ClassPass: Capitalizing on The Contemporary Yogi's Noncommittal Nature

This past week, several friends from different parts of the country shared an article from Vice.com entitled: ‘ClassPass is Squeezing Fitness Studios to the Point of Death’.  This grim foreshadowing reveals a fraction of the real behind-the-scenes brittleness of the finances of most yoga studios. In the midst of a multi-billion dollar yoga industry, most studios are a labor of love not a cash cow.  Others are barely sustainable, bolstered day by day - one breath at a time, as we say in the biz - on budgetary life support.  

Even a simple peek into the books of a yoga studio quickly reveals that our industry was not started by folks with shrewd business sense.  Turns out “all you need is love” is a catchy lyric, but studio owners will find that landlords, local utilities, and insurance companies don’t accept good vibes as currency.   Nor do teachers, who need cold hard cash to pay their own bills.

ClassPass has exposed and taken advantage of a massive flaw in an already shaky business model, revealing the depth of our inability to establish value in our services.  ClassPass, for the uninitiated, is an app that provides customers with “credits” that can be applied to bookings at a variety of yoga studios and gyms in exchange for a monthly membership fee paid directly to ClassPass.  

As you might imagine, this takes money that would be paid to local studios and puts it in the hands of this billion (with a B) dollar company.  ClassPass does make pay-outs to the studios, but the client becomes accustomed to paying less for more, and recouping those losses can be downright impossible.  Many studios sign on anyway, as they fear losing students to competitors who allow more freedom. ClassPass’s founder is said to have started the company to make fitness more “engaging, accessible, and affordable,” with a tagline that shouts to potential members: 

“Committing is hard.  So don’t.”  

Yeah, about that….

That is not how any of this works.  First of all, people take fitness and wellness classes because they want to see change.  Change actually only comes through commitment and consistency. Unless you’re talking about the kind of change you receive when you break a dollar, which is what most studios are getting from ClassPass - pennies on the dollar.  Unfortunately within the fitness world, the yoga industry is likely the most vulnerable to the damaging effects of ClassPass, due to a financial model that benefits neither student nor studio owner.

Some people get uncomfortable talking about the relationship between yoga and money, but it’s absolutely essential on multiple levels.  Yoga studios are businesses. They need to accept and understand that to be successful, which includes differentiating themselves from other fitness models and other studios.  Regardless of what studio owners like to say or even think, they are one another's competitors.  

Most studios are NOT set up as non-profit / 501(c)3 organizations.  So if they are going to exist, they have to make a profit. Even non-profits need to have a business plan that drives enough revenue to support their administrative costs - not just their mission alone.  The yoga industry has adopted a standard “drop by and say hi” model that makes little to no sense from a financial or educational perspective. Specifically, the offer of bulk pricing for individual sessions in the form of 5-, 10-, even 20-class passes has devalued the service and diluted the practice.

This is where things can get confusing, because ClassPass has taken their name from this very same pricing option that continues to financially impair yoga studios.  Sometimes called a “class pack” or “bundle”, consumers may purchase 5, 10, or 20 standalone classes in advance for a discounted price. Usually the passes expire after six months or a year.  But by purchasing a class pass from a studio, clients receive a discounted rate to facilitate a less consistent practice. They are rewarded for lack of commitment. ClassPass just figured out a way to make money off of these consumer trends.

After a two-week free trial, the ClassPass customer defaults to a $49-a-month plan that includes “27 credits to book up to 8 classes a month”.  Visit a yoga studio website, and a glimpse of the pricing page will show that you can buy a 5-class pass/package/bundle for $80-$90 - a price per class cost that’s three times that of the ClassPass option.  Granted, studios may choose and limit which classes ClassPass members can access, but when comparing at the time of purchase, it’s hard to not find the ClassPass price point more appealing.

Like ClassPass, yoga studios do offer monthly draft payment options as well.  Often called a “membership” and costing between $95 and $150 per month, “members” attend the same classes and events as drop-in clients.  So unlike the motto championed by American Express in the 80s and 90s, these yoga memberships don’t come with any privileges. Most students purchase this pricing option because it’s the best value if they intend to attend class more than twice a week.  But ClassPass offers a $79 per month option that includes credits for “up to 14 classes” - just over 3 classes per week.  

Due to the size and scope of their company, ClassPass is able to offer a discount of up to 50% - 65% on services as compared to a single studio, while giving the consumer the freedom to be completely uncommitted to any one way of pursuing health and wellness.  It’s a Walmart-ization and Amazon-ification of yoga. Even if some of the cash comes back to the studios after the fact in the form of ClassPass payouts, the app takes revenue away from local business owners and drives it to this singular billion-dollar behemoth.

