Wellness studio software has to handle group classes and one-to-one treatments in the same calendar, let a client spend one prepaid balance across both, pay instructors and practitioners on different models, and tell you which service line actually makes money — which is why software built purely for classes, or purely for appointments, tends to fail here within a few months.
The defining feature of a wellness studio isn't the services. It's that there's more than one kind of them.
Most platforms are built around a single booking object.
Class software assumes a fixed time, a fixed capacity, and many people. Appointment software assumes a variable duration, one person, and a specific practitioner. These are genuinely different data structures, and a platform designed around one usually bolts the other on badly.
You'll recognise the symptoms. Treatments that have to be created as "classes with a capacity of one." Practitioners who can't set their own availability because the system thinks in class blocks. A calendar you can't view as a whole because classes and appointments live in separate tabs.
None of this is fatal on day one. All of it compounds.
The test: can you look at Tuesday and see everything happening on Tuesday?
Then check the layer underneath. Can a treatment room be booked as a resource independently of the practitioner, so two therapists can't be scheduled into one room? Can a class and a treatment run concurrently without the system complaining? Can a client book a class and a massage in the same checkout?
That last one sounds trivial and isn't. If a client has to complete two separate transactions to book their week, a meaningful number will complete one.
This is the requirement most likely to be missing, and the most annoying to discover late.
A client buys a $500 wellness package. They want to spend it on classes, a facial, and two massages, over three months. Your software needs to hold that balance, decrement it across different service types at different price points, show the client what's left, and handle expiry.
Systems that only do class packs — ten classes, decrement one per check-in — cannot express this. You end up tracking it manually, which works until you have forty clients doing it.
Ask specifically: can a single prepaid balance be spent across service categories? "We support packages" is not the same answer.
Under one roof you may have a yoga instructor paid per class, a massage therapist on commission, an aesthetician on a tiered commission with a retail split, and a front desk person on hourly.
Most software supports one of those models properly.
What you need is per-person pay rules that can differ in kind, not just in rate — flat per session, percentage of service, percentage of retail at a different rate, tiered thresholds. We've written about the mechanics of getting this right in salon software with payroll and commission tracking; the requirements are the same here and the failure modes are worse, because you have more pay models running simultaneously.
Wellness retail is usually attached to a service — the client buys the product the practitioner just used on them. That means inventory needs to connect to service delivery, commission on retail needs its own rate, and stock needs to decrement at the point of sale rather than in a monthly count.
If retail is more than incidental revenue for you, check that inventory is real inventory and not a product list with prices.
Here's the question a multi-service business has to answer and single-service software structurally cannot.
You run classes, treatments and retail. One of them is carrying the others. Most operators have a strong instinct about which, and a meaningful share of the time the instinct is wrong — because classes look busy and treatments look quiet, while a treatment at $110 with one practitioner for an hour is a very different margin from a class at $22 with an instructor and a room full of people.
The Global Wellness Institute tracks how broad and fragmented this sector has become; what it can't tell you is which of your lines pays for the lease.
Mako calculates margin by service and by service category in real time — revenue against practitioner cost, room time and processing. So the decision to add a treatment room or cut a class comes with a number attached.
For a business running three or four revenue models at once, that's not a reporting nicety. It's the only way to tell whether the mix is working.
Starter at $39/month covers 100 clients and three team members. Team at $149/month covers 500 clients, fifteen team members, and adds financial analytics and QuickBooks sync — which is the tier most multi-service studios need, because the pay models get complicated before the client count does.
No contract at either tier. Pricing is published in full.
