Why I wrote to you
I look for studios and wellness businesses whose websites suggest they're wrestling with the same thing I was: paying monthly for software that owns your schedule, your client list, and often your website too — and gets more expensive the better you do.
If I got that wrong about you, I genuinely apologize for the noise. Reply with a word and I'll take you off my list for good.
Where this came from
My working life has never been just one thing. I've managed dance studios and yoga spaces, and I've had a whole career as a gymnastics coach. I DJ ecstatic dances and produce music. I facilitate breathwork, practice yoga, and sit with mindfulness. And for the last ten-plus years I've been a web developer and designer, building and looking after websites for people running exactly these kinds of places — so this isn't a software company that picked wellness as a market. It's the room I was already standing in.
A while back I was helping Hudson Valley InterArts — a community arts school in New York — get out from under their booking platform. Across three locations, each with its own rooms, running it properly was heading toward roughly $500 a month. For software they didn't own, holding data they couldn't easily get back.
I couldn't find anything that would simply let them own the thing, so I built it. Gather Grove runs their booking today — three locations, 30-plus teachers, 350-plus clients — and I've since moved other studios and centers off their platforms the same way.
To be straight with you: I'm not a customer telling you about a product I bought. I built Gather Grove, and I ran those migrations myself. Everything on this page is my own experience, not a testimonial — and I'd rather say so up front than have you find out later.
What Gather Grove actually is
It's for the people who run the room: yoga and pilates studios, dance and movement spaces, wellness centers, retreats, teachers with a practice and a mailing list, and communities that don't fit any of those boxes neatly. If you currently pay one company for your website and a second for your bookings, you're the person this was built for.
A suite of WordPress plugins that runs on your own website, on hosting you control. It covers the things a studio, a teacher or a community actually needs:
- Class booking and scheduling, including check-in at the door
- Online courses and video content, for teaching beyond the room
- Private communities and member-only spaces
- Forms, signups and payments
Three physical locations, one teacher working entirely online, or anything between — it's the same tools either way.
And it's yours
Your schedule, your clients and your content live in your own database, on your own site. Three locations on one website cost the same as one — that's exactly how Hudson Valley InterArts runs. And I don't take a percentage of anything you sell; the only cut is Stripe's transaction fee, and that goes to Stripe, not me.
What I charge for is an annual subscription covering updates and maintenance. If it ever lapses, everything keeps running exactly as it is — your data, your flows, your payments, all of it. You simply stop receiving updates and new features until you pick it back up. Nothing gets switched off, and nothing gets held hostage.
One thing it seems fairer to mention than to let you discover later: there's a founding offer running at the moment — the first fifty people pay $499 once and have the entire suite for life, including every plugin shipped after that. It's on the pricing page if it's of interest, and the ordinary annual plans will be there either way.
That's the whole point, really. Owning your platform isn't a feature I'm selling you — it's just how this ought to work.
The full picture, including what everything costs, is at gathergrove.io.
Rather just talk to a human?
There's an open call every Thursday, noon Mountain — the Open Grove Call. People turn up, ask whatever they like, and see the thing working. No pitch, and you're welcome to leave the moment it isn't useful. Or if you'd rather talk one-on-one, book a free half hour with me directly.
Or simplest of all: reply to my email — or write to rob@trygathergrove.com — and tell me how your booking and scheduling runs today. I'll tell you honestly whether I can help, or whether what you have is already fine.