Praise for Arketa
When I first started my own studio, it was just me doing the teaching and booking. So I was pretty comfortable using Wix for my website and booking. It wasn't very streamlined nor user friendly for clients, but it was inexpensive (I think like $600 for three years).
Once I began contracting other instructors to work with me, it became clear pretty quickly that it was super unreliable and almost unusable to the other instructors. I wasted no time in entertaining a cold call from Arketa. It sounded simple but included all the bells and whistles on my checklist and the price was right. The sales agent worked with me to get a deal that fit my small studio (3 reformers with plans to expand to a 8 (or 10) reformer group room with two private rooms.
The onboarding process has been extensive. Where Wix had next to zero resources to help me build my booking platform, Arketa provided me with a checklist of items complete with how-to videos, plus FIVE face to face onboarding check in calls. The data migration from Wix to Arketa is customizable, so I chose to only migrate my client listserv and current package holders. This is the part that remains to be done, so I'll update this when I'm completely onboarded. But I just had to say what a breath of fresh air it has been to be hand-held through this process.
For a moment I was very scared I'd made a mistake. Arketa is fairly new to the scene and I stumbled upon a studio owner's Reddit posts of bad experiences with Arketa. I mentioned a little bit about this person's account to the Arketa onboarding specialist I'm working with (Erica) and she reassured me that they would continue supporting me through the process. She's been incredibly available to me as I set up my Arketa dashboard.
Before starting my own studio I had worked mainly with Mindbody and had hoped to work with them again because I'm familiar with them and rarely had issues. However, in most recent years of working with them, if I did have an issue I found the customer service to be TERRIBLE.
Again, I'll update soon, but just wanted to throw out some praise for Arketa.
PS- I'm very anxious about this. So unless you can provide any specific and helpful advice related to your Arketa experience, please don't share until after my update.