Changelog

Moving to Availy no longer means typing your students in one at a time — bring the whole roster over from a spreadsheet, families and all. This release also fixes a real problem with credit expiry emails: some students were getting several of them at once, and one of them said something that wasn't true.

Bring Your Whole Roster In

• Import students from a CSV. There's now an Import from CSV button on your Students page. Export your roster from whatever you use today — another platform, a spreadsheet, your own notes — and upload it. No particular format required.
• Availy works out your columns, and you confirm. It reads your headers and proposes which column is the first name, the email, the parent, and so on. Rename or remap anything it guesses wrong before you continue.
• Parents come across in the same pass. One row per student, with the parent's details in that same row. A parent with three children is created once and linked to all three, set up to receive their lesson emails. A student with no parent columns filled in simply comes in on their own.
• For families who share one inbox. Rosters for younger students usually only carry the parent's email. Availy can give each child their own address based on the parent's — so everything still lands in the same inbox the family already reads — and shows you exactly what each one will be, to edit or reject, before anything is created. Prefer not to? Choose to skip those rows instead.
• See exactly what you're about to create. The preview counts people, not rows — "3 rows → 4 people: 3 new students, 1 new parent linked to all 3" — and flags any row it can't use, with the reason. Nothing is created until you say so.
• One bad row doesn't sink the import. Everything valid is created, and you get a line-by-line report of what went in and what didn't, so you can fix a few rows and re-run just those.
• Nobody is emailed behind your back. Imported students and parents are added quietly, with no invitations sent, so you can tidy your roster first and invite everyone when you're ready.
• What doesn't come across. Credits, payment history, and past lessons aren't imported — those stay yours to set up deliberately. Student phone numbers are left blank too, since rosters usually list the same family mobile against every child; the parent's number does come across.

Fixed: Credit Expiry Emails

If your students have been getting a pile of expiry warnings in one morning, this is why — and it's fixed. We're sorry for the noise it put in front of your families.

• Fixed: one email per credit pack instead of one per student. Availy tracks credits in batches, and each batch was warning separately. A student with five batches expiring in the same window got five emails. It hit the busiest studios hardest, because a cancellation that returns credits puts them back as a new batch — so the more a student booked and cancelled, the more emails they got. Now it's one email per student per warning, covering everything that's expiring, with the total and the date the first of them runs out.
• Fixed: the two-week and three-day warnings could both arrive on the same day. When a run caught credits that qualified for both, it sent both. The two warnings are now exclusive: each credit triggers one or the other, never both.
• Fixed: the expiry notice read as though everything was gone. The email sent after credits expire announced "your balance of N lesson credits has expired" — but N was only the credits that had just expired, not the student's balance. A student with credits still available was being told their balance was gone. It now says plainly that N credits have expired, and makes no claim about what's left.

Fixes & Polish

• Fixed: homework due dates didn't follow a rescheduled lesson. A practice task set to be due at the next lesson kept its original date when that lesson moved, so it could show as overdue for a lesson that hadn't happened yet. It now moves with the lesson.
• Fixed: switching studios could fail silently. If a switch between studios didn't go through, nothing said so — the screen just stayed put. You now get a clear message.
• A faster calendar. Calendar pages reuse the lists they've already loaded rather than fetching them again for each panel, so opening and moving between them feels quicker.
• One less confusing option. A checkbox in the blocked-time dialog that never did anything has been removed.

Behind the Scenes

We expanded our internal support tooling so we can answer account questions faster and with better context when you write in. We tidied up duplicate sign-in records, removed some unused code, and added substantial test coverage around the new import and around credit expiry — including tests that pin the expiry emails to one per student, so the flood we fixed above can't come back unnoticed.

Availy now connects directly to your Google Calendar — your lessons appear there automatically, and the commitments already on it stop students booking over you. We also rebuilt the public side of the site so people can find Availy, and understand it, before they ever sign up.

