Orhuk
Run your gym, club, or studio just by talking to it
Hey IH 👋
I'm Asher, a college student in Santa Fe, and I just shipped Orhuk — all-in-one software for gyms, sports clubs, studios, and recreation facilities.
The origin is unglamorous: I worked the front desk at my college's activity center for two years. The job was chaos — sticky notes for shift handoffs, scattered messages, a clunky setup for rentals and bookings, and a stack of tools that didn't talk to each other. I kept thinking, "why does running a facility need five disconnected apps and hundreds of dollars a month in software?" So I started building one that didn't.
Orhuk puts scheduling, bookings, memberships, payments, waivers, and point-of-sale in a single dashboard. Two things I'm most proud of:
1. You can run it in plain English. I built an ML pipeline that turns natural-language commands into real operational changes — type "raise court rentals to $50" or "add a Saturday clinic" and it just happens. No menus, no admin panel. In testing it cuts management time ~80%.
2. It's completely free. Every feature unlocked — no tiers, no per-seat fees, no contracts. The whole thing is monetized by a flat 3% on transactions, so I only make money when my customers do.
The business model was the scariest decision. "Free everything + 3%" means I'm betting entirely on volume and alignment instead of locking value behind paywalls. So far it's live with real facilities taking real payments, but I'd genuinely love this community's take:
- For those who've done usage-based/transaction pricing — what bit you that I won't see coming?
- Does "free + 3%" read as a no-brainer to you, or as too-good-to-be-true?
Happy to share anything about the build, the AI layer, or the GTM. Thanks for reading 🙏
8 Comments
The ‘free + 3%’ model is smart for early adoption removes every objection at the door. The real challenge is getting facilities to trust a new platform over something they’ve used for years. Curious how you’re approaching that first conversation with facility managers?
Exactly right — the objection is never features, it's fear. Most facility managers we talk to have scar tissue from their last migration: a week of broken workflows, retraining staff, things slipping through the cracks. So we don't open by claiming we're better. We open by proving switching won't hurt — onboarding sets the system up the way they already run, so there's no adaptation phase to dread.
Then the real hook lands: we're one of the only platforms that's multi-vertical without giving up the depth of a CourtReserve or Mindbody. That makes us a marketplace, not just software — at scale our facilities get discovered and booked across the whole network, demand they can't generate alone. On top of that sits an AI layer that lets someone book through ChatGPT or Claude ("book me a tennis court near me tonight") — so as search moves to LLMs, our operators are already there.
The first conversation is just removing the fear. The reach and the AI distribution are what make staying the harder choice.
The fear removal framing is exactly right that’s the only way to get facility managers to move. The multi-vertical + AI discovery angle is a strong long term moat too. Are you on X, Telegram or Discord? Would love to connect distribution for platforms like this is exactly what I help with.”
The part I found most interesting wasn't the AI or the pricing model.
It was that the product seems to have started from living with the day-to-day friction instead of trying to imagine it from the outside. That usually leads to a very different understanding of what actually needs fixing.
Curious which assumptions changed the most once real facilities started using it.
The assumption that broke first was about customization. I came in thinking facilities wanted control: more settings, more ways to bend the tool around how they already worked. What they actually wanted was to think about it less. The friction was never a missing feature — it was the mental overhead of operating the tool at all.
I think that's downstream of something bigger. Our relationship with software was built on habit. We've been trained to believe powerful means lots of knobs, that capability should be visible and earned. But that's a norm we inherited, not a law. A good tool should recede — you notice a hammer only when it breaks; the rest of the time it's just an extension of the work, not a thing you're "using."
So the goal sounds almost self-defeating: make it so easy it barely needs to be used. Not unused — invisible. The bookings, payments, the admin just happen, and the operator gets their attention back for the part they actually care about. That's the version of "easy" I'm chasing: software that gets out of the way which is quite ironic lol.
That's exactly what I was getting at.
I'd be interested in unpacking one implication of that shift, but it'll be easier outside the thread.
What's the best email to reach you on?
for some reason I am not able to post my email in this threat, but my linkedin is public, if you can reach out that would be great! thank you!
I couldn't reach you on LinkedIn, so I found the support@orhuk.com address on your website and sent you a note there.