Square

Designing prepaid commitments within Square Appointments

Square Appointments made booking simple, but sellers lacked predictable revenue. After each visit, retention depended on buyers returning on their own.

The solution was packages: prepaid bundles of services or classes that buyers purchased upfront and redeemed over time. But scoping it correctly mattered as much as building it. Early discussions explored using unlimited classes with a monthly expiry as a shortcut, effectively a subscription. I pushed back. Square already had a subscriptions product built for retail, and borrowing that model for fitness would have misapplied infrastructure designed for a completely different mental model.

Studios needed credits. A yoga client buys a 10-class pack and uses it over 90 days. That's a different relationship than a recurring membership. Even studios that offer unlimited classes sell them as a monthly commitment at a lower per-class rate, not a one-time bundle with an expiry. Conflating the two would have meant one model doing the job of two, neither correctly.

Keeping that distinction intact meant building a proper credit tracking model for packages, while preserving space for memberships to be built the right way later.