Google Calendar Connection

• Your lessons, in the calendar you already live in. Connect your Google account from your Account page and Availy writes your confirmed lessons into a dedicated Availy calendar in Google. Reschedule or cancel in Availy and the Google entry follows within minutes — no copying, no double entry.
• Your outside commitments block your bookable slots. Availy reads when you're busy in Google and takes those times off the board, so a dentist appointment or a school run you put in your own calendar can't be booked over. Availy only ever sees that you're busy — never the details of those events.
• Kept separate, and easy to undo. Availy writes only to its own calendar in your Google account and never touches your existing ones. Disconnect at any time from the same place you connected.
• Scheduling still happens in Availy. An event you create directly in Google won't become an Availy booking — your availability, credits, and student records stay the single source of truth.
• The calendar feed is still there. Everyone — students and parents included — can still subscribe to a personal Availy calendar feed from Google, Apple, or Outlook, and booking emails still carry an invite.

A Public Site That Explains Itself

• A real pricing page. Both plans, what's included, and answers to the questions people actually ask before subscribing — now at its own address you can send someone directly.
• Honest comparisons. Side-by-side pages covering how Availy stacks up against the other tools teaching businesses consider, including where a competitor is the better choice. Useful when a colleague asks why you picked Availy.
• Pages for how you actually teach. Dedicated pages for music teachers and for tutoring centres, framed around the way each of them runs a week.
• Easier to find in search — and in AI assistants. Every public page now carries proper titles, descriptions, and structured information, and loads fully formed for search engines. We also publish a plain-language reference that tools like ChatGPT and Claude can read, so when someone asks an assistant about Availy the answer comes from us, including a frank list of what Availy doesn't do yet.

Behind the Scenes

We corrected several details in how public pages describe themselves to search engines, so the right page gets indexed and preview links look right when shared. We also added automated checks that pin our public claims — prices, plan limits, session lengths — to what the product actually does, so the marketing side of the site can't quietly drift out of date. Alongside that, we broadened test coverage around signing in and moving between studios.

Availy now keeps track of what each student is working toward. Build a plan of goals and practice tasks, share it with the family, and let it follow along into lesson reminders and the sessions you teach.

Learning Plans

• Give every student a plan of their own. Create a plan for each subject you teach — "Piano", "Theory", "Grade 8 Math" — with long-term goals and the practice tasks that build toward them. A student can have as many plans as they have subjects.
• See progress at a glance. Move a goal from not started, to in progress, to achieved, and check off tasks as they're finished — so you always know where a student stands without digging back through your notes.
• Shared notes for the bigger picture. Keep a running summary of where a student is and what's next, visible to the family. If you and a colleague both teach the same student, neither of you can quietly overwrite the other's edits.
• Keep some items to yourself. Any goal or task can be marked private, so your own teaching notes stay staff-only while the rest of the plan stays open to the family.

Families Can Take Part

• Students and parents see the plan. Learning plans now appear in the student and parent portals, so everyone knows what to work on between lessons.
• And they can pitch in. Families can add goals or tasks of their own, check off work they've completed, and leave comments on the plan — while progress and shared notes stay in the instructor's hands.
• Updates arrive by email. Availy lets the family know when a new goal is added, when a goal is achieved, and when someone leaves a comment.

Homework Where You Already Look

• Lesson reminders now carry homework. A student's reminder email lists their open practice tasks, so the work arrives with the reminder instead of living somewhere separate. Reminders look exactly as they do today when nothing is outstanding.
• The plan follows the lesson. Open a session and you'll see that student's open tasks right there — review homework at the start, update it at the end.

Plan Templates

• Build a curriculum once, reuse it forever. Save any plan as a template — your beginner method book, your first-term syllabus — and apply it to another student in a single step.
• Offered the moment you add a student. When you create a student you can start them on a template right away, so they begin with a plan instead of a blank page.

