Why I wrote to you
I build software for studios and wellness spaces — the booking, the memberships, the class schedule, the website it all lives on. I write to the places I'd genuinely like to build it for.
Yours caught my eye. Somewhere in there was a hint of the thing I kept running into myself: paying every month for software that holds your schedule, your client list, and often your website too — and asks for more the better you do.
Maybe that's not you at all, and if so I'm sorry for the interruption — reply with a word and I'll take you off my list for good. But if any of it rings true, I'd love to hear how you're running things now. That's the whole reason I wrote.
The short version
Gather Grove is self-hosted booking and studio software for WordPress. Your schedule, your clients and your payments live on your own website instead of inside somebody else's platform — and I don't charge by location, by client, or by transaction.
The longer version, and why I ended up building it, is below.
Where this came from
For the last ten-plus years I've been a web developer and designer, building and looking after websites for studios, arts organizations, teachers and community spaces. I've also managed dance studios and yoga spaces myself — running the day-to-day on MindBody and a handful of other booking platforms, from the operator's side of the login. So when I talk about class schedules, memberships, or walking a new teacher through a booking system, that's not market research. I've been the person at the front desk and the person behind the website.
The rest of my working life has mostly happened in those same rooms. I had a whole career in gymnastics: ten years competing, more than ten coaching, from two-and-a-half-year-olds learning body awareness all the way up to junior competition. These days I still hold the sound for ecstatic dances around the Southwest — Santa Fe, Durango, Denver, Boulder and beyond — through a small sound-system company I run that carries everything from weddings to festivals. I produce music, hold small-group breathwork, practice yoga, and sit with mindfulness.
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 client accounts — 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, the version you've installed stays active. Your classes, clients, memberships and data stay on your site. I don't remotely disable software you've already paid for — you simply stop receiving updates and new features until you pick it back up.
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 get the entire Gather Grove suite, including everything still to come, for as long as Gather Grove exists. 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.
Don't particularly want to take my word for it?
There's a fully working demo studio you can poke around in — two locations, a real weekly schedule, instructors, packages and a year of booking history already loaded. Browse the schedule, make an account, book a class, buy a pretend membership. You can't break it, nothing gets charged, and it resets overnight.
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. I'll happily show you what Gather Grove does — I'm just not going to spend forty-five minutes trying to talk you into it if it isn't right for you. 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.