What's new at Baluu — April roundup

It's been a busy five weeks. Since our last post on April 1, we've shipped one of our biggest single feature launches to date (Newsletters), completed the rewrite of Appointments, unified every checkout surface through the basket, and quietly knocked out a long list of reliability and UX improvements.

Here's the customer-facing tour, grouped by what it actually does for you and your customers.

🆕 Newsletters — send email campaigns from inside Baluu

The headline feature of this cycle. You can now reach your customers and grow your business without ever leaving Baluu.

Why we built this

Most of our partners are small-to-medium businesses. You've built up a healthy list of customers over the years — but between running classes, managing bookings and putting out the day-to-day fires, there isn't always time to sit down and run an email campaign. And when you're paying a contact-list-based subscription like other tools, that's a real problem: you're being charged every month for the size of your list, not the volume you send. Unless you're blasting campaigns regularly, you're paying a lot for very little — the maths only really works out if you're sending often.

On top of that, our third-party email integration was halted due to supplier issues, and in parallel we'd already been quietly building our own email editor for the past year (more on that below) so you could customise the transactional notifications we send on your behalf.

So when one of our partners asked us, "can I just broadcast an email to my customers from inside Baluu?" — it clicked. We already had your customer list, we already had the editor, we already had the sending infrastructure for transactional emails. The gap was small, the value was obvious, and the timing was right.

That's how Newsletters was born. A way to broadcast emails to your customers, taking advantage of the same editor we'd been building for notifications — and giving it a much bigger stage to live on. All while keeping our fair pricing policy intact: you only pay for what you use. No monthly subscription, no penalty for the size of your list. If you send three campaigns this month and none next month, you only pay for the number of emails we've actually sent on your behalf.

What's in the box

🎯 Audiences — send to all your customers, or filter by tags, memberships, past behaviour, and more.
🎨 Editor & blocks — build beautiful HTML emails from a block-based editor (text, images, CTA banners, custom slash items).
💾 Templates — save your favourite designs and reuse them across future campaigns.
📨 Drafts, send tests & sends — save work in progress, fire a real test to your inbox before launch, then send for real with a custom From name and Reply-To address.

Built around per-email pricing — up to ~60% cheaper than Mailchimp

We deliberately did not copy Mailchimp's per-subscriber subscription. With Baluu Newsletters you simply pay per email sent, which is much more cost-effective for businesses that send a few campaigns a month rather than weekly.

Pack	Price	Credits
Starter	£10	1,500 credits
Growth	£25	5,000 credits (£5 / 1k)
Pro	£40	10,000 credits (£4 / 1k)

One credit = one delivered email. No list-size penalty, no monthly minimum.

Heads-up before sending: to protect your sender reputation and the plataform we require a verified custom email domain and a prepaid credit balance. Don't have a custom domain yet? Or need shared domain from Baluu? Email us at support@baluu.io and we'll get you set up.

✍️ Email Editor — out of the shadows

For the past year we've been working on our own email editor in the background. We wanted something that lets you genuinely customise your emails — but without the overburden of every knob and option that tools like other tools throw at you. We're a booking system, not an email marketing platform, and we wanted that to come through in the experience: simpler, focused, and built around the data we already know about your business.

It took a while, but I'm honestly really happy with where it's landed. The same editor now powers both your transactional notifications and your Newsletters campaigns.

Some of the headline features:

The basics, done well — text, headings, lists, links, alignment, images. The stuff you expect, with sensible defaults so emails look good without you fiddling.
Blocks — custom components we've built specifically for the kinds of emails our partners send (CTA banners, session cards, more on the way). New blocks will keep landing — if there's one you wish existed, tell us.
Variables — drop in customer name, session date, listing title, and more. Write the email once, and we personalise it per recipient at send time.
AI Assistant (coming soon) — describe what you want in a prompt and the editor drafts the email for you. Already built end-to-end; we're just finalising fair pricing before we flip the switch.

📅 Appointments v2 — full rewrite, now live

A complete rebuild of the appointments product, replacing the legacy flow with a modern, configurable model.

Public vs private sessions — open booking pages or invite-only links, with separate plan and configuration paths.
Variable & fixed durations — customers can pick the length of their session, or you can lock it down.
Buffer time — back-to-back slots respect the padding you configure.
Charge anytime — charge before, during, or after the appointment, not just at checkout time.
Per-appointment terms & cancellation logic — distinct from courses and classes.
Add-ons inside the appointment flow — finally fixed and working as you'd expect.

If you offer 1:1s, consultations, or any time-based service, this is a meaningful upgrade.

🧾 Basket Reconciliation — request additional payment after checkout

A new flow for the cases where the original checkout didn't capture everything: tickets that weren't charged, an add-on missed at booking, or anything in between.

Staff-initiated — open the order, click Request additional payment, enter a reason (shown to the customer) and an amount.
Stripe-hosted payment link — the customer receives an email with a secure payment link that lives on your account's domain.
Account-branded confirmation page — after paying, the customer lands on a page that shows the real state of their payment (no more "did it go through?"), with order summary, amount, and reason.
Handles the messy edges — webhook-after-redirect races (auto-polled), expired links (one-click "request a new link"), declined payments (auto-emailed), simultaneous resends from two staff members (locked), and full cancel audit trail with reason and timestamp.

