SaaS strategy

Avelok's pricing logic, vertical sport rollout, and partnership model — written for clubs and federations deciding whether to build with us.

This page is the public-facing version of how we think about Avelok as a business. It exists so that potential club, academy and federation partners can read the actual plan rather than a sales deck.

What we sell, today

Two product lines, one platform.

Avelok Personal

The Mini Program for individual athletes and parents. Free tier covers solo training logging + AI chat with a 30 messages/week cap. Paid (¥39/month) lifts the cap and adds match analysis.

Avelok Pro

Coach Studio + Club OS for coaches and clubs. Tier'd by active members: 5 / 15 / 40 / 100+ seats. Per-seat pricing decreases at higher tiers; details on the pricing page.

We do not run an enterprise sales motion. Coaches sign up and pay self-serve; clubs sign up and pay self-serve. Anything bigger than ~150 seats lands a 30-minute partnership call instead of a sales pursuit.

How pricing actually works

Three principles:

  1. Athletes shouldn't pay twice. A player whose club is on Pro doesn't need a Personal subscription to use the Mini Program — the club seat covers them.
  2. Coaches don't get billed. Coach Studio is included in the club's Pro subscription. A solo independent coach pays for their own seats (one club seat with their players attached).
  3. Failure is cheap. Annual plans are not discounted hugely. We'd rather lose a 20% annual discount than have a 9-month-stale customer who feels stuck.

The vertical sport plan

Avelok started with table tennis in Hong Kong, Mainland China and France. Not because TT is a huge market — because TT is a sport where:

  • Memory across coaches matters a lot (kids change coaches often, sometimes twice a year)
  • Drills are enumerable (the AI can usefully suggest from a known catalogue)
  • The active-coach community is small enough to learn from feedback weekly

We deliberately go one vertical at a time. The roadmap as of this writing:

VerticalStatusWhy
Table tennisShippingFounder sport; deepest model fit
BadmintonPilot, late 2026Adjacent racquet, large coaching community in HK / Mainland
SwimmingResearch, 2027Different memory shape (lap-based, less micro-technical) — testing the abstraction
TennisConsideringBig market, well-served by incumbents — only worth it if we have a real angle
Team sportsNot on roadmapDifferent product entirely — team memory ≠ athlete memory

Adding a sport means: writing the skill tree, hiring or partnering with a sport-specific coach as memory advisor, calibrating the AI with at least 3 months of real session logs. We don't take shortcuts here. A sport we ship badly hurts more than not shipping it at all.

The partnership model

We work with two kinds of partners:

  1. Pilot clubs / academies

    50–500 active members. We onboard them in a single 90-minute session, then check in monthly for the first 3 months. They get free Pro for the pilot quarter; in exchange, they give us product feedback, occasional case studies, and ~1 hour of coach interviews per month.

  2. Federation partners

    National or regional federations who want Avelok available across their member clubs. We provide a shared instance, federation-level reporting, and coach training. Pricing is per active member, with a shared services fee for the federation tier. Currently in pilot with one federation; details under NDA.

If you're either of these, the contact form on avelok.com/contact is the right place to start. We reply within 2 business days.

What we won't do

A short list of strategic non-goals, so partners know what to expect:

  • No content marketplace. Avelok is not a place where coaches sell drill packs to other coaches. Lock-in by content marketplace is bad for athletes.
  • No social feed. No timeline of other people's training, no follower counts, no reactions. Sport gets quieter, not louder, on Avelok.
  • No video review as a primary feature. We'll let you tag clips against memory entries, but we won't compete with Hudl on technique-tagging tooling. Different problem.
  • No general-purpose coaching app. Avelok is sport-shaped. We say no to sport-agnostic asks.

What's next