Behind the Scenes

Availy now keeps a record of account sign-ins, strengthening how we monitor account security. We also tuned how the platform rides out brief database hiccups, so a momentary blip retries quietly instead of surfacing as an error — keeping the app steady and our alerting accurate.

A stability-focused release: clearer messaging around trials, a fix for studios whose trial had lapsed, and a lot of behind-the-scenes hardening so payments and notifications stay dependable.

Trials & Paused Studios

• Clearer messaging as a trial winds down. Studios get a heads-up when their trial is ending, and once a studio is paused everyone sees plainly what they can and can't do — without exposing billing details to people who shouldn't see them.
• Fixed a lockout for lapsed trials. Previously, when a studio's trial expired its page could become unreachable, leaving the owner unable to sign in and resubscribe. The studio now stays reachable so owners can log back in and pick up right where they left off.

Payments & Notifications Reliability

• Hardened how we handle Stripe payment events, with added monitoring so payments and payouts stay accurate and any hiccup is caught quickly.
• Improved delivery tracking for the emails Availy sends, so notifications are logged reliably from end to end.

Behind the Scenes

• Expanded automated testing, deployment safeguards, and monitoring across the calendar, booking, and payments systems — the kind of under-the-hood work that keeps releases fast and safe.

Our biggest scheduling update yet: teach more than one student at a time, save the groups you teach, and let new clients book you from a public page.

Group Bookings

• Teach several students in one session. Add multiple students (or a whole group) to a single lesson — each keeps their own seat, credits, and notifications.
• Recurring group lessons. Set up a standing weekly group class once and Availy materializes every session going forward, seating each participant automatically.
• Per-seat billing and control. Credits are charged per student, and you can add or remove a participant, or cancel a single seat, without disturbing the rest of the session. If one student is short on credits, only their seat is skipped — the lesson still runs for everyone else.
• Group lessons come with a shared roster view and group notes so you can keep track of the whole class in one place.

Student Groups

Create reusable groups of students — a class, a family, a skill level — and book them all at once instead of adding names one by one every time. Student Groups now live under the Students tab.

Public "Meet & Greet" Booking Page

• Let new clients book you directly. Publish a public booking page so prospective students can grab an intro session from your open availability — no account required to get started.
• Bookings flow straight into your calendar, and you stay in control of which calendars are public.

More Flexible Instructor Scheduling

• Book any time you want. Instructors can now schedule a lesson — one-off or recurring, single or group — outside their published availability. Your available hours are for your students; your own calendar has no such limit.
• Recurring lessons are firm commitments. A standing series keeps generating its sessions on schedule; changing your general availability no longer quietly drops future lessons. Pause or end a series whenever you want to stop it.

Calendar Improvements

• The calendar now loads bookings up to three months ahead, so you can see and plan your standing lessons further out.

Bugfixes & Reliability

• Fixed a homepage error that could appear on calendars with group or seatless bookings.
• Resolved several public-calendar booking issues.
• Fixed cross-site sign-out, studio theming and browser tab titles on custom subdomains, and the currency shown on starting-credit invoices.
• Continued behind-the-scenes work to keep releases fast and safe.

Your lessons now live in the calendar you already use, and getting paid (and paid back) got a lot smoother.

External Calendar Support

• Every booking email now comes with a calendar invite attached — add a lesson to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook in one click, with reschedules and cancellations reflected too.
• New subscribable calendar feed: connect Availy to your own calendar once and every upcoming lesson shows up there automatically. Works for instructors, students, and parents — across every studio you're part of.

Payments & Payouts

• Refunds without leaving Availy. Owners and staff can now refund a card payment (fully or partially) right from the Accounts page — no digging through Stripe. Credits are never removed automatically; you stay in control of adjustments.
• See money on the way. The Payouts page now shows what's pending, what's available, and your latest payout with its expected arrival date.
• One click to your Stripe dashboard. Jump straight from the Payouts page to your Stripe Express dashboard for the full payment history.

