FOR GYMS & FITNESS STUDIOS
Your studio lives and dies on recurring billing, full classes, and a smooth front door — and you're paying a platform that takes a cut of every transaction, locks your member data behind its app, and still can't quite book the way your schedule works. We build the membership engine around your studio.
THE SHORT ANSWER
Custom software for gyms and fitness studios runs the recurring side packaged tools hold hostage: membership billing with dunning and failed-payment recovery, class booking with waitlists and capacity rules, and fast check-ins. It puts your branding on the member experience, keeps your member data yours instead of locked in a platform, and drops the per-transaction cut Mindbody and its peers take.
WHERE THE REVENUE LEAKS
Mindbody, Glofox, and Zen Planner book a class and run a card. They hold you exactly where it hurts — your member data, your branding, the cut they take, and billing logic that doesn't match your plans.
A member's card expires, the charge fails, and nothing chases it. No retry sequence, no nudge to update the card — they just stop being billed and eventually stop showing up. Dunning and failed-payment recovery is the single most overlooked revenue leak in a studio, and generic tools barely touch it.
Class packs, drop-ins, unlimited tiers, waitlists, late-cancel and no-show fees, a cap of twelve spots and two bikes held for walk-ins — your booking has rules. Off-the-shelf software supports the common ones and forces you to fake the rest, so the front desk patches it by hand.
Your members book through an app with someone else's name on it, see a marketplace nudging them toward competing studios, and never quite feel like they're yours. You're paying to make a platform look good to your own customers.
On top of the subscription, a slice of every membership charge and class sale goes to the platform. As you grow, that skim grows with you — a tax on your own recurring revenue that never stops.
Attendance, billing history, contact info — it's all in there, but it's their system. Try to leave and you find out how much of your business's memory you don't actually control.
THE OTHER WAY ROUND
Built around your plans, your schedule, and your brand — so the recurring revenue and the member relationship stay yours.
CAPABILITY, NOT A CASE STUDY
Examples of what fits a gym or studio — what we build, not clients we're claiming. Scoped to the leak that's quietly costing you members or margin.
Recurring billing tuned to your plans, with automatic retries, expiring-card nudges, and a failed-payment recovery flow that turns silent churn back into active members. The revenue you're quietly losing every month, caught.
Class booking, waitlists, and a fast front-door check-in — under your name, on your brand, with no marketplace steering your members elsewhere. The member experience finally feels like yours.
Capacity caps, equipment holds, packs versus unlimited, late-cancel and no-show fees — the booking logic your front desk currently patches by hand, encoded so it just runs.
THE HONEST CAVEAT
If you're a single small studio and Mindbody's convenience outweighs its cut, staying put can be the right call. Custom starts to pay when you're multi-location, when the per-transaction skim is real money, or when owning the member relationship matters more than the platform's reach.
STRAIGHT ANSWERS
Yes, and it's usually where custom pays for itself fastest. We build recurring billing tuned to your plans, on top of a processor like Stripe, with the dunning most studios neglect — automatic retries, expiring-card reminders, and a failed-payment recovery flow. That recovered revenue from cards that would've quietly lapsed often covers the build on its own.
That's the point. Booking, waitlists, and check-in live under your name and your brand, with no marketplace nudging your members toward other studios. They experience your studio, not a platform you happen to pay.
With a custom build, you own 100% of it — attendance, billing history, contacts — in a system that's yours to query and act on. Part of why we build is so your business's memory isn't trapped in a vendor you'd have to fight to leave. Getting data out of an incumbent platform is usually part of the migration we plan with you.
Yes — those exact rules are what off-the-shelf tools force you to fake. We encode your packs, caps, equipment holds, waitlist promotion, and late-cancel or no-show fees so booking runs the way your studio actually works instead of the way a generic product assumes.
You connect your own payment processor and pay its standard rate — no extra platform skim layered on top of every membership charge and class sale. Over a growing membership base, dropping that recurring cut is a meaningful, compounding saving.
Tell us the leak — silent churn, booking you patch by hand, the skim on every sale. You'll get a real plan back in plain language: what we'd build and how fast. You work directly with the builder, and you own the system and your member data, 100%.
START YOUR BUILDWe take only a few builds at a time.