Per-payment refunds and full payment details

The Payments tab on each order got a complete rework:

Per-payment Refund — refund a specific payment (e.g. only the reconciliation top-up, not the original checkout) with the right refundable headroom enforced.
Full Payment Details — open the in-page Stripe Connect overlay to see every detail, payouts, disputes, and metadata for direct-charge payments.
View on Stripe — one-click external link to the right Stripe dashboard URL, with /test segment automatically inserted on test mode.

🛒 Unified basket checkout, everywhere

We've spent the cycle migrating every single checkout surface — Regular, Term, Trial, Drop-In, Appointment, Calendar Visibility, Checkout Overlay, and the book-now widget — onto a single basket-driven path.

What changes for your customers:

One consistent checkout experience whether they're booking through your website, a calendar embed, an overlay, or the book-now button.
A directCheckout mode for surfaces (like book-now) where the add-to-basket step would just be friction.
Cart price calculation behaves consistently across all entry points.

Bundles in basket

Packages and bundles can now be browsed and bought directly through the customer-facing widget — with Add to Basket and Buy Now buttons, full bundle checkout, and packages enabled by default for new businesses.

Jump-to-date in checkout

Customers no longer need to scroll endlessly through dates. The Regular checkout flow now has a jump-to-date calendar filter so they can skip ahead to a specific week or month.

💳 Smarter pricing — conditional logic & constraint groups

A genuinely powerful upgrade to the pricing engine. You can now express:

Conditional logic — rules that drive pricing or display behaviour based on context (selected options, customer attributes, dates, etc.).
Conditional price modifications — apply price adjustments only when the rules say so.
Constraint groups — express add-on / selection constraints as reusable groups, so you stop reinventing the same rules across listings.

This unlocks the kind of bundling, surcharging, and tiered pricing you used to have to fake with multiple listings.

🎟️ Tickets v2 is now the default

Continuing the migration we started in March: ticket v2 is now the default model for newly created listings, the one-for-me flow has migrated, and we've cleaned up display issues across listing pages and edit terms. Everything you build from here on uses the new model — and we hide the legacy v1 selectors in the surfaces where v2 is correct.

A complete rethink of how you move around the dashboard.

Bottom dock — a quick-access bar for your most-used sections, with calendar integration.
Drill-down menus — replacing the flat menu structure for clearer hierarchy.
Smarter search — "add booking" and "session" actions now live directly inside the search bar.
Cleaner listing & session detail pages — improved card layouts and clearer information density.

Right-actions sidebar (Global actions)

You'll have noticed the new Global actions rail on the right of the dashboard — Search, Notifications, QR Scanner, Add Booking, Add Session, Preview Website, and Support, always one click away regardless of which page you're on.

🎨 Website v2 — first look at the new editor

We've started work on the next-generation Website editor. The first working slice is in, page hiding is supported, and we've cleared out the previous (deprecated) Website v2 scaffolding to make room. More coming soon — this is the foundation for a much more flexible site builder.

🛡️ Security: 2FA polish & anti-spam

After enabling mandatory 2FA in mid-April (in response to a targeted attack on our infrastructure), we've spent time smoothing out the rollout:

A clearer in-product explainer banner so the why is obvious.
A skip2fa path for specific authenticated flows that shouldn't re-prompt.
Adjusted rules to avoid 2FA being triggered in edge cases where it wasn't appropriate.
Anti-spam conditions on sensitive endpoints.

💼 Memberships & payment plans

Frequency benefits — extended the benefits system with frequency-based benefit tracking.
Membership credits in external bookings — cancellation now correctly restores bundle and membership credits.
Membership badge on attendees — session attendee lists now show a membership badge for members.
Mixed payment plans — partial payments across different sources (cash, card, gift card, membership credit) now work properly.
Membership credits require login — applying membership credit no longer attempts on anonymous sessions.

📊 Better analytics signals

Behind the scenes, we've expanded our funnel instrumentation: course title now flows into conversion-tracking events, external bookings emit the same events as native bookings, and we've added supplementary fields that make cohort analysis and conversion debugging meaningfully easier. Mapbox is now integrated for location-aware features.

🔧 Reliability work

Boring but important. This cycle we also:

Hardened the booking layer (fixStaleSession, presets, private event creation, update availability).
Closed a schema leak on a session endpoint.
Fixed a class of bugs where dashboard-originated requests were building widget URLs from the dashboard's own origin instead of your account's actual subdomain.
Fixed the refund service to prefer payments with enough headroom rather than always picking the first one — and fixed a silent param drop in the dashboard refund controller that was making per-row refunds land on the wrong payment.

What's next

AI-assisted newsletter writing — built and ready, just finalising pricing.
Website v2 — more components, more page templates, real customer rollout.
Gate Bookings — first MVP shipped, more rules and configuration coming.
Continued v1 → v2 cleanup across tickets, embeds, and old settings surfaces.

If any of this is unclear, or if you want help getting set up — especially with Newsletters (custom domain + credit pack) — drop us a note at support@baluu.io. And if you'd like Newsletters enabled on your account today, the Newsletters page now has a Get this for my account button that drops a pre-filled email straight into our inbox.

Thanks for being a great partner.

— The Baluu team

What's new at Baluu — April roundup: Newsletters, Appointments v2, smarter checkout, and more