<span style="color: #808080;">The best gym deals are in December, when gyms count on us to make good on our New Year’s resolutions. There is a lot of competition in the market and fitness centers are ready to waive all sorts of fees to attract new customers before the end of the year to sell you the gym membership to fit your life.

Enrollments to get the special price must take place no later than December 31 and then again in June — just in time to have that beach ready body for outdoor sports. Choosing a membership that’s right for you, and your family, to get you moving and feeling great is what gyms are all about.

In other words, it’s money-making time for the gym industry. Every January membership purchases spike and traffic soars – but wait a few weeks – it won’t be long before all those good intentions die. It’s a business model that succeeds when their customers never come back.

<span style="color: #808080;">Gym-As-You-Go wants to offer pricing based on usage rather than monthly subscriptions.

At this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin Hackathon, in its third year, that took place on December 2-3, hundreds of developers and engineers worldwide descended on Berlin, formed teams and spent 24 hours creating, coding and hacking their way to a completely new, cool or potentially life-changing product.

Competitors are given one hour to form teams. The teams have until 9:30 the following morning to complete their project. Finally, each team gets just 60 seconds on the Disrupt stage to impress a panel of judges with their innovation.

<span style="color: #808080;">Gym-As-You-Go is one of the compelling inventions that came out of this year’s Disrupt Berlin Hackathon. The technology allows a gym-goer to scan a bar code to check in at a chosen work-out station using a pay-as-you-go system. The member is  charged a usage fee for how long they use the machine not a membership fee to use the gym. The creators of Gym-As-You-Go keep a percentage of the cost and the gym keeps the rest.

Pay-as-you-go pricing could also give lazy people who rarely work out a way to waste less money and gyms a way to attract a different type of customer. And popular machines could be priced so they’re always available for customers desperate for a certain exercise and don’t have time to wait.

eGym, a cloud-based gym equipment company, is working to reduce gym memberships by getting people locked in with work-out tracking. Pay-as-you-go offers a direct incentive to modernize the existing gym membership model.

Some gyms may worry that they will lose membership money and not be enticed to offer a pay-to-use service, but as more gyms compete for the consumer dollar, an alternative to the monthly membership could be another power player to increase market share and keep members coming in the door all year.