Discover how F45 Training, the global boutique fitness franchise, rolled out user-facing analytics 10x faster and 50% cheaper with Fiveonefour, unlocking an immersive mobile app experience for their Lionheart biometrics and connected-fitness users.
Book a Demo
"User-facing analytics had been stuck in our backlog for over a year. With Fiveonefour, we delivered those analytics features in just a few weeks, boosted our dev speed by 10x, and cut our infrastructure costs in half."
F45 is a global boutique fitness franchise offering high-intensity group workouts in over 1,500 studios and 60 countries, serving more than a quarter million members every month. Over fifty thousand of these members participate in LionHeart, F45's proprietary heart rate tracking system, generating billions of biometric data points as they train around the clock. F45 saw an opportunity to leverage these data streams and provide richer, more personalized insights to drive user engagement and retention. However, their legacy data infrastructure struggled to keep pace with real-time demands, high concurrency, and global availability. That’s when they turned to Fiveonefour.
F45’s engineering teams rely on Fiveonefour, deployed on top of open-source real-time analytics infrastructure - including ClickHouse and Redpanda. This unified data stack powers F45’s new wave of user-facing analytics features, and complements the franchise’s existing transactional backend, based on Amazon RDS.
From a user perspective, F45 recognized data & analytics as a clear path toward a richer, more dynamic fitness experience. Members were hungry for immediate, personalized data that not only validated their progress but also motivated them to push harder. By delivering faster, more responsive workout insights, F45 could nurture deeper engagement and loyalty among its global community.
From a business perspective, enhancing the Lionheart platform promised a tangible increase in member retention and satisfaction. A more interactive, data-driven app would help F45 differentiate itself in a crowded market of connected fitness experiences. Real-time metrics and detailed visualizations offer members a compelling reason to stay engaged with the brand, and historically translated into significantly increased lifetime value.
"We found that our users who engaged with their Lionheart data became our most loyal, most engaged members - with a lifetime value 2.5X higher than other members. This spurred the business to invest further in our user-facing analytics, and Fiveonefour had the perfect set of tools for the job."
F45 originally built its Lionheart analytics on top of their production transactional backend. While that setup was successful enough to gather initial momentum, it wasn’t designed for large-scale aggregation and real-time data processing. The mismatch became more pressing when F45 wanted to create immersive, in-app experiences to keep members engaged long after they left the studio.
Much like any high growth, data-centric company, F45 discovered that its original data systems and analytics workflows couldn’t meet strict latency or concurrency requirements for user-facing features. The only path forward was rearchitecting the data stack, but F45 needed something that wouldn’t bog down engineering or risk months of rework.
"We knew as a business that we wanted to take our data and analytics experiences to the next level, but the success of the product had outgrown the technology supporting it. We were hamstrung in our ability to innovate."
F45 needed to unlock an entire backlog of data-driven features that couldn’t be built effectively on their old infrastructure. Developing on the legacy stack was too costly in both time and effort, pushing much-needed member-facing analytics projects to the bottom of the roadmap. A more efficient solution would have to slash the development cost and complexity, so these features could finally see the light of day.
Unfortunately, a massive rearchitecture using unfamiliar OLAP infrastructure was impossible; they couldn’t afford to stand up new systems, glue them together, and risk months of engineering work to ensure scale and stability. F45 needed something their existing team could adopt immediately—no steep learning curves, no lengthy setup.
"In under 48 hours of working with Fiveonefour’s team, we had a production-scale proof of concept, complete with interactive dashboards and a fully functional analytics backend."
Another pressing concern was performance. F45 required sub-second data responses and minimal cloud costs—an elusive combination in most off-the-shelf analytics platforms. F45’s leaders knew that every bit of latency would degrade the real-time experience they envisioned for their members.
Finally, F45 wanted a platform built for software developers: a system that integrated into CI/CD pipelines, used version control seamlessly, and allowed their TypeScript devs to remain in their comfort zone was non-negotiable. After evaluating various options, F45 discovered that Fiveonefour was the only solution to deliver on all these requirements without overcomplicating their environment or blowing up their budget.
Following a proof of concept spun up in under 48 hours, F45 selected Fiveonefour as its partner for member-facing data needs. With the open source Moose framework for streamlined data engineering, hosting platform Boreal for single-click deployments, and Aurora AI agents that auto-generate data processing code, F45’s engineers found they could ship new analytics features drastically faster.
"As a TypeScript developer, I was able to pick up Fiveonefour’s Moose developer framework and start building data API endpoints and streaming transformations literally on day one."
Before Fiveonefour, attempts to refactor Lionheart’s data engine were blocked by the fear of downtime and the complexity of rewriting fundamental components. With Moose’s abstraction layer and Boreal’s production-ready hosting, the F45 team created and deployed the data APIs to power their new mobile app experiences on top of a brand new, open-source, best-in-class OLAP backend, based on Clickhouse and Red Panda—and they did it with just a couple developers in a couple weeks, a fraction of the originally budgeted dev-time for their user-facing analytics investment.
"With Fiveonefour in our hands, we were able to carve off two developers and quickly launch our new real-time data ingest and analytics APIs. This unlocked a global rollout of a brand new mobile app experience for our Lionheart users to engage with their biometric data in new and compelling ways."
By offloading analytics workloads to a specialized, open-source-backed stack, F45 cut operational and cloud spend nearly in half. Retiring expensive legacy infrastructure and consolidating the code base under Fiveonefour’s platform significantly lowered both storage and compute costs, by running analytics workloads on the right infrastructure built for the job.
F45 engineers—who are primarily focused on transactional application development—now build, manage, and own the entire member-facing analytics stack in Fiveonefour. The integrated developer experience lets them build transformations and data APIs without leaving their familiar TypeScript environment, IDE, and workflows
"With Fiveonefour’s hosting platform, Boreal, integrated directly into our GitHub, CI/CD, testing, and observability, we go from dev to production in one click, and we’re confident iterating quickly on critical production code."
F45’s investment in their upgraded analytics experience paid immediate dividends with significant boosts across their app's user engagement, virality, and satisfaction. F45 gave their members more personalized metrics, faster updates, and deeper insights into their performance - and their members leaned in hard: viewing the app 19% more, sharing their results 44% more, and increasing their average ratings for the app by over 70%.
Meanwhile, the engineering team supercharged their development velocity by 10x for member-facing analytics features. Features that once took months or even quarters to deliver now come online in a matter of weeks, thanks to Fiveonefour’s streamlined workflow and developer-friendly tools.
By retiring its complex, patchwork infrastructure and adopting Fiveonefour’s platform, F45 cut cloud costs by over 50%. In short, F45’s transformation—powered by Fiveonefour—unlocked measurable improvements for end users, operators, and the bottom line.
If, like F45, you’re looking to build or optimize user-facing analytics or data-intensive features for your users, without sinking months of engineering effort into architecting the right analytics tech stack for the job, Fiveonefour can help. Our developer-friendly platform eliminates complexity and slashes dev times, so you can focus on delighting your customers.
Get in touch and discover how Fiveonefour can help you ship user-facing analytics faster, cheaper, and at scale.