Your practice deserves a home
Instagram can't shut down.
VeloCMS is a publishing platform for independent yoga teachers: each class is an Event with registration, meditation audio plays on your posts, and paid memberships run through your own Stripe account, all in one place with no plugin stack, no $129/mo Mindbody subscription, and no algorithm deciding which students see your announcements. The Wabi Sabi theme (paper-white, hairline rules, terracotta accent, asymmetric reading column) is included with every plan.
Why independent yoga teachers keep hitting the same walls
Three different platforms, three different problems, one root cause — none of them were built for what you actually do.
Instagram owns your students
Yoga teachers who built their following on Instagram in 2018 watched their organic reach collapse through 2022–2024 as the algorithm shifted relentlessly toward Reels, paid promotion, and watch-time signals that a weekly Vinyasa clip can't compete with. Your 12,000 followers don't receive your posts unless you pay to boost them. Your account can be suspended for a policy violation, a report from a competitor, or simply a platform moderation error — and there is no appeal process that works at human timescales. Every student who found you on Instagram and never gave you their email is an audience member you don't own. Waking up to a suspended account the week before a retreat is not a hypothetical — it has happened to teachers with 5-year-old accounts in good standing.
Mindbody is built for studios, not solo teachers
Mindbody's entry tier starts at $129 per month — designed for a studio with five instructors, two front-desk staff, a physical location, and a retail shelf. It assumes recurring in-person classes at a fixed address, a payment terminal, and a team that can dedicate hours per week to the back-office. For a solo teacher running three community classes a week plus an online program, you're paying for 80% of software you will never touch. The onboarding alone takes weeks. Acuity Scheduling and Calendly are lighter but designed for appointment bookings, not for a publishing workflow where each Tuesday Vinyasa sits as an Event next to free meditation audio and philosophy essays.
Squarespace is pretty but doesn't handle your full stack
Squarespace gives you a beautiful home page, and then the stack starts growing. You need a third-party scheduling tool ($20/mo), a separate newsletter platform ($15–40/mo), a membership paywall ($15/mo), and a podcast or audio hosting service ($10/mo) for your meditation MP3s. By month three you're managing four billing subscriptions, copying student emails between systems, and wondering why your site loads at 3.4 seconds. The problem isn't Squarespace — it's that its ecosystem is designed around visual design, not the specific publishing and audience-building needs of an independent wellness teacher.
What a yoga-teacher-first platform gives you
Class events with registration, meditation audio, paid memberships, a newsletter, and the Wabi Sabi aesthetic, bundled into one platform with no plugin overhead and no algorithm between you and your students.
Classes as Events with registration
Create each class as an Event in Admin → Events: Tuesday Vinyasa 7am, Thursday Yin 6pm, Saturday Breathwork 9am, each with a date, time, venue or Zoom link, and a capacity. Events list on your public events page, students can register, and a full class can run a waitlist. A weekly class is one Event per session; Events do not repeat on their own.
Audio embed with native player
Attach a meditation recording (MP3, M4A or AAC) to a post in the Podcast panel of its settings, and the post shows a native audio player at the top: no SoundCloud embed, no third-party audio host. Make the post free for everyone or gate it behind your paid membership tier, and the player goes with it. Students stream it right on your site.
Membership-gated content via BYOK Stripe
Connect your own Stripe account — VeloCMS takes 0% platform fee on reader revenue. Gate your online class library, advanced meditation series, or retreat preparation guides behind a monthly subscription. Your Stripe account, your students, your income.
Wabi Sabi mindful theme included
The Wabi Sabi theme is included with every plan. Paper-white background, hairline horizontal rules, asymmetric reading column, terracotta accent: the slow-living aesthetic that yoga teachers reach for on Squarespace and Pinterest. One click to apply in Admin → Themes, zero content changes required.
Newsletter for retreat and workshop announcements
Collect reader emails on your blog and send broadcast newsletters directly from the admin. Announce your autumn retreat to the people who signed up because they trust you — not to an Instagram algorithm that may or may not show them the post.
Features yoga teachers actually need
Class Events, a native audio player on posts, BYOK Stripe memberships, the Wabi Sabi theme, a retreat newsletter, and long-form essay SEO, all in one place without a plugin in sight.
Class Events with registration
Each class is an Event with a date, time, venue or Zoom link, and a capacity. Events list on your public events page with Event structured data, students register there, and a waitlist takes over when a class fills. There are no recurring schedule cards: a weekly class means one Event per session. No Mindbody, no Calendly, no embedded widget pulling in a third-party UI that clashes with your Wabi Sabi aesthetic.
