Simple PT

Booking and payments for personal trainers

Personal trainers lose hours each week to managing schedules, invoices and payments by hand. Simple PT put all three in one app — clients book from a trainer's live availability and pay from a pre-loaded wallet. CodeLeap designed and built it end to end, shipping the MVP to iOS and Android in 2 months.

What we did CodeLeap built the bespoke trainer scheduling interface, client booking and invoicing, and a virtual wallet where clients top up by bank transfer and sessions are debited automatically, which removes payment processor fees entirely and kept the MVP inside budget.

Simple PT exists to take the administration out of personal training, letting clients see their trainer's availability, book sessions and pay for them from their phone, while giving trainers control of their schedule and their invoicing. CodeLeap designed and built the app for iOS and Android in two months on a very tight budget, which shaped the engineering approach as much as the feature set. The result is a product that removes the scheduling and payment chasing that consumes a large share of a self-employed trainer's working week.

Product features

Virtual wallet

Rather than processing card payments or routing through a third-party provider, clients top up a virtual wallet by bank transfer and sessions are debited from it automatically. We worked through in-app payments, cards and PayPal with the client before settling on this approach, which avoided payment processor fees entirely and kept the MVP simpler, and in practice it works extremely well for both sides.
Trainer scheduling interface

The ability to set and adjust availability easily is the single most important feature for a personal trainer, so we built a complete scheduling interface from scratch, offering a full weekly view, the option to repeat the current week's settings and the freedom to make one-off changes at any point. Trainers' weeks are rarely identical, and an interface that assumes otherwise gets abandoned.
Simple client booking

For clients the flow is deliberately minimal, requiring them only to top up their wallet, check the schedule and book, after which the trainer is notified and the payment is taken from the wallet automatically. Nothing further is asked of either party.
Repeat and custom sessions

Clients can schedule recurring sessions while retaining the flexibility to adjust individual bookings, which reflects how training relationships actually run, with a standing weekly slot and regular exceptions around it.
Trainer-managed bookings and invoices

Trainers can manage bookings and invoices on their clients' behalf, which matters in a business where a good proportion of clients would rather text their trainer than use an app, and the trainer needs to be able to act for them without leaving the system.

Challenge

Personal trainers spend a considerable part of their time managing schedules and chasing payments, work that generates no income and displaces the coaching they are actually paid for. Solving it required a booking system that could handle repeat sessions while remaining easy to customise, since a trainer's week shifts constantly and a rigid recurring booking model would create more work than it saved. Trainers also needed the ability to manage bookings and invoices for their clients directly. The most significant constraint was commercial, because the project ran on a very tight budget while the top priority remained the quality of the user experience, which meant every element of the build had to justify its cost and the payment architecture in particular had to be chosen with running costs in mind.

Solution

CodeLeap developed and launched the Simple PT app for iOS and Android in two months. The central decision was to use a virtual wallet funded by bank transfer instead of conventional payment processing, which removed processor fees from the model altogether, simplified the MVP and kept the build within budget without compromising the experience. Around it we built a bespoke scheduling interface giving trainers a weekly view, repeatable settings and the ability to make custom changes whenever they need to, and a booking flow for clients that amounts to topping up, choosing a slot and confirming. Trainers can manage bookings and invoices on their clients' behalf, so nobody is locked out of the system by their own reluctance to use an app.

Tech stack

The tech chosen was our speciality, enabling fast development of performant user interfaces and a reliable infrastructure. Simple PT is available for both iOS and Android.

Frontend: React Native (iOS & Android)
Backend: Python, Django, PostgreSQL
Hosting: AWS