Why Active Hub
Active describes the person, not a thing you sign up for, which fits the social side of the app: open games, crews, streaks and leagues. Hub says one place for every sport, venue and coach. Together it reads like a call to action, and the app's slogan says it out loud: Live Active.
The mark is an A and an H fused into one heavy shape, one flat colour so it prints anywhere, from a shirt to a court fence to a 1 cm app icon. See all 10 logo directions.
Earlier working name: veld. Trademark, domain and social handle checks still need to be done before anything is printed.
Three sides, one app
Find, book, pay, play
Search by sport, area and time. See live availability, real reviews and the real price. Pay upfront, split with friends, get a ticket on WhatsApp. Free to use, small service fee per booking.
A full diary, for free
Clubs, courts, pitches, pools, gyms, studios and schools list their bookable spaces. Active Hub fills the empty slots and pays out weekly. They pay a commission only on bookings we bring.
A storefront for every coach
Any coach in any sport gets a verified profile, a diary and upfront payments. They pay a small monthly fee to be listed and keep 100 percent of their session price.
The engine: any sport, no new code
The key design choice. Most booking apps hard code "tennis court" or "padel court". Active Hub never knows what a sport is in code. A sport is a row in a table that points at a space template, lists the booking modes it supports and the details players filter on. Screens, filters and forms are drawn from that data. When pickleball, spikeball or underwater hockey takes off, an admin adds it in 60 seconds and every venue and coach in the country can list it the same day, with no app store update.
One space, many sports
A multi purpose court is tagged basketball, netball and futsal. Book it for any of them and it blocks out for all of them. No double bookings, no separate calendars.
Filters build themselves
The court template carries surface, indoor or outdoor, floodlights and backup power. Every court sport inherits those filters for free. A new template (say, ice rink) adds its own details once.
Five ways to book
Every sport picks the modes that fit it. This is how one app covers a padel court, a boxing class and a surf lesson without feeling generic.
| Mode | How it works | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Rent a space | Pick a space, a date, a start time and a duration. Peak and off peak pricing. Split the cost. | Tennis, padel, squash, 5 a side, cricket nets, golf tee times |
| Book a coach | Pick a coach, a package and a time. Sessions at a venue, at your home or at the beach. Packs of 5 or 10. | Boxing, tennis, surf, swim, jiu jitsu, personal training |
| Join a class | Scheduled sessions with limited spots. Waitlist when full, auto fill when someone cancels. | Boxing classes, surf school, yoga, spin, bootcamp |
| Day pass | Entry for a day or a visit, sold in quantity. | Bouldering, lane swimming, skate parks, MTB trails |
| Events and leagues | Tickets and team entries for tournaments, social leagues and corporate days. Phase 3. | Padel americano, 5 a side leagues, fun runs |
The trust layer
This is the TripAdvisor half, done properly. Review sites lose trust because anyone can post. On Active Hub you can only review what you booked and played.
No booking, no review
Every review is tied to a paid, completed booking. Venues can reply in public but never delete.
Scores that mean something
Each template rates what matters: court condition and lighting for courts, coaching and safety for surf schools, punctuality and communication for coaches.
Player reliability
Players get a reliability score from show ups and late cancels. High scores unlock pay later and member prices. Venues get a reliability score too.
Players' Choice awards
Every year the top rated venues and coaches per sport and city win Players' Choice. They get a physical plaque and window sticker. It costs us almost nothing, venues love it, and every sticker on a clubhouse door is free marketing that sends players to the app.
How Active Hub makes money
Proposed numbers, to be tested with real venues and coaches before launch.
| Stream | Who pays | Proposed price | Why it works |
|---|---|---|---|
| Booking commission | Venues | 8% on bookings Active Hub brings | Free to list, so saying yes is easy. They only pay when we fill a slot that would have stayed empty. |
| Coach listing | Coaches | R149 / month, Pro R349 / month, first month free | A flat, small fee. Coaches keep 100% of their session price, which is the main pitch against platforms that take a cut. |
| Service fee | Players | R5 per booking | Small enough to ignore, covers payment processing on cheap bookings. |
| Hub Desk | Busy venues | R499 / month | Runs their whole booking sheet, walk ins and members on Active Hub. 0% on their own regulars. Locks the venue in, because their entire diary lives on Active Hub. |
| Promoted listings | Venues, coaches | Pay per featured week | Phase 2. Clearly labelled as promoted, never mixed into review scores. |
bookings per month, if 300 venues take 120 Active Hub bookings each at about R350
monthly revenue: R1.01m commission, R176k coach plans (800 coaches), R180k service fees, R30k Desk
Illustrative target to sanity check the model. Not a forecast, every input above is an assumption to validate.
Built for South Africa
Payments people actually use
Card, Instant EFT and QR wallets like SnapScan, all in rand. Split payments by WhatsApp link, because the friend who books always ends up chasing everyone else.
WhatsApp first
Confirmations, reminders, pay links and rebooking all land on WhatsApp, where South Africans already are. Email is the backup, not the main channel.
Power and weather guarantee
A "backup power" filter for floodlit venues, and a promise: if rain, an outage or a venue closure stops your game, you rebook free or get your money back.
Light on data, POPIA from day one
Fast on a mid range phone and a slow connection. Only the personal data we need, clear consent, an information officer, and South African hosting for player data where possible.
Getting venues to sign up
A marketplace lives or dies on supply. The plan is to make saying yes free and obvious, and to let players do the asking.
Players nominate venues
Inside the app, players nominate the club they already play at. When 10 players ask for the same venue, it goes to the top of the sales list. We walk in with proof that their own customers want it, and the player gets R50 credit when the venue joins.
Free diary replaces the paper book
Many venues still run bookings on paper, a spreadsheet or a WhatsApp group. We set them up for free in an afternoon. The pitch is less admin first, more bookings second.
One city, two sports, then expand
Launch in Cape Town with padel, tennis and coaches, where demand is dense and venues compete for evening slots. Prove it, then Johannesburg and Durban, then add sports city by city.
Coaches bring their students
Every coach who joins moves their existing students onto Active Hub to pay and book. Each coach is a small marketing channel, and their students then discover venues too.
How we build it
| Piece | Proposed tool | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Player app | Expo (React Native) | One codebase for iPhone and Android. This prototype becomes the design reference. |
| Partner dashboard and website | Next.js on Vercel | Venues and coaches manage diaries, prices and payouts on the web. Public venue pages rank on Google. |
| Database and accounts | Supabase (Postgres) | Sports, templates, venues, spaces, offerings, bookings and reviews as tables. Row level security so a venue only ever sees its own data. PostGIS for "near me". |
| Payments and payouts | A South African gateway with split payouts | Card, Instant EFT and QR payments in, weekly payouts to venues and coaches. Shortlist and compare fees before choosing. |
| Messaging | WhatsApp Business API | Tickets, reminders and split pay links. |
| Availability engine | Our own, on the database | Opening hours, price rules, buffers between bookings, block outs for leagues, and holds that expire if payment fails. The hard part, so it gets built and tested first. |