Plenty of gyms, clubs and studios run on a shared platform app — the operator’s logo appears somewhere inside, but the icon on the member’s phone belongs to the software company.
That arrangement is cheap and it works. It also quietly determines whose customer the member is.
The icon is the relationship
The app a member opens two or three times a week is the most frequent contact your organisation has with them. More often than the newsletter, more often than reception, sometimes more often than a class.
If that icon carries somebody else’s brand, the habit being reinforced is with somebody else’s product. Members describe themselves as using the platform rather than as belonging to your club, and when they move, the app moves with them.
The practical differences
Beyond the branding, running your own app changes several things that matter:
- Notifications come from you. A message from your club is read differently from one from a platform, and it is far less likely to be muted.
- You control what appears. No adverts for competing operators, no upsells you did not choose.
- The member journey is yours to design. Joining, booking and paying can follow your process rather than a generic one.
- You keep the audience. If you change supplier, the members are still yours.
None of that is visible in a feature comparison, which is why it is usually discovered afterwards.
What it should not cost
The reasonable objection is money. A bespoke app per organisation is expensive to build and worse to maintain, and small operators cannot justify it.
That is the wrong way round though. Done properly, one multi-tenant platform serves every organisation on it, and each gets its own colours, logo, domain and home-screen icon generated from a shared token set rather than a separate codebase. The build happens once; the branding is configuration.
We built The Performance Centre this way: every club gets its own branded app rather than a shared one, on a platform that also serves clubs a fraction of their size. Grassroots pricing starts at £1 per player per month, which is only possible because the branding is per tenant rather than per project.
The questions to ask a supplier
- Whose name is on the icon my members tap?
- Can you send notifications to my members that I have not approved?
- If I leave, what happens to the app my members have installed?
- Is the branding configuration, or a separate build I will pay to maintain?
The answers usually make the commercial model clear very quickly.
Where it genuinely does not matter
Worth saying: for a small operator with fifty members and a single class a week, a shared app is fine, and the effort of running your own is not repaid.
The calculation changes with frequency and size. Once the app is part of a member’s weekly routine, whose brand it carries stops being cosmetic.
Thinking about what your members actually open? Get in touch, or see how we build platforms for health and fitness.