At the risk of this being a bit of a dry newsletter, I am going to dive into the world of platforms and apps, as requested by many. Recently, I have had some major changes in my platform usage, and I hope that if I share some of my experiences, you can perhaps make better choices and fewer mistakes.

If you are teaching classes, you will want to ponder a platform unless the studio(s) at which you teach do all of your bookings. If you offer classes or courses online, you will most definitely want to read on.

There are so many platforms out there now,, and they are all seemingly trying to become everything to everyone but they aren’t all good at doing that. It is confusing. It is challenging to try to navigate the choices because you might not even know what questions to ask. So, let me ask you a few questions to start this conversation going. And BTW, I am always open to you asking me questions that I forgot to or didn’t think to include here.

Why?

Why do you want a platform? Is it to register people for classes? Gather names for a newsletter/blog list? Help with social media planning and execution? Make a website? Or are you going all in and pondering your own app?

Please ask yourself these questions and decide what you really want in a platform, and therefore increase your ability to wade through the weeds to find the right platform for you.

In all honesty, part of me would happily return to recipe cards and attendance sheets, but my clients and I are hooked on the ease of paying and booking classes online. Lately, I am aware of fraud and scammers. Being on a platform where they store my clients’ info is a risk. Yes, the ones I use say they are very safe,, but frankly, I think we are entering an age where nothing is really safe.

If you are thinking that you want a platform because it makes you look more successful and professional, just think about it first. There are lots of ways to look really pro without necessarily paying lots of money per month or putting your clients’ info and your reputation on the line. Image is such a huge commodity right now but you don’t need to fall in line. You don’t need to look like that massive studio in that big metropolis! Truth be told, that studio is likely in a whole whack of debt. You don’t have to be. 

Find out what the free options are. There are lots of them! And yes, they all try to get you to buy in but you don’t have to! Email platforms are a good example. Many like Mailchimp are free until you reach a certain number of subscribers. This presents an interesting conundrum of wanting more subscribers while not wanting more cost! 

Is there a monthly subscription instead of yearly? I know they all reduce the annual fee to hook you in, but if there isn’t a free trial, just do a month or three. Make sure you are happy first. I actually switched to Go High Level in April or May so that I would have a long runway to make sure everything was as smooth as possible come DDay (which just passed). You need a long runway before sharing stuff with your clients, particularly if you are trying to look like you know what you are doing!

Class Booking Platforms

In terms of class booking/payment platforms, I have used the bulk of them. Mindbody, Wellness Living, and now Momence. I looked at many before going to Momence during the pandemic – GloFox, Vigaro, Monoyoga, Acuity, Zendesk, oh so many I can’t even name. Mindbody and Wellness Living are a whole lot of money but Mindbody gives a lot of service for that money. You just have to ask yourself what you really need vs what you can do yourself or on a free app. Wellness Living was just awful but that was a long time ago. I don’t love GloFox (sorry to the studios here that use it.). I find it confusing as an end user to have to purchase a class separately and then go choose the class I want to go to. It seems like it asks the clients to do more than should be necessary. 

Rule of thumb? A sale should take as few clicks as possible!

I chose Momence when it was in its infancy and it has been really great to be part of its growth. I loved the pricing – I currently pay around $89/month. I say ‘around’ because most of these platforms use USD whether they are out of Berlin or Boston, so the exchange rate is different each month. Irritating but true. Momence covers my booking, payments, and tracks packages and class subscriptions. Yay to that! I love that I can do zoom classes with Momence sending the links to the zoom plus the recording. They also allow me to archive an awful lot of videos. Switching to Momence took a lot of tedious work away from me.

Lately, I have been less enchanted.They are one of the many platforms that are trying to become more important to everyone. If I want to add another location for a class, I must pay as though I am a studio. If I want to send an automatic email to tell people that their packages are about to renew, I need to buy their marketing suite. All of these options are between $160-250+ USD per month on top of what I pay. For the moment, I will remain loyal, but if anything better comes along, I won’t hesitate to switch. My hope is that the new platform which I will share in a sec, will get their acts together and develop a package tracker for yoga classes. Or heck, maybe I will go back to recipe cards!

