There is a particular kind of bad morning that only happens to studios running online classes.
It is 7:38 AM. The class started at 7:00. Everyone is in savasana, or holding a plank, or halfway through a cool-down. And Zoom ends the meeting.
Nobody did anything wrong. The studio was on Zoom's free tier, the class was longer than 40 minutes, and the limit did exactly what it says it does. The teacher restarts the meeting, half the class drifts away, and somebody asks for a refund.
This is entirely avoidable, and it is avoided by knowing four things about Zoom before you build a timetable on top of it. None of them are hidden — they are all in Zoom's own documentation — but almost nobody reads that documentation until something has already gone wrong in front of paying members.
1. The free tier ends meetings at 40 minutes
Zoom's wording: "Almost all meetings scheduled and hosted by Basic (free) users, on Free and Paid accounts, are limited to 40 minutes."
Two details people get wrong.
It is not only group classes. The 40-minute cap on a Basic account applies to one-to-one meetings too. Studios routinely assume personal training sessions are exempt because older versions of Zoom's limits worked differently. They are not exempt.
"On Free and Paid accounts" matters. If your studio has a paid Zoom account but the teacher hosting the class is set up as a Basic user on it, that teacher's meetings are still capped. The limit follows the user, not the account. Check who is actually hosting, not just what the account is.
A paid Zoom licence lifts this to 30 hours, which for any realistic class is effectively no limit.
The fix: if you sell a class longer than 40 minutes, the person hosting it needs a paid Zoom licence. Not the studio — the host.
2. One account hosts one meeting at a time
This is the limit that shapes your timetable, and it is the one that gets discovered at the worst moment.
From Zoom's support documentation: "Each Basic user and Licensed user on a Pro account is limited to hosting only 1 meeting at a time."
So if your 7:00 AM Vinyasa and your 7:00 AM Pilates both run online from the same Zoom account, one of them does not start. Not "runs badly" — does not start.
Hosting two meetings simultaneously requires a Business, Education or Enterprise licence, where a licensed user can host up to two at the same time. It is worth being precise about what that means, because studios waste money here: it is not a setting you can enable, and it is not an add-on you can attach to a Pro account. It comes with the higher account tier or it does not exist.
The fix: three options, all legitimate. Stagger online classes so two never overlap. Give each simultaneously-teaching instructor their own licence. Or keep one of the clashing classes in the studio.
The failure mode to design against is not the constraint itself — it is finding out about it live. If you schedule online sessions in MyGymDesk, it warns you when a new online class overlaps another one on the same day, so the clash surfaces while you are building the timetable rather than at 6:59 AM.
3. A recurring series stops at 50 occurrences
Zoom caps a recurring meeting at 50 occurrences. A weekly class reaches that in just under a year; a thrice-weekly class in about four months.
What makes this awkward is how it fails. Zoom does not refuse to create the series or warn you at the time. It just stops producing occurrences past the cap, so the problem appears months later as "the link stopped working" — long after anyone connects it to a decision made in January.
The fix: if you schedule manually, diary a reminder before occurrence 50 and create the next series. If your booking software creates the meetings, check that it handles the split. MyGymDesk splits a long series into consecutive blocks automatically and resolves each date to the right link, so a member booking in month eleven gets a working link without anyone intervening.
4. The host has to actually start it
Obvious until the teacher is stuck in traffic.
A scheduled meeting exists, but somebody with host rights has to start it. If your studio's Zoom account is logged in on the owner's laptop and the owner is not at the 6 AM class, the class does not begin — members sit in a waiting room watching nothing happen.
The fix: decide in advance who hosts each class, and make sure that person can start it from their own device without sharing a password.
This is a real design question, not a detail. Sharing one Zoom login across a team is how studios end up with an account nobody can secure and a departing teacher who still has access. MyGymDesk handles it by letting the assigned trainer start their own session as host from their schedule, alongside the owner and anyone explicitly given permission to host — without handing out the Zoom account password, and without exposing the host link to members.
What this adds up to
None of these four are reasons to avoid Zoom. It is reliable, members already have it, and it does not need explaining. They are reasons to spend twenty minutes on your setup before you sell an online membership rather than after.
A quick checklist before your first paid online class:
You will notice that three of the four are scheduling questions rather than technology questions. That is the honest summary of running online classes: the video part is solved, and the calendar part is where the work is.
If the answer to most of those is "our booking system should handle it", that is the right instinct. The Zoom integration creates the meeting when a session is marked Online, keeps it in step when you reschedule, and puts the Join button on the member's booking instead of in a group chat. Where Zoom's own limits apply — the 40-minute cap, one meeting at a time — no software can remove them; they belong to your Zoom account, and the useful thing scheduling software can do is warn you before you hit one.
The online classes and PT page shows what that looks like in practice, and what hybrid classes actually take covers running both formats from one timetable.
Next: how to set up online classes properly, and how recurring links work. Or book a demo and we will check your setup against these four before you sell an online class.
