Sportl's Gym-Friendly Model Challenges Classpass. Will Studios Benefit?

The commission rates paid to independent fitness studios have long been a source of tension in London's boutique gym scene. Classpass, the incumbent booking platform, has faced years of complaints from studio owners who say they're forced to accept minimal payouts whilst watching their classes fill with members who will never convert to direct customers. That friction has created an opening for Sportl, a new pay-as-you-go booking app founded by two former Bank of England employees.

Matthew Austin and Ryan Lovelock spent evenings after their central banking day jobs walking London's streets, sitting down with over 300 gym owners and managers. What they heard repeatedly was frustration with existing marketplace platforms that leave studios with little control over pricing or availability. Their solution, which launched on Tuesday, lets independent gyms set their own prices and manage their class inventory directly, with Sportl taking a commission on bookings rather than dictating terms to its partners.

Tony Chin, founder of Amica Shoreditch, captures the studio owner's dilemma neatly. 'Users who access our classes through Classpass don't want a membership because they already have one,' he told the company. 'If we converted every Classpass member we would have thousands of pounds, however, we often make nothing and have to turn away our own members; we look busy, but we're struggling.'

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We look busy, but we're struggling. Users who access our classes through Classpass don't want a membership because they already have one.

Classpass disputes this characterisation, noting it sets negotiated floor rates with partners and uses real-time data to fill predicted empty spots, with gyms earning more for peak-time classes.

The flexible work factor

The post-pandemic shift to hybrid working has created a cohort of Londoners who need fitness options that don't assume they're in the same location five days a week. Traditional gym memberships make little economic sense for someone who's in the office Tuesdays and Wednesdays but working from Kent the rest of the week. Sportl's pay-per-class model targets precisely this demographic, alongside younger professionals who've largely abandoned boozy client meetings for wellness-focused networking.

Lovelock points to a genuine cultural shift. 'What we found a lot as well talking to focus groups, industries where people take clients out, a lot of that used to take part in the pub,' he said. 'Nowadays I know quite a few people that love going to pilates or brunch as that network side instead.' Whether this represents a permanent change or a temporary fashion remains an open question, but the business model doesn't require it to be universal—just large enough to sustain a marketplace.

The company has secured 50 London studios for launch, including RFRM and Trainyard, with plans to expand nationally once it's established a foothold in the capital. The backing comes from a strategic investor group that includes Kevin Hewitt, former EMEA chairman of FTI Consulting who now chairs Sportl's board, James Hardy, a former Deliveroo executive, and health tech investor Jamie Hearne. The Deliveroo connection isn't coincidental—the business model shares DNA with the on-demand platforms that reshaped food delivery and transportation.

A marketplace moment, or already too late?

Austin's claim that fitness is 'one of the lone sectors without a marketplace' requires qualification. Classpass launched in 2013 and has operated in London for years. What Austin means, though he doesn't quite say it, is that fitness lacks a gym-friendly marketplace—one where studios feel they're getting a fair deal rather than being strongarmed into accepting whatever terms a dominant platform dictates.

The UK fitness industry reached £6.5bn in 2025, according to UK Active's latest report, with total revenue hitting £5.7bn. More than a third of UK adults now use fitness apps, according to the same research. What's interesting here is that despite this scale and the evident appetite for digital fitness solutions, no platform has achieved the dominance that Uber secured in ride-hailing or Deliveroo in restaurant delivery.

That suggests either structural reasons why fitness marketplaces struggle to reach escape velocity, or a genuine opportunity for a better-designed product.

The test for Sportl will be whether its gym-friendly commission structure can actually sustain itself at scale. Classpass didn't start out squeezing studios—competitive dynamics and the need to maintain low consumer pricing whilst generating returns for investors drove those economics over time. Sportl has hired Lucy Gray, a fitness influencer with over 12,000 followers, as marketing manager, and Sean Sevant, who previously worked in sales at David Lloyd, as partnerships manager. That's a sensible combination of consumer-facing credibility and industry relationships, but it won't insulate the company from the fundamental tension between keeping studios happy and keeping prices low enough to drive adoption.

The couple's initial concept focused on grassroots sports clubs before they pivoted to boutique fitness classes, determining the former would be difficult to sustain 'from a monetary perspective'. That pragmatism suggests they understand marketplace economics. Whether they can maintain gym-friendly terms whilst scaling, or whether they'll eventually face the same pressures that turned Classpass into the platform studio owners love to hate, will determine whether Sportl becomes a genuine alternative or simply recreates the same problems with different branding.

The company has its sights set on national expansion, aided by the fact that several chains already working with the platform in London operate branches elsewhere. For the moment, though, the battleground is the capital's boutique fitness scene, where hybrid workers and wellness-focused professionals are rewriting the rules of when, where and how they exercise. The £250,000 pre-seed round gives Sportl runway to prove whether that market is large enough to sustain another platform, or whether London's independent studios will find themselves, once again, squeezed between competing marketplaces offering slightly different versions of the same difficult economics.

More articles by Ross Williams