Membership Improvements

• When a membership is cancelled — by the studio or by the payer — both sides now get a clear email: the payer sees exactly when it ends, and the studio gets a heads-up.
• Membership proposals can only be sent once payouts are set up, so payers are never invited to a checkout that can't complete.
• When a student leaves or is removed (or a studio closes), their recurring membership now cancels automatically — no more charges for a studio you've left.

A polish-focused release: Availy is now much better on your phone, and clearer everywhere else.

Big Mobile Improvements

The whole app got a mobile pass — friendlier layouts, bottom-sheet dialogs, and card views where tables used to overflow. Pages also load noticeably faster thanks to some heavy behind-the-scenes slimming. Parents can now reschedule lessons from their phone without issue.

Clearer Billing & Payments

• A studio-specific "How billing works" explainer for students and parents.
• Owners get at-a-glance money tiles on the Billing page.
• Students and parents now have a clear route to their invoices, plus a weekly lessons view with an easy way to request a change.

Smarter Dashboards & Onboarding

Student and parent dashboards now surface things that need your attention, and new students and parents get a quick first-run tour. Onboarding for studios now starts with your calendar.

Your Brand, Front and Center

Your studio's name now appears as the wordmark across the app on every plan.

Other Improvements

• You can now delete an entire recurring lesson series in one action.
• Failed page loads now show a clear error message instead of failing silently.
• Lots of under-the-hood cleanup for reliability and faster future updates.

Huge Reliability Update:

Development Environment

We've finally stood up a dedicated development environment! This is a big deal because it creates a huge amount of reliability and stability in our system. We've been working on this for a while, and since our release we now see enough traction to dedicate resources into creating this.

Having a standalone, cloud-based development environment means we can test every single change privately and thoroughly before you see it.

You get: more confidence in this platform. Breaking changes and degradations are harder to experience!

Added Parent/Student Payment Mechanisms

Tutors and Studios can now charge their clients directly in-app instead of having to go to another platform/system. Of course, if you prefer to charge your clients in cash/etransfer/etc, you can still grant credits accordingly.

Credit Packages, Memberships & Custom Pricing

Tutors and Studios can now shape their own pricing with far more granularity. Set what a credit is worth, bundle credits into packages your students can buy online, or offer recurring memberships that top up credits automatically every month. Students and parents can purchase a package or start a membership by card, right from their credits page — and staff can still apply packages to an account manually.

Better Discoverability

We've made big improvements to how Availy appears in search engines and AI assistants, so prospective clients can find your studio more easily. Landing pages now load faster for crawlers, and shared links show the right preview image.

Security Hardening

We've tightened up behind the scenes with stricter request handling and cleaner session and log management, keeping your data safer.

Various UI Improvements

• Credit Ledgers now allow everyone to much more easily see their Credits, Usage, and Payment Tracking.
• Subdomains now appear in outgoing emails!
• Subdomain Login bugs are fixed where users were routed back to base availy.app instead of the proper subdomain.
• Instructor calendars now support split-day availability.
• You can now resend a pending email invite to students, parents, and team members in one click.

Various Bugfixes

Various calendar and booking issues have been resolved.

Our official release! The headlines:

Multiple calendars for Instructors

Studio plans now support up to 3 calendars per instructor! Separate your lessons/availability by subject, date, etc.

Improved communication services

Allow parents to communicate with instructors, and vice-versa.

Various UI Improvements

Many changes have been made to the UI to improve user experience, or clarify processes.

Welcome Tour

When you sign in, a dynamic tour will guide you through getting started, getting a calendar and student set up, and getting your bookings going!

Updated Terms of Service + Privacy Policy

Updated both docs from their original placeholders to better reflect the platform today and it's capabilities.

Mobile Cleanup

Completed a deep review of the mobile app. Made various updates here to improve user experience.

