📱 New Feature: Phone Numbers

I'm excited — really excited — to announce a feature we've been heads-down building for a long time: Phone Numbers in Tula.

Studio owners can now provision a dedicated phone number for their studio. Right inside your Tula Software account. Self-serve. End to end.

I want to spend a minute on what that actually means, because I think it's easy to underestimate.

Getting a real phone number that can text U.S. consumers in 2026 is not a "click a button and you have one" situation. The carriers — for very good reasons — built an entire compliance regime around it. To send a single text message to a student, you legally need:

• A registered brand with the carriers, vetted against your business identity

• A registered campaign describing how and why you'll be texting

• A published Terms of Service that students can read before opting in

• A published Privacy Policy that explains how their number gets used

• A compliant opt-in flow where students actively agree to be texted

• A compliant opt-out flow that handles STOP and HELP correctly

• An approved phone number provisioned to your registered brand

• A messaging pipeline that respects all of the above on every send

So we made it simple. One signup. Every one of those steps, handled. No spreadsheets, no third-party accounts to juggle, no legal pages to draft on your own, no separate hosting to figure out. You give us the basics about your studio and we walk the rest of the road for you.

What we actually built

Inside Tula, you fill out a single guided signup. We take it from there:

• Your brand gets registered with the carriers from the info you give us

• Your campaign gets registered with the right use case for a studio

• Terms of Service get hosted for you, branded to your studio, at a URL students can actually visit

• Your Privacy Policy gets hosted alongside it

• Your phone number gets provisioned and attached to your brand

• Compliance handling is wired up, end to end, so STOP and HELP just work

• Sending is connected to the rest of Tula, so your number is ready the moment it's approved

When your number gets approved, the very first thing you can do with it is send text messages to your students — from your studio's own dedicated number, with your studio's identity on it, fully compliant, no asterisks.

And then there's everything next

This release is also the foundation of an entire communications layer we can now build on top of Tula. The hard, ugly, unglamorous infrastructure work — brand, campaign, compliance, hosting, provisioning, pipeline — is done. Every phone-based capability we build from here gets to stand on top of it.

That's the part I'm most excited about. But that's a story for other release posts. Today, the news is: you can get a real phone number for your studio, inside Tula, and start texting your students from it.

How to get started

Owners — head to your studio settings menu and click Phone Numbers (it sits right under Custom Domains). Pay a one time setup fee of $199 and agree to the $19/mo maintenance fee. Walk through signup. We'll handle the rest.

Note: Carrier approvals usually take a few business days but can take up to 4 weeks so we recommend signing up as soon as possible.

🥳 New Feature: Upgraded Student Apps!

I'm excited to announce a feature we've been working on for a while — the brand-new AI App Designer. It's the biggest upgrade to the mobile setup we've ever shipped, and it completely changes how you customize your studio's app.

The old way worked, but it asked a lot of you. Pick this color, upload that background, tweak an opacity slider, preview, repeat. If you weren't a designer, getting to something that genuinely felt like your studio was a slog.

The new way is a chat. You describe the feeling you're going for — "warm, calming yoga retreat with linen tones and lots of whitespace," or "bold high-energy HIIT studio, dark with neon accents," or "boutique pilates with an editorial fashion vibe" — and a minute later your phone preview reloads with a fully custom-designed app. Landing screen, internal pages, colors, typography, the whole thing. Don't love something? Tell it what to change ("rounder buttons," "more breathing room at the top," "softer green") and it iterates with you. Every version you generate is saved in the sidebar — jump back to a previous design anytime, then hit Publish when it's right.

Three things I want to specifically call out, because they make this much more than a "pretty picture" generator:

📅 Today's classes, live on the home screen — your landing page can show today's schedule with class names, times, and instructors, pulled fresh from your calendar on every page load. Great for the student who opens the app five minutes before walking in and wants to know "wait, is the 5:30 still on?" No more stale screenshots — what they see is what's actually happening today.

▶️ Featured recording spotlight — pick one class recording that’s public, and choose to make it a featured vido, and the AI Designer drops a polished video card directly onto your home screen. Title, instructor, date, built-in player. Perfect for a "watch this first" moment when someone opens your app for the first time.

👋 Personalized greetings — the AI can welcome each student by name and show their attendance count, so opening the app feels like walking into a studio where someone knows them.

These aren't baked-in screenshots — they're live on every render, for every student.

Your existing mobile setup is still there. Nothing has been taken away — the manual color and background controls work exactly like they did before, and you can mix and match. The AI Designer is a faster path layered on top of everything you already have.