So before you hop into a platform for classes ask yourself this:

• Will I be teaching in studios that handle bookings for me?

• Could I work through e-transfers and Facebook events? Since COVID a lot of people are more open to cash and e-transfer vs credit cards! Don’t be shy! This means that you avoid the cut that all credit card companies and payment processors take from your bottom line. Those fees really add up!

• Is it actually a booking platform that I need????

Once you are in a system, it is hard to change. You will lose your archives if you don't save them elsewhere. You and your clients will have to learn another system which is a bigger deal than you might realize. I have very loyal clients but I often lose someone when I make a big change in platforms. Be mindful of what you are choosing because it is a real investment of your time and money plus your clients’ attention spans.

The Big Online World & Do I Really Need An App????

The bigger questions come up with online platforms for courses and communication with your clients. As the world continues to rise in Vata, many are seeking the community connection of Kapha. And we want to do it without spiking our algorithms! This can come in the form of newsletters, blogs, community forums, an app with chat features, or something like Mighty Networks that devotes itself to community sites. I believe it is an absolute necessity to have a course platform that includes community chats. It raises the bar and binds your people to you and your community!

I have used the following options with a very quick subjective review:

• Mighty Networks (super expensive & not great course portal)

• Thinkific (not flexible and only good for courses)

• Kajabi (more as a user than a creator, no complaint other than it is a uni-tasker)

• Passion.io built my app (see below)

• And now Go High Level
  

Maybe it is easier to just cut to the chase and share why I have switched mainly from Passion  to Go High Level and then I can work backwards from there. 

Two years ago, I made a leap to create an app. Social media kept telling me that it was the way to go and it seemed to make sense as a way to bring everything into one central offering. As I looked into pricing, it was clear that Passion.io was the best way to go plus they promised low tech. The staff at Passion are devoted to their user’s success. I will miss that community. I thought an app would give me the one stop shop that I needed but in reality I still had to have an email platform and frankly, I still needed a website (more on that later). There wasn’t room on the app to have people settle in to get to know me. 

An app wasn’t the answer for me.

One day, in speaking to my app support dynamo Marta, out of my mouth came “I really only use this like Kajabi.” That statement was like stepping in glue. I couldn’t move past it as I asked myself why I was paying this much for something that is not being used? Isn’t it enough that I only use 10% of my brain? 

On that fateful week, I decided to do an audit of what I was paying per year on platforms which came in at over $8000. Gulp. It all happened like the tide, a slow rising of needs that could only be met by yet another platform. And wowee kazowee I got up over $8000/year.

My app was around $5500/year, which is actually not bad for an app but really bad if I am not needing its capacity. Moving forward with the support I wanted, the app could be costing more like $8000/yr after USD exchange. They offered me so many reductions and deals as I told them of my departure, but I couldn’t reason it out when I saw all the add ons I would still be using.

Kit was my latest email campaign and sales funnel platform. It is very good at what it does, but it comes in at around $750/year. What the actual???? Squarespace costs $275 or so per year for my website and domain. I used Vimeo to store videos that were separate from class videos. Chalk up another $350. The straw that really broke the camel’s back was an app called Zapier. It would act as a middleman between my app and stripe (payment processor), or my app and Momence. It is a system that sets triggers in motion like my clients coming to the end of a package and needing an email. Or, when you first signed on to get my newsletters, that was a Zap. I hate Zapier. I go into Math Freeze the minute I am faced with this grid of triggers and actions. To add insult to injury, I had to pay another $325 for that stupid platform.

I was DONE!

At the time, a coach told me that her course and her email funnel were coming through Go High Level. When I told her about my audit, she was super shocked. By taking away all of the platforms listed in my last paragraph, and replacing them with Go High Level, I will save $6000/year at minimum (before the app increase).

