Unmanned Golf Revolution: 24/7 Sim Franchises
What is a 24/7 unmanned golf simulator franchise? A new breed of indoor golf facility that operates without on-site staff, using app-based booking, keyless entry, and automated access control. Members and guests reserve private simulator suites by the hour — any hour — and let themselves in. Brands like Another Nine, The Golf Crypt, and Golf VX LAB are scaling this model fast, with Another Nine selling 75+ franchise territories in its first year.
Two years ago, if you wanted to open an indoor golf franchise, you had two options.
Option one: raise $2-4 million, sign a 10-year lease on 8,000+ square feet, install a full kitchen and bar, hire a general manager and a kitchen staff and a bartender and a front desk person and a maintenance crew, and open a Five Iron Golf or an X-Golf. Full-service entertainment venue. High revenue, high complexity, high everything.
Option two: don’t open an indoor golf franchise, because there wasn’t really a second option.
That was 2024. In 2026, there are at least six franchise concepts chasing the same customer with wildly different business models. The most interesting one — the one that changes the math completely — is the one that needs zero staff, zero food service, and zero memberships.
The 24/7 unmanned golf facility is a genuine structural innovation. It competes in the same market as Five Iron, but it’s a fundamentally different business — lower investment, lower overhead, higher margins, different customer.
The Old Model: Eatertainment
Let’s start with the incumbent, because the whole reason the unmanned model exists is that the old model is hard to make work.
Five Iron Golf raised $50 million from Danny Meyer’s Enlightened Hospitality Investments and Callaway Golf. X-Golf has 133 locations and counting. These are legitimate businesses that serve a real market. But look at the unit economics:
Five Iron Golf franchise investment: $1.7 million to $4.3 million. Royalty: 7% of gross sales. Average unit revenue: $2.4 million (median $1.8 million). EBITDA margin: 15-25% for a well-run location. Staffing cost: 30-40% of revenue.
That’s the problem. A Five Iron location doing $2 million in revenue might spend $700,000 on labor alone. Before you pay rent. Before you pay for food cost. Before the 9% royalty and marketing fee. The food and beverage component — which generates 30-40% of revenue — also generates a massive operating headache. You’re running a restaurant that happens to have golf simulators.
X-Golf’s numbers tell a similar story. $1.1-1.8 million investment. Same 7% royalty. Per-simulator revenue averaging $113,000 annually. A 10-bay location does about $1.1 million in gross sales, and roughly 30-40% of that comes from food and drink.
These are good businesses for the right operator. But “the right operator” means someone who knows how to run a restaurant and bar, manage 20+ employees, handle liquor licensing and health inspections, and also understand golf simulator technology. That’s a narrow Venn diagram.
Enter the unmanned model.
The New Model: No Staff, No Food, No Problem
Another Nine opened its first corporate location in Cincinnati in 2024. It was a simple idea: private simulator suites, available 24/7, booked through an app, no membership required. Walk in with your phone, let yourself in, hit balls. Leave when you’re done. Zero human interaction if that’s what you want.
The company started franchising in 2025. In its first year, it sold 75+ franchise territories. It opened its first franchise location in Cornelius, North Carolina in June 2026. It has 12 locations planned for the Charlotte metro alone. Charlotte is already sold out.
The model works because the operating structure is fundamentally different from the eatertainment approach:
- No food service. No kitchen, no bar, no health department inspections, no food cost, no labor for F&B. The facility is just simulator suites, a bathroom, and maybe a vending machine or a keurig.
- Minimal staffing. The booking system, access control, and facility management are all handled through the A9OS software platform. Remote monitoring means one person can oversee multiple locations.
- 24/7 utilization. Most sim facilities generate revenue from 11 AM to 10 PM. A 24/7 facility monetizes the other 13 hours too. The late-night golfer is a real demographic — people who finish work at midnight and want to hit balls.
- Lower buildout costs. Without a kitchen, bar, or restaurant-grade finishes, the buildout is simpler and cheaper. Private suites mean you don’t need the same level of public-space finishing.
The unit economics reflect this simplicity. Another Nine hasn’t published detailed Item 19 financials yet (the franchise system is too new), but the comparable model — The Golf Crypt — gives us a window.
The Golf Crypt franchise investment: Approximately $500,000-$800,000 (estimated from comparable models). Staffing requirement: 30 minutes to 2 hours per day. Membership model: $150-300/month, targeting 200-400 members per location. Projected EBITDA margins: 40-60%.
Let that sink in. A traditional sim franchise might spend 30-40% of revenue on labor and achieve 15-25% EBITDA margins. An unmanned facility spends 10-15% on labor and achieves 40-60% margins. The absolute revenue is lower — a Golf Crypt might gross $400,000-600,000 annually instead of $2 million — but the profit per dollar of revenue is dramatically higher.
