discount on the £39.99 subscription price would be £8.00 including VAT, and about £6.67 of that is net revenue and contribution you would otherwise have kept, so first-delivery contribution drops from £16.03 to about £9.36.
Here is the whole model on one ladder: the same stack at three prices.
| Subscription price, VAT included | Ex VAT | Contribution per delivery | Payback of a £60 acquisition cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| £34.99 | £29.16 | £11.86 | 5.1 deliveries |
| £39.99 | £33.33 | £16.03 | 3.7 deliveries |
| £44.99 | £37.49 | £20.19 | 3.0 deliveries |
The £34.99 row looks friendly and starves the model. Payback stretches to 5.1 deliveries and contribution drops below the £15 floor this model needs. You would be renting subscribers rather than acquiring them. The £44.99 row pays back fastest, but it is the same price as the one-off tub, so there is no reason to subscribe unless you add something extra. The £39.99 row is the working middle: a genuine saving for the customer, contribution above £16, payback within four deliveries.
Use the £34.99 row as a test point, not a default. Run the £39.99 against the £44.99 for 60 days and compare the conversion and the delivery two retention before you lock the price.
Retention Decides What the Price Is Worth
Here is the sentence most pricing spreadsheets miss: the price decides what you keep per delivery, and retention decides how many deliveries you get. A subscription that looks healthy on price can still lose money on stay.
Worked example, still illustrative. A cohort of 100 new subscribers at £39.99 a delivery, £16.03 of contribution each, acquired at £60 each, so £6,000 of acquisition cost. Retention is the only thing that changes between the rows.
| Retention pattern | Average deliveries | Contribution per subscriber | Net after £60 acquisition cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weak: 60% reach delivery 2, then 80% stay per delivery | 4.0 | £64 | £4 |
| Workable: 75% reach delivery 2, then 85% stay | 6.0 | £96 | £36 |
| Strong: 85% reach delivery 2, then 90% stay | 9.5 | £152 | £92 |
Look at the weak row and sit with it. Under the weak pattern, 40% leave before delivery two, and after that 20% of the remaining subscribers leave before each later monthly delivery. The model leaves about £4 of lifetime contribution after acquisition cost per subscriber, before fixed costs and other overheads. Every bit of growth is a treadmill. And notice what the fix is not: a price cut, because £5 off removes £4.17 of contribution from every delivery the customer would ever have taken. The fix is retention, and in sports nutrition retention has specific levers.
The first is the pause button. Some customers need to pause because of injury, travel, the off season or a break in training. A pause option can keep them attached without sending another tub. The second is payment recovery: some churn comes from failed payments rather than a decision to leave, and a dunning flow can recover some of those payments. The third is seasonality: if acquisition spikes in January, test whether retention weakens in spring and reflect the result in your cash forecast. We walked through this in our post on forecasting a supplement subscription's first 90 days, and the shape transfers to sports.
Set the price before you scale the ads, and judge it by whether it leaves enough contribution to survive your real retention curve. "We will fix churn later" is a promise that shows up in the accounts sooner or later.
The Recurring Commission Trap
Creators, athletes and coaches can be important acquisition channels for sports nutrition subscriptions: a creator's training clip, an athlete's day-in-the-life, a coach's recommendation. Read your affiliate terms twice, because there are two very different deals hiding in the word "commission".
A one-off bounty pays for the first delivery and stops. A recurring rate pays on every renewal, turning a marketing cost into a permanent line in your cost stack. At £39.99 a delivery, a 10% recurring rate on the ex VAT price costs £3.33 of your £33.33 of net revenue every month, a fifth of your £16.03 of contribution. At 15% it is £5.00, nearly a third. Check whether your programme pays on renewals or only the first order, then set a defensible rate ladder and review it monthly, because a recurring cut changes the price you need. Recurring commissions are also paid every month, long after the ad that drove the signup, landing in your margin in months when you have stopped thinking about that customer.
VAT: Check Each Sports Nutrition SKU
Now the section that changes the price if you get it wrong. This illustrative SKU is assumed to be standard rated for VAT. For a VAT-registered seller, £39.99 includes £6.66 of output VAT and £33.33 of net revenue, and the whole model above is built on the £33.33.
HMRC's VAT Notice 701/14 is blunt about why. It standard rates sports drinks that are advertised or marketed to enhance physical performance, accelerate recovery after exercise or build bulk. That includes syrups, concentrates, essences, powders, crystals and other products used to prepare those drinks, including drinks containing milk or whey. Tablets are standard rated except glucose, dextrose and Horlicks tablets. Products made wholly or mainly of creatine are standard rated. Sweet-tasting cereal bars and compressed fruit bars are generally standard rated, while bars that qualify as cakes can be zero rated. Check each SKU instead of assuming every sports nutrition product has the same VAT treatment.