It is too early for me to know that Go High Level is the best platform on the planet but it is the one stop shop that I have longed for. I have launched my website; all courses and subscriptions; community chats; blogs like what you are reading right now; social media planning and execution; plus all sales funnels, email sequences and newsletters. All of this cost me $900 for one year because I hit a 50% off deal.

That same coach told me that someone in my position should have 7 hours of content for people to peruse once they find my site. I can do that on GHL. All of my blogs are there as well as course material. I can keep building that now under one umbrella instead of 8. 

I don’t love their customer service, but they are helpful and there are lots of YouTube videos. There isn’t a GHL community that I feel affiliated with, however, I really don’t need more of that in my life. I have enough community to maintain through my subscriptions, courses, classes, and my friends! I don’t need my platforms to try to be my BFFs. Do you know what I mean?

GHL says that yoga teachers can run class registrations through them but it isn’t true. I can run my YTT electives through them because they are one-off workshops and courses. They can cap numbers and provide a calendar with booking capabilities and that is fantastic! Running weekly classes with 5 & 10 packs won’t work however, because they can’t track packages. The only way I could run my classes on GHL is if I were to switch everyone to a simple subscription format. I don’t think my clients are ready for that, but I am slowly testing the waters. I do think this is likely the way forward for simplicity and consistency. However, not yet.

What do you think about subscriptions for classes? Are you doing that or still in the 5 and 10 pack world? One thing that I see with subscriptions is that the value can be greater because I include the archives of classes and 21 day challenges. Many of my clients have jumped at the recent switch to one or two classes per week per month, but there are still some for whom it does not make sense. The guaranteed recurring income of subscriptions sure is helpful. I would love to hear what your experience is on this. Really. I am not trying to get likes. I just really want more thoughts on this.

Go High Level’s course structures feel a lot like Kajabi. You can do sequences so that participants cannot proceed until they have completed the lesson. This is really helpful for YTT and other training programs like Living Your OM. 

I also have subscriptions like The Curious Yogi and The Teachers’ Lounge where the content is more open to peruse as needed instead of sequential. There are also really amazing community chat features that allow participants to support each other between our meetings. We can share ideas, thoughts, difficulties, and support without triggering the algorithms to try to sell us the next latest and greatest cure for being human. My next project is to get these community chats to be robust! I am excited about that!

GHL may not produce a website as slick as Squarespace but it is still a good website. When one platform does so much, there are sacrifices, but I am ready for that loss. I am excited to have more energy because I am only looking at one platform and no longer going broke trying to pay for so many. 

Email Platforms

Why would you want to have an email platform? Because it is all about connection these days! People want to know who they are supporting. A regular newsletter is a great way to have people get to know you and want to be around you and that is good business! Writing my weekly newsletter is therapy for me and it keeps me in touch with a lot more people than I see in my classes. It is also, along with social media, my best marketing tool. I can keep people aware of workshops, class changes, and retreats or programs without feeling like I am ‘hard selling.’

Please don’t use your newsletter blog to hard sell. Use is to show who you are. Let people connect with you. Tack on your promotions after your writing.

Your email list will become a commodity, not to sell, but to be an incentive to your hiring. Let’s say that you wanted to teach at a retreat. If you have a bigger list in which to share the info, you become an asset! The bigger your reach, the more appealing you are to people who might hire you. Of course, this also points to social media reach. A quick aside… My understanding now is that it isn’t the number of followers that matter on socials but it is your engagement. Can I say here how much I despise that world? I love the ability to market my stuff and stay engaged but the cost of social media on our mental health is too large to ignore.

I have used the following email platforms:

• Constant Contact (great templates, got more expensive than I needed)

• Mailchimp (good free option until it isn’t. I found it really limiting in the end and awkward to use for funnels)

• Kit (fantastic platform, way too expensive unless a paid newsletter is your thing)

• And now Go High Level
  

In what I do, I need an email platform that can also house funnels. If you don’t know what those are, they are the automatic emails you get when you click the box that offers you 10% off if you join that company’s newsletter list. I have sequenced emails that you would receive if you said you wanted YTT or any other course with me. They give more information about the program while also incentivizing buy in. I usually do 3 or 4 over a week for whoever clicked on the offer, and then let go. There is a real formula there and it is effective but I also feel like it is reaching a bit of a ‘fromage’ level. Must we all follow Tony Robbins' choices?