Run the numbers side by side:
| Metric | Entertainment (Five Iron) | Unmanned (Golf Crypt) |
|—|—| | Investment | $2-4M | $0.5-0.8M | | Annual Revenue | $1.8-2.4M | $0.4-0.6M | | Labor Cost | 30-40% of revenue | 10-15% of revenue | | EBITDA Margin | 15-25% | 40-60% | | EBITDA | ~$400K | ~$250K | | Cash-on-cash return | ~9% | ~35%+ |
The absolute EBITDA is higher for the entertainment model. But the return on investment is dramatically better for the unmanned model. You put in $700,000 and get $250,000 back. That’s a 35% annual return. Good luck finding that anywhere else.
The Middle Ground: Golf VX LAB
Golf VX — known for its premium commercial simulator technology — launched a franchise concept called Golf VX LAB that occupies the space between the two models. It’s membership-driven, semi-automated, and compact.
Investment: $342,000 to $552,000. Footprint: 2,000-3,000 square feet. Operating model: Semi-passive, autonomous access with some staff during peak hours. Royalty: 6% of gross sales.
This is interesting because it solves a different problem. The unmanned model works best for practice-focused golfers who want private time. The Golf VX LAB model targets the same demographic but adds coaching revenue, social events, and a club-like feel — without the full restaurant overhead.
The startup costs are low enough that a working professional could open one as a side business. Which is exactly what a lot of franchisees are doing.
What This Means for the Industry
This shift has implications beyond franchise investment brochures. The rise of 24/7 unmanned facilities changes the landscape for sim golf in three ways:
1. It accelerates the installed base.
Every new unmanned facility puts 4-8 commercial-grade simulators into the market. These aren’t home sims — they’re TrackMan-equipped, professionally calibrated, maintained by the facility operator. They create a network effect. More simulators in more places means more people try sim golf. Some of them will build home sims. All of them become part of the sim golf ecosystem.
2. It normalizes sim golf as infrastructure.
When you can walk into a 24/7 sim facility at 2 AM on a Tuesday, sim golf stops being a novelty and starts being infrastructure. It’s the same shift from hotel gyms to 24 Hour Fitness — the model becomes reliable enough that you can depend on it, not just enjoy it when you happen to find it. The unmanned model makes sim golf a utility.
3. It creates a new buyer demographic for home sims.
People who use commercial sim facilities are the #1 source of future home sim buyers. This doesn’t get discussed much, but it’s hard to overstate. Every time someone books a suite at Another Nine, they’re practicing with a TrackMan, experiencing what good sim software feels like, and thinking “I could put this in my garage.” The unmanned facility boom is a customer acquisition funnel for the entire home sim industry.
The Catch
The unmanned model isn’t a slam dunk. It has structural vulnerabilities:
No walk-in traffic. Without a bar or kitchen, there’s no reason for someone to wander in off the street. All bookings are intentional. This means the facility lives and dies on its booking funnel — website, app store optimization, Google Maps presence, word of mouth.
Member acquisition cost is high. Membership models need 200-400 members to reach breakeven. That’s a lot of people to find in a local market. In a metro area with 500,000 people, you need to convince 0.05% of the population to pay $200/month for simulated golf. Doable, but not automatic.
Technology dependency. The entire model rests on software working perfectly. If the app goes down at 1 AM, nobody can book. If the door lock fails, nobody can enter. If the simulator crashes mid-round, there’s nobody to fix it. The remote monitoring model works well 95% of the time. The other 5% is a customer service nightmare.
Facility degradation. No on-site staff means nobody is wiping down the bays, restocking the TP, or picking up trash until the remote team schedules a visit. The facility experience degrades faster without daily attention.
Still, these are solvable problems. The demand exists. The economics work. And the market is still early enough that first movers have a real advantage.
What It All Adds Up To
The 24/7 unmanned golf franchise is the most important structural innovation in sim golf since GSPro added online play. It changes the unit economics of indoor golf from “complex restaurant with simulators” to “capital-efficient recurring revenue business.” That matters for investors. It matters for franchisees. But it matters most for the sim golf ecosystem, because every new facility adds 4-8 TrackMan-equipped bays to the network, and every new bay creates more sim golfers.
You can’t have a $2 billion industry grow to $4 billion without more places to play. The unmanned model is how that happens.
Full disclosure: We don’t have affiliate relationships with any franchise brands mentioned here. This is an industry analysis, not investment advice. If you’re considering a franchise investment, talk to an attorney and existing franchisees — not a guy who writes about golf simulators on the internet.