Yoga studios need to be more like their fitness industry contemporaries.  A Crossfit gym has no problem saying, "If you want to workout here, you have to sign up for our on-ramping / beginners course for six weeks, then commit to a year-long contract on a monthly draft." You're in or you're not.  That's not only a better way to budget, but it's a better way to grow a skill set. It takes time to learn a methodology, to put it into practice with integrity and intention.  

When we insist on this foundational level of understanding, we place value on what we teach.  When held accountable in that way, people see the change they seek because it only comes through the process of developing new habits.  And this takes time. They also develop a deep sense of community and belonging - not because they are told how important community is or showered with warm and fuzzy slogans about inclusion, but because they actually get to feel it by consistently showing up with the same group over and over again.  

By allowing folks to drop in, we ensure that each and every class will be a hodge-podge of clients with widely varied levels of experience.  As such, we can’t really teach much. We can lead people through poses, aiming for what works best for the greatest number of people, but there is no room for learning that builds on itself.  The early seismic shifts that draw people to a yoga practice initially come less frequently over time, and so many bounce around, chasing the big beautiful breakthrough, while yoga is mostly the steadiness of the showing up and seeking within, without expectation.  We've groomed what Adyashanti has called a "cult of experience seekers."

I suspect the standard yoga pricing and teaching model probably started in the name of wanting to encourage as many people to come to practice as possible - "being flexible" and giving people options.  However, to keep a business open you have to be able to budget for expenses. Expenses are largely consistent month-to-month, but income on the drop-in system is definitely not. The discounts on 5-, 10-, and 20-class passes don’t really help anyone who has low cash flow anyway. They help people who have more cash in hand. And the more money you have at your disposal, the better the deal: 20-class passes cost more, but the cost per class is lower than that of a 10-class pass, which is lower than that of a 5-class pass.

If you want to offer discounted classes in the name of reaching more socioeconomically diverse students, you not only need to consider plans that truly benefit those in need, but also have a means of offsetting the costs of reduced prices for some. Sliding scale rates and angel memberships worked well at my former studio.  But businesses don’t gain any traction by consistently offering services or products at a rate that doesn’t position them to cover their operating expenses. I’d add, and this is a topic that deserves its own post, that just because something is affordable doesn’t mean it’s accessible. The yoga industry needs to do much more than lower rates to make itself feel more relatable and appealing to a broader spectrum of the population.

If a studio wants to provide tiered options, a 5-class per month draft at a lower rate works as an alternative to the unlimited monthly draft. It lowers the price point while still encouraging consistency. Drop-ins can still work into a weekly schedule but should emphasize the most basic and fundamental elements of the practice. If the education, safety, and personalized growth of individual practitioners are the primary goals - rather the the big bang experience of endorphins and affirmations, then we should require foundational series and steady attendance before throwing crows and headstands into sequencing with a “go into it if you know it” nonchalance.

So far I have yet to use the term “student” to describe a person who pays to attend a class at a yoga studio.  This has been a deliberate choice. Studentship requires commitment. Our current system does not encourage studentship.  Clients are much more likely to become attached to certain teachers than dedicated to the practice of yoga - in large part because they miss the foundational understanding that yoga is a process not a product.  It’s cultivating a garden: seeding and weeding and tending and mending. It’s not a quick fix - or really a fix at all.  That’s part of what makes it so hard to sell, I suppose, but with a little time and context one can begin to see how that dance with the unresolved and unsolved makes life not only livable but layered with limitless meaning and possibility. If boutique gyms and dance studios can demand consistency through memberships and committed series classes, then there’s no reason yoga studios can’t step up and require the same.

There are many reasons why yoga consumers bounce from studio to studio, but the industry has to take responsibility for a big one: we emphasize the freedom aspect of the practice but not the discipline part.  “Do what feels good” is a big message in a lot of yoga classes, and it can be an essential part of creating balance. But it doesn’t always lead us to greater awareness. It can often keep us smack-dab in the middle of the same patterns.  If you really want to teach people something, you have to require that they show up consistently. They’ll feel the benefit more fully if they do, and they often want the accountability. But if yoga studios set up their pricing to make it easier to be inconsistent, if there’s no special training or access to more complex or challenging content associated with memberships, then why would anyone feel compelled to dive in that way? It’s easy to place the blame with ClassPass, but it’s the class passes offered by studios that promote the damaging notion that commitment is unnecessary.  ClassPass just caught on.