The trap is the quiet one. A brand below the VAT threshold can build a price that stops working after registration if it models no output VAT and ignores the input VAT it may then recover. Registration becomes compulsory once taxable turnover passes £90,000 in a rolling 12 months, or is expected to in the next 30 days, and the day it arrives the maths changes. Our VAT registration checker shows where a brand sits and what is coming. If you are at £80,000 and growing, price as if you are registered today; your future self needs the margin.
One accounting note: cash from a prepaid subscription is not sales on day one. Each delivery becomes revenue when the customer takes control of it, normally on delivery, and the rest sits as deferred income. Our post on why subscription brands need a different approach to bookkeeping covers the machine, and the supplement version of this pricing exercise, including why a 28-day billing cycle charges thirteen times a year, lives in pricing a 28-day supplement subscription. The cost stack transfers; only the serving language changes.
The Rules Your Subscription Has to Survive
Subscription pricing also has to survive the rulebook, and the rulebook is being rewritten. Under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, a customer who buys goods online usually has 14 days from the day after delivery to cancel without giving a reason. Where one contract covers regular deliveries over a defined period, that period normally runs from the first delivery, not every delivery. The right does not apply to goods that deteriorate or expire rapidly, and it can be lost when sealed goods that are unsuitable for return for health protection or hygiene reasons are unsealed after delivery. Edible does not automatically mean exempt, so check the SKU and the fulfilment model.
More is coming. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 sets out the framework for a new subscription contracts regime, with secondary legislation still required. It includes clear pre-contract information, regular reminders, especially before trials or contracts of 12 months or more auto-renew, straightforward exits, online exit where signup was online, and a 14-day cooling-off period after a trial or a contract of 12 months or more auto-renews. The government's consultation response, updated on 2 April 2026, says it anticipates that the regime will commence in spring 2027. The flows you build today will either be ready or be rework.
Why this belongs in a pricing post: hard-to-cancel subscriptions can create chargebacks, complaints and support work. Build a straightforward online cancellation flow and offer a pause where it helps the customer, and your acquisition maths stays honest.
FAQ
How much should I charge for a sports nutrition subscription?
With the illustrative cost stack in this post, around £17 of delivery-level costs per monthly delivery, price it at £39.99 including VAT against a £44.99 one-off tub. That leaves £16.03 of contribution per delivery and pays back a £60 acquisition cost in just under four deliveries. Your costs will differ, so run your own stack and let the price follow it.
Do I charge VAT on a sports nutrition subscription?
Once you are VAT registered, charge VAT if the SKU is standard rated. HMRC standard rates qualifying sports drinks and drink preparations, most tablets, and products made wholly or mainly of creatine. Bars and other foods need their own classification. On a standard-rated £39.99 delivery, the VAT is £6.66 and net revenue is £33.33. Registration is compulsory once taxable turnover goes over £90,000 in the previous 12 months, or you expect it to go over £90,000 in the next 30 days.
How many deliveries before the acquisition cost pays back?
At £16.03 of contribution per delivery and a £60 acquisition cost, payback is 3.74 deliveries. Cumulative contribution first exceeds the acquisition cost on delivery four. Keep contribution at £15 or more per delivery to achieve payback within four deliveries. This is CAC payback, not full profitability, because the model excludes fixed overheads and other costs.
The Bottom Line
Pricing a sports nutrition subscription is a serving exercise before it is a marketing one. Cost the delivery honestly, price the serving so that at least 50p of contribution survives every layer, set the subscription price around 10% below your one-off tub, and treat retention as part of the price: contribution of £15 or more per delivery, payback within four deliveries, and a pause button where a cancellation would otherwise go. Check the VAT position before you launch, check your creator terms before you sign, and build the reminder and cancellation flows before the rules require them. Get those pieces right and the subscription becomes a margin you can forecast. Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash is reality.
If you want your subscription numbers stress tested, delivery by delivery and cohort by cohort, that is the work we do. We are specialist social commerce accountants for UK ecommerce brands. The wider picture sits in our post on how a 7-figure sports brand should structure their P&L, and if TikTok Shop brings your first-time buyers, we broke down its cost stack in the cost stack of a £1m TikTok Shop sports brand. When you are ready, Book a call and bring your last few months of fees and settlements.