A Salt Lake City fitness franchise network outgrowing its third-party booking SaaS
A Salt Lake City, Utah-based fitness franchise network operating 84 studio locations across 11 western US states, including boutique cycling, strength training, and HIIT studio brands under shared franchisee ownership. Founded in 2017, the network had grown rapidly through franchisee acquisition but was constrained by an outdated third-party booking SaaS that did not support the multi-brand franchise model, charged per-location fees that compounded across 84 studios, and offered no franchisee-level analytics for owner-operators running multiple studios. The leadership team needed a custom platform that could handle the network's scale, complexity, and franchise model.
Why generic booking SaaS could not support the franchise model
Three structural problems blocked the existing solution. First, the third-party booking SaaS was designed for single-studio operators, not multi-brand franchise networks. Member accounts were siloed per studio, so a member who used 3 studios across the network needed 3 separate accounts, billed separately, with no shared booking history. Second, the SaaS charged $340 per location per month plus per-transaction fees, costing the network approximately $28,560 monthly in software fees, with costs scaling linearly as the network grew. Third, franchisees who owned multiple studios had no consolidated dashboard, no operational analytics, and no member overlap visibility, so they could not optimize class scheduling, staff allocation, or marketing investment across their portfolio of studios.
What we engineered across booking, payments, and franchisee analytics
Our engineering team built a custom multi-tenant SaaS platform from the ground up over 10 months. The platform supports white-label per-studio branding while maintaining unified member identity across the network, so a member who joins one studio can attend any participating studio with a single account, a single payment method, and a single booking history. The booking system handles class scheduling, capacity management, waitlists, and dynamic pricing across all studio types, with per-studio rule configuration. The payments layer integrates with Stripe Connect to handle franchisee-level payment splits automatically, including franchise royalty calculations, marketing fund contributions, and franchisee net payouts, all reconciled monthly without manual intervention. The franchisee analytics dashboard surfaces real-time member metrics, class fill rates, revenue per studio, staff utilization, and cross-studio member behavior. We also built a member-facing mobile application for iOS and Android that handles booking, payment, class history, and franchise-wide membership management. The platform runs on a modern stack (Next.js, Postgres, Redis, AWS) with 99.97% uptime since production launch.
The 10-month rollout across 84 studios and $42M in annual GMV
By month 10, all 84 studios had migrated to the new platform with no service interruption to members. Monthly bookings processed reached 184,000, with peak weeks crossing 52,000 bookings. Annual gross merchandise value running through the platform reached $42 million, with franchisee royalties, marketing contributions, and net payouts all automated. Software cost dropped from the previous $28,560 monthly third-party SaaS fee to approximately $4,800 monthly in infrastructure costs, an annual saving of $285,120 against the prior subscription. Franchisee net promoter score moved from 31 to 74 because the analytics dashboard gave owner-operators visibility into their portfolio that they had never had under the previous system. Member-facing mobile app adoption reached 78% of active members within month 6 of launch, lifting average bookings per member by approximately 23% because friction to book dropped significantly.
How owning the platform changed the franchise economics
Before the engagement, the network paid increasing software fees as the franchise grew, with no path to better terms because the third-party SaaS knew the network was locked in. After the engagement, the network owned its platform outright, with infrastructure costs scaling sublinearly to growth and full control over the feature roadmap. The leadership team described the engagement as moving from being a tenant of someone else's software to owning the operating system of the franchise network. Elatre continues as the engineering partner on the platform, with ongoing development on new modules including franchisee-specific marketing automation, member retention prediction, and white-label brand expansion for incoming franchise concepts.