I need a platform that allows me to tag people. In my bigger newsletter subscriber list, I have tagged you as an instructor so that you will receive this email. I can also tag people that said they were interested in something special like prenatal or lower back health. It is a really useful feature that I believe even the free platforms will offer. Do your tags from day one and you will save a whole lot of forehead slapping moments “Who told me they wanted that info???”

Kit has a creator network where all of us creators can recommend each other from our bio and site. I think this is great if your main gig is writing or making money from Kit. I felt like it was another social media or Linked In kind of thing and so it just irritated me. All of these take time to populate and energy to maintain consistency. Just let me send my newsletters and be done with it. I don’t need to belong in these places.

Webites

My website was hosted on Squarespace and I have nothing but good to say about that experience. There is virtually no customer service but the platform is very easy to use. I am only getting rid of it because Go High Level hosts sites.

Ask yourself if you really need a website. I think they might be phasing out with social media and apps. I think of my website as a place where people can have a longer conversation with me. If they want to know the details, go to my site. Again, think about what that coach told me – 7 hours of content to get to know you!

Momence and Kit both have site-like features where I can show, in the case of Momence, my class packs and schedule. These sites are minimalist for what I do, but they would work for a lot of users! I just have too many trainings, retreats, and courses to not have a place for that larger conversation.

Wrapping It Up

Well, if you made it this far, good on you. That was a lot of information. I hope it was helpful. I am excited about the year ahead in that I feel like I am realistically owning and running my business. Self-employment is such a strange world where yes, we are in control of our hours, but truthfully most of us are bouncing around behind the pick up truck of trying to please enough people to make a viable business. 

Since 1998, I have owned and operated 3 studio spaces; rented multiple studio spaces from others; taught in churches and townhalls; cleaned goose poop in grassy parks over COVID; and pivoted more times than I can count onto online and beyond. I continue to be curious as to how to make a life of greater ease while also being so grateful for the richness that this life has given me. I don’t love the constant uncertainty but I don’t think any job holds certainty anymore. At least my work is truly in my hands and not those of a corporate giant whose decisions have nothing to do with my well being. 

My job is to show up and help others to love themselves a little more. I get to talk to people about down-regulating their nervous systems and embracing the bumpy rides of their life that got them to this place. I spend my days focused on connection, expansion, and belonging. I do not want to spend my days populating multiple sites and never hanging out with my dude and my dog. I want a fulsome life of balance. 

As of 2026, I will only be paying for 

• Go High Level (I imagine it will be around $2000 post excellent deal)

• Momence ($89/mo)

• Canva (can’t get rid of this fab graphic design platform $199/yr)

• And Zoom ($215)

My yearly costs will be around $3500 instead of $8400. Going forward I will see a $5000 difference but this year, with the deal from GHL, it is closer to $6000. That is a significant change in my stress level.

So that is my platform story. As with all platforms, I have affiliate links if you would like to use them to benefit us both!

For Go High Level, use this link here

If you are interested in Momence, reach out and I can connect you using your email. 

I hope this was useful to you. Please let me know if you have any questions or want to talk this through further. I promise it won’t lead to an email funnel.

Yoga Teacher Training

300Hrs

coming this winter!

YTT 300Hrs​

If you are looking to get your 300HR certification in a way that is deep, wide, and focused on your personal growth, this is your training. The core curriculum will launch in January 2026, so there is no need to fully commit until then, but I have some exciting electives planned for the fall to keep you learning and engaged.

The structure of the 300HR program covers both a core curriculum and a series of electives, all adding up to 300 hours of training. The electives are open to any teacher looking to boost their skills and refresh their minds.

From Kids Yoga; to Vinyasa Flow; Hands on Assisting; and a Soul's Focus coaching program, we have you covered!

You will have 24 months to attain your full 300 hours, so keep track and keep growing.

I hope to walk beside you here.

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