Meditation audio with native player
Attach an MP3, M4A or AAC file (up to 500 MB) in the Podcast panel of a post's settings. It plays in a native browser audio player at the top of the post, one player per post, so a longer practice is its own post. WAV files are not accepted; export to MP3 or M4A first. Audio counts toward your plan's storage. Free posts play for everyone; on a members-only post the player appears only after the paywall.
Membership-gated online class library
The paywall works at the post level: set a post to members-only and its audio player goes with it. Students sign up via your Stripe checkout (your Stripe account, not ours), gain immediate access, and manage their subscription directly through a member portal on your subdomain. You receive 100% of the subscription revenue minus Stripe's standard 2.9% + 30¢ processing fee.
Wabi Sabi theme — designed for slow-living content
Paper-white surface, single-column asymmetric reading layout, hairline rules between sections, a terracotta accent, Cormorant Garamond headings and Lora body text. All applied via CSS custom properties, so you can swap to any other theme with zero content restructuring. The restraint principle of wabi-sabi is built into the whitespace ratios.
Retreat and workshop broadcast newsletter
Write a newsletter in the same TipTap editor you use for posts. Send to your full subscriber list or filter by membership tier (free readers vs paid members). Retreat spots fill faster when announcements go to people who opted in rather than relying on whether Instagram chose to show your Reel that morning.
Philosophy essays with long-form SEO
Write a 2,000-word essay on a philosophy concept. The AI writing assistant drafts alongside you, the SEO panel checks your title, meta description, heading structure, link count and readability, and BlogPosting JSON-LD ships automatically so search engines and AI answer engines can read what each essay is about.
VeloCMS vs Mindbody vs Squarespace vs Instagram
| Feature | VeloCMS | Mindbody | Squarespace | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Custom domain | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Class schedule with registration | Yes | Yes | Manual blocks | Manual posts |
| Meditation audio with native player | Yes | No | Plugin required | Reels only |
| Membership-gated content | Yes | Yes | Built in, with a 7% platform fee on Basic (5% Core, 1% Plus, 0% Advanced) | No |
| Stripe BYOK — 0% platform fee | Yes | No | 2% transaction fee on entry plan | N/A |
| Cost per year ($) | 108 – 348 | 1,548+ | Paid plan (price varies by billing country) | Free — but rented |
From Instagram or Mindbody to your own site in five steps
No developer, no Squarespace consultant, no $129/mo studio software. Get your class schedule, audio library, and memberships live in an afternoon.
Export your Instagram audience or Mindbody / Squarespace contacts
From Instagram, use the Download Your Information feature to export your follower list (note: Instagram only gives you usernames, not emails — this is precisely why building an owned list matters). From Mindbody or Acuity, export your client list as a CSV. VeloCMS accepts CSV imports for blog member seeding.
Upload your CSV and import your audience
In Admin → Members → Import, upload a CSV with an email column and, if you have them, name, tags, newsletter and tier columns (tier is free or paid). The import adds members silently: VeloCMS sends no welcome email, so send your first newsletter campaign yourself, and import only people who have agreed to hear from you.
Set up your weekly classes as Events
In Admin → Events, create an Event for each session: Vinyasa, Yin, Breathwork, Meditation. Set the date, time, duration, venue or Zoom link, and a capacity. Every Event lists on your public events page, which students can bookmark. A weekly class is a new Event each week, so duplicate last week's rather than starting from scratch.
Add your first meditation audio
Open a post, then its settings, and attach your MP3, M4A or AAC file in the Podcast panel. Set the post visibility to free or members-only and hit publish. The audio player appears at the top of the post, with no SoundCloud account, no embed code, and no third-party audio host eating into your load time.
Activate Wabi Sabi theme and open member signups via your Stripe account
In Admin → Themes, click Wabi Sabi → Apply. In Admin → Settings → Membership, paste your Stripe publishable key, secret key and webhook signing secret, add the webhook URL shown on that page in your Stripe dashboard, then set your monthly subscription price under Tiers. Your site is live on your velocms.org subdomain; point a custom domain CNAME when you're ready to go fully independent.
Start a 14-day free trial. After it, Pro ($9/mo) covers your custom domain and paid memberships.
Pro
$9
per month
- Unlimited posts
- Custom domain + SSL
- BYOK Stripe memberships (0% fee)
- Audio on posts, free or members-only
- AI writing assistant
- Retreat broadcast newsletters
Business
$29
per month
- Unlimited posts
- Multi-teacher studio blog
- Custom sender domain (email)
- Priority support
- Team collaboration
- Everything in Pro
Questions yoga teachers ask before switching
Honest answers — no Mindbody upsell.
How does VeloCMS handle weekly recurring class schedules?
