Fitness & Wellness Platform

A coach with a 300-person in-person practice wanted to scale without hiring 20 more trainers. She needed an app that delivered personalized workout plans, tracked nutrition goals, sent motivating push notifications, and handled subscription billing, all while feeling like a premium product, not a janky side project. She'd tried a white-label app builder first and lost 40% of her initial beta users in two weeks to crashes and clunky UX.

Django REST Framework runs the coaching content, workout programs, and progress-tracking APIs. React Native powers the iOS and Android apps with native-feeling animations on the exercise demo videos, a detail that mattered because her users were comparing the app to Peloton and Nike Training Club. Stripe Billing handles tiered subscriptions with a 7-day free trial and automated dunning for failed payments. Firebase Cloud Messaging sends workout reminders and milestone notifications at the times each user is most likely to open the app, not at arbitrary 9am blasts.

• Grew to 8K+ monthly active users in year one with 35% month-over-month growth
• 72% subscription retention after free-trial conversion, top-decile for fitness apps
• Push notifications (sent at user-specific active hours) lifted DAU by 28%
• Coach's revenue grew 4x in 12 months; she hired a second coach instead of ten

DRF was the right backend because we were also building an admin dashboard for the coach to manage content, and Django's admin saved weeks. React Native was non-negotiable once we ran the numbers: native iOS plus native Android would have doubled the build and tripled the ongoing maintenance for a single-coach business. Stripe Billing over custom subscription logic because dunning, plan upgrades, and proration break in creative ways we didn't want to own.