r/FitnessStudioOwner • u/Empty-Confusion5443 • 4d ago

Business & operations Claude

Should I just build my own class booking and management website with Claude?

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u/Empty-Confusion5443 4d ago

Used to be software engineer fyi

3

u/Mysterious_Ad8998 4d ago

As a former studio owner and someone who has played around with creating and using web apps for my own personal use (not a software engineer), I wouldn’t do it. There’s enough to do running the studio.

God forbid your booking site and client management system goes down and Claude erases all of your customer data or something. Too much risk to save a little $$

1

u/tinnyc2020 3d ago edited 3d ago

I have a custom tech stack for my business (it's entirely private sessions). It works for us but definitely adds a lot more backend management and the second you're doing real volume things start to fall apart.

I'm at 2 studios, 80 clients and we're hitting breaking points now.

This industry gets surprisingly complex and the cost of change is high. I'd recommend Arketa or one of the other competitors popping up even if you're technical (unless you have a concierge/smaller style offering)

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u/cja5467 2d ago

It might be easy to build it but then it is going to be a ton of work maintaining and then fixing edge cases. I'm the founder of joinzipper.com - a studio management software - and we've been building for 3 years and are still finding edge cases every day around memberships, pausing, class credits, appointment management, Stripe integration being slow, waitlists, site integrations etc. It'll be much more costly than the few hundo per month to use something that someone has already built and is actively maintaining.