Create each class as a VeloCMS Event (Admin → Events) with a date, time, and capacity — not a tag-based schedule field, since VeloCMS doesn't have dedicated day-of-week/time/location fields on regular posts. Events show up in your public events calendar automatically, students can register, and you can still cross-post a class announcement to your blog feed with a link to the event. No external scheduling tool, no embedded Calendly widget.
Can students stream meditation audio directly from my site?
Yes. Attach an MP3, M4A or AAC file (up to 500 MB) in the Podcast panel of a post's settings, and the published post shows a native browser audio player at the top. There is no SoundCloud account, no Spotify embed, and no third-party player that clashes with your site design. WAV files are not accepted, so export to MP3 or M4A first. Audio counts toward your plan's storage (5 GB on Pro, 50 GB on Business). Free posts stream for all visitors; on members-only posts the player appears only for people who can read the post.
How do I set up paid online class memberships?
In Admin -- Settings -- Membership, paste your Stripe publishable key, secret key and webhook signing secret (all copied from your Stripe dashboard), then add the webhook URL shown on that page as an endpoint in Stripe. Set your monthly subscription price under Tiers -- you keep 100% of the revenue minus Stripe's standard processing fee (2.9% + 30 cents per transaction). VeloCMS charges 0% platform fee. Once connected, set any post to members-only; its audio player goes with it. Students who land on gated content see a sign-up prompt that routes them to your Stripe checkout and returns them to your site, and access follows the payment.
Why is Wabi Sabi the recommended theme for yoga teachers?
Wabi Sabi is a theme built around the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of restraint and imperfection -- paper-white background, generous whitespace, single-column asymmetric reading layout, hairline dividers, a terracotta accent, Cormorant Garamond headings and Lora body text, which read well on long-form philosophy essays and short class announcements alike. It avoids the glossy wellness-brand cliches (oversaturated greens, stock photo gradients, bold-all-caps headers) and instead communicates that the teacher writing here has something real to say. It is included with every plan, like the other themes in the catalog, and you can switch themes at any time.
Can I migrate my Mindbody or Squarespace site to VeloCMS?
Yes. For Squarespace, export via Settings -- Advanced -- Import/Export -- WordPress and drag the XML into Admin -- Import in VeloCMS. Posts and pages keep the publish status they had on Squarespace. For Mindbody, there is no content migration because Mindbody stores scheduling data, not blog or essay content -- the migration from Mindbody is primarily a contact list export (CSV) that you import into Admin -- Members. Your class schedule content starts fresh in VeloCMS, which is generally an improvement since most Mindbody class descriptions don't translate meaningfully to blog posts anyway.
What happens to my account if Instagram suspends me tomorrow?
Nothing -- your blog on VeloCMS is unaffected by whatever happens on Instagram. Your students who signed up on your VeloCMS site (by email, through your membership, or via the newsletter) are yours. You own that list and can export it as a CSV at any time with the Export CSV button on the Admin -- Members page. Instagram is a discovery channel; your VeloCMS blog is the permanent address. When the algorithm or a suspension severs the channel, your owned list remains intact. This is the only architecture that makes sense for a teacher whose livelihood depends on consistent access to students.
Does VeloCMS take a cut of my paid memberships?
No. VeloCMS charges 0% on membership revenue. You connect your own Stripe account in Admin -- Settings -- Membership, and Stripe charges its standard processing fee (2.9% + 30 cents per transaction) directly. VeloCMS never sees your Stripe revenue -- the money flows from the student's card to your Stripe account. Compare that to Mindbody's processing fee structure (typically 2.75-3.5% plus a per-transaction fee on top of the monthly subscription cost) or Squarespace's 2% transaction fee on its entry plan (0% on higher plans), and the savings for a teacher running $1,500/mo in memberships are material.
Is VeloCMS suitable for solo teachers versus multi-teacher studios?
Both, though VeloCMS is designed first for solo teachers and small independent practices where the teacher is the brand. On the Pro plan, it's a single-author publishing platform with class Events and audio on posts, with paid memberships from Pro. On the Business plan, you can add team members (a studio manager, a second instructor, a marketing coordinator) and run a multi-author blog representing multiple teachers under one domain. Large studios with 10+ instructors, complex room scheduling, and in-person payment terminals are better served by Mindbody -- that's not the use case VeloCMS is optimised for. A solo teacher with three weekly classes, an online meditation program, and 200 email subscribers is exactly the audience VeloCMS was built around.
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Your practice deserves a permanent home. Start your free trial with Wabi Sabi.
Class Events, meditation audio, paid memberships, and the slow-living aesthetic your work deserves, all on a platform where you own the audience, not Instagram.