We're rolling this out to all customers on all plans and we hope you have as much fun playing with it as we did building it. Try a few different prompts. Have fun with it. Then show us what you came up with, we'd genuinely love to see what you make!

New Mobile Check-In App 📱❤️

I’m excited to announce a new feature we've been working on: a Mobile Check-In App that lets you run your front desk from your phone.

The Mobile Check-In App gives you everything you need to manage check-ins, view your schedule, and look up student accounts — all from your Android or iPhone.

How to Get It

Go to the dropdown menu in the upper right of your Tula dashboard. You'll see a new Mobile Admin Apps section right at the top. Tap Mobile Check-In and it opens in a new tab. From there, add it to your home screen and you're all set.

No App Store download needed — it's a Progressive Web App (PWA), which means it installs directly from your browser, has its own icon on your home screen, and opens full-screen like a native app.

Your Schedule, At a Glance

When you open the app you'll see today's full class schedule. Each class shows the class name, time, instructor, and a live count of how many students are checked in vs. registered. You can flip forward and backward through dates, and there's a "Jump to Today" shortcut to get back quickly.

One-Tap Check-In

Tap into any class to see the full roster — registered students, who's checked in, and who hasn't arrived yet. Checking someone in is a single tap. Marking a no-show is just as easy. It's the same check-in flow you're used to on desktop, just optimized for a phone screen with big, easy-to-tap targets.

Student Profiles

Tap any student's name to pull up their full profile: contact info, credits, active passes, payment history, attendance history, and upcoming registrations. Everything you'd see on the desktop, formatted for mobile. Great for quickly answering "do I have credits left?" or checking someone's pass status while they're standing in front of you.

Real-Time, Same Data

This is the same data as your desktop check-in page — it's not a separate system. Check someone in on your phone and it shows up on desktop immediately. There's nothing extra to set up, no syncing, no second login. It uses the same Tula account you already have.

Who Can Access It

Only Owners, Admins, and Desk Staff can use the mobile check-in app, same permissions as the desktop check-in page. (Coming soon: Enhanced permissions for instructors on their own classes)

More Apps Coming Soon!

We’ll continue to lean in heavily on Apps that can be installed directly from the browser - just like your student apps. We believe for our use cases Progressive Web Apps are not just sufficient but offer an opportunity to provide a superior overall experience for mobile users. We hope you love it as much as we do!

Updates! 🥳 Purchase Agreements, New Settings, and a Redesigned Outbox

I’m happy to announce more new updates! This time we’re introducing Purchase Agreements. Purchase Agreements can be added to any pass you sell, and when activated, students will be required to confirm their agreement in order to proceed with payment. Great for all sorts of passes, but in particular things like teacher trainings, retreats, memberships with specific rules and more.

Membership Settings

Speaking of memberships, now that the Federal Trade Commission’s “click to cancel” rule is a bit up in the air, we’ve made this a setting that you can control. On the memberships page you’ll now see a setting that allows you to determine whether or not student can cancel on their own.

Registration Settings

We’ve also introduced another setting on the Registration Settings page. For a while now we’ve had the option for you to require payment on events to ensure people have credits on file for the event to which they are registering. We didn’t however take into account when the pass expires. Sometimes a feature, sometimes a bug, depending on you and your preferences. Now, you can decide whether or not you want people to be able to register beyond the date of expiration on their passes. Keep in mind, membership passes expire and then renew so when turning this on people will only be able to register for events up until the date of renewal on their membership passes.

Refreshed Design on the Outbox

With our purchase triggers feature becoming more and more popular, along with some upcoming to be announced features, there’s a lot more one to one activity in the outbox. Now our design takes this into consideration and adds some useful quick links to student profiles, along with an updated design to make opens and clicks easy to see at a glance.

More Soon!

We’ve been hard at work on some BIG new features that’ll help you sustain and grow your business, and promote you and your brand to your students and customers. In the meantime we hope you love these updates!

New Feature: Kiosk for Self Service Check-ins

I’m excited to announce our newest feature, a Kiosk experience for students, enabling self service check-ins and a big time saver for studio owners.

On any event, you can now enable “Kiosk Mode” - either from the today page or any individual event page - which will activate the kiosk experience.

Progressive Web App

Tap on the “Kiosk” link in the left navigation to open up the Kiosk index page, which will list all your remaining events for the day that have Kiosk mode enabled. Save this page to the home page of a tablet or even to the doc of a mac or pc, and you’ll have a dedicated app-like experience.

The admin side remains the same experience you’re used to. Simply refresh your admin page to see the status of all your checked in students.

We’re thrilled to release this update to all customers on all plans and hope you find it as much of a help as we do!