Website for personal trainers, where the calendar is the whole business
Your week is a grid of hours and every hour that empties at short notice is simply gone, because six o'clock on Tuesday cannot be sold twice. Somewhere in the middle of that there is a block of ten sessions somebody paid for in February, and the count of what is left of it lives on the back page of a notebook.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From £49 to £199 a month, excluding VAT.
Three ways an hour disappears
Not one of these is about training anybody. They are about the hour before and the hour after, which is where the money leaks out.
Ten to six, and a text arrives
Sorry, work has gone mad, can we do Thursday instead. It comes an hour before, from somebody who is perfectly nice about it and has done the same thing twice this month, and you are already changed and halfway to the gym.
There is a rule about this. You have said it out loud to them, once, at the start, in a conversation neither of you wants to have again. It has never been written down anywhere either of you could point at.
How many are left on that block?
Somebody bought ten sessions in the spring. You think they have used seven. They think it was six. Neither of you is being difficult and neither of you has anything to check it against except a pencilled column in a notebook that has been in a kit bag since March.
So you give them the benefit of the doubt, because arguing about it would cost more than the session does, and you do it two or three times a year without ever calling it a loss.
Everybody wants one before they commit
Nobody buys ten sessions from a stranger. They want one hour first, or at least a conversation, and that conversation currently happens over about nine messages spread across four days and two apps.
By message six they have gone quiet, and you never find out whether it was the price, the times you had going, or just that the reply came while they were at work and the momentum went out of it.
Four things that put the week back in order
The point of all of this is that the calendar and the money stop being two separate jobs done at two different times of night.
Clients take an hour that genuinely exists
Your availability is the availability. A client picks the type of session and then a slot, and the only slots offered are the ones left after your own training, the school run and the two mornings you are at the other gym.
Different session types can run different lengths, so a first consultation and a full hour do not have to pretend to be the same thing on the way in.
A cancellation rule that is written down and applied
Each booking has a personal link, and the notice period sits right next to it in plain words. If somebody moves a session inside the window, they read the rule at the moment they do it, not from you afterwards.
When they move it outside the window, the hour goes straight back onto the site, where the client who wanted a Thursday can take it before you have even seen the message.
One record per client, and the block count in it
Everybody who books lands in the register with their contact details and every session they have had, so what has been used and what is left is a thing you can look at rather than a thing you both half remember.
When somebody comes back after a year off, their history is still there, and the awkward conversation about how many they had left never has to happen.
Blocks and codes that sell without a negotiation
A block of ten at a package price sits on the page as its own thing, paid before the first session rather than chased after the ninth. A code you hand to a client who has brought a friend along does what you meant it to do without any arithmetic at the end of the month.
A January offer can be set to run for a fixed period and then stop on its own.
What you can put on the page
Your names, your figures, your rules. The structure is what matters: what is bought once, what is bought as a block, and what is a way in.
Sessions and blocks can sit under separate headings, so somebody looking for a single hour is not reading past four package prices to find it.
Questions trainers ask before signing up
Yes. Availability is set per day and per session type, so the mornings you are across town simply are not offered. What a client sees is the hours you can actually stand in front of them.
A block is sold as its own item at a package price, and payment runs through your own Stripe account. Sessions are then booked against the calendar one at a time, with the record showing what has been used.
You set the notice period, and it appears next to the client's own cancel and rebook link. Inside the window they see your rule stated before they act; outside it the hour is released back onto the site straight away.
You can, and most trainers do. It goes on as its own service with its own length and price, and it can be limited to people who have not booked before, so your regulars are not quietly buying discounted hours.
No. Describe what you do and the builder makes a first version from that, or point it at any web page you have and it will import what is there. The booking link then works from your posts as well as from the site.
Between £49 and £199 plus VAT, across four plans. Your own domain, SSL, hosting, a backup every night and support are in each of them. Anything you want sent by text uses prepaid SMS credit.
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Put your calendar on the site
A few sentences about who you train and what you sell is enough. A first version comes back with the session types, the blocks and the cancellation rule already on the page, and you change any of it by clicking the pencil beside it.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From £49 to £199 a month, excluding VAT.