Easily attach roles to users

Studio plan memebers can now easily assign/remove roles from their team: Instructor and Staff roles can be updated with a click of a button!

Media bugfix

Resolved an issue preventing users from seeing media they've shared.

Tenant Homepage

Studio plan members now also get a landing page of their own. Members can now go and build out a full homepage with their own branding, page sections, contact info, and really make it their own!

Simplified Plans

Made various changes to the two plans to simplify the choice for clients. Some updates:

• Removed student cap entirely for all plans.
• Added Staff accounts to Studio plan.
• Added free storage allotment to all plans for file sharing/management.

Subscription emails

You'll get a note when you start a paid plan, when a card fails, when you cancel, and when service finally pauses.

Platform reliability

New internal monitoring dashboard plus a public /v1/health check. Failures page our team automatically.

Tighter security

Every authenticated endpoint re-checks org membership on every request, and token lifetimes are shorter. Nothing user-visible — just a whole class of access bugs structurally gone.

Paid plans

Stripe checkout is live. Pick a plan, pay through the hosted flow, and your studio unlocks more seats automatically.

Trial expiry

Free trials now expire on a schedule, with email reminders before the cutoff.

Online classes

Bookings can be marked online or in-person. Instructors paste a meeting link onto the session; students see it in their booking.

Notes and messaging

Leave notes on a student and message them from inside the platform.

Smaller wins

• Studios can host multiple instructors on one subscription.
• New support page with contact form.
• Internal alert on every new tenant signup.
• Sessions show full history.
• Per-calendar minimum advance-booking windows.

Booking statuses

Bookings now carry pending / confirmed / cancelled. Cancellations follow your studio's policy.

New look

Refreshed logos, branding, and landing-page SEO.

Student calendars

Students see their own schedule, rendered in their timezone.

Notifications

First pass of in-app notifications — booking activity surfaces without leaving the app.

A heavy month under the hood — mostly invisible, but it unlocks everything downstream.

Timezones

Every time-bearing model now stores both the moment and its timezone.

Multi-role users

One account can hold more than one role — owner who also teaches, instructor who handles billing.

Studio settings page

A dedicated page for branding, defaults, and member management.

Student self-signup

Students can sign up and book sessions themselves. Profiles are decoupled from auth, so updating contact details no longer breaks login.

Audit log

Admin configuration changes are tracked.

Instructor calendar

Dedicated weekly view showing availability and bookings side by side.

Auth flow rebuild

Signup, email verification, login, refresh, and logout rewritten end-to-end. Tokens behave correctly across tabs; errors are clearer; reset-password is faster.

Landing page

Rewritten with a clearer call-to-action.

The first usable build of Availy.

• Accounts — owner signup with email + SMS verification, password reset.
• Calendars — instructors configure availability; clients see what's open.
• Flexible sessions — multiple session types per calendar.
• Cancellation policies — configurable windows and late-cancel fees.
• Students — a studio can track its students.
• SMS — outbound notifications wired up.

Final polish ahead of the first public preview.

Studio subdomains

Each studio gets its own subdomain for branded signin and signup.

Signup rework

Owner signup was rebuilt to feel less like a form dump and more like onboarding.

Account verification

Phone numbers are verified by SMS at signup. A new accounts page lets owners review their details.

Under the hood

JWT validation tightened across the API, plus a first round of unit tests.

The plumbing for outbound and inbound text messages — delivery, replies, and queued processing — landed in the backend.

Reworked copy and UX across the app to speak to private tutors and small studios specifically, rather than generic class management.

The first product features start shipping.

• Auth — protected routes, logout, and password reset.
• Class management — define the sessions you teach.
• Instructor calendar — first cut of a weekly schedule view.

The starting point — Availy's repo, stack, and deployment pipeline.

• Stack — React frontend, Python Lambda backend, Terraform infrastructure on AWS.
• CI/CD — automated build and deploy from main.