Trainer Terms and Payout Policy

These Trainer Terms apply to users who apply to become trainers, are approved as trainers, publish trainer profiles, accept bookings, sell courses, sell recurring coaching plans, upload credentials, or use wallet and payout tools on Fitsylvania.

Trainers are independent providers. Nothing in the Platform relationship creates employment, worker status, partnership, joint venture, agency, fiduciary duty, franchise, or representative authority between Fitsylvania and a trainer, except where mandatory law says otherwise.

• Provide accurate, complete, and current profile, pricing, availability, qualification, and identity information.
• Hold and maintain all qualifications, registrations, licences, permits, and consents required to lawfully offer the advertised services, and hold professional or public-liability insurance where required by law or by your profession in your jurisdiction.
• Only make claims that are truthful, supportable, and lawful. Do not hold yourself out as a doctor, therapist, regulated clinician, or specialist unless you are lawfully entitled to do so.
• Use appropriate judgment when assessing a client's suitability for training and do not knowingly provide unsafe or clearly inappropriate instructions.
• If you use the session-notes tool, you are responsible for the content, accuracy, and lawfulness of the notes you create, and for keeping them relevant and proportionate to coaching the client. Do not record more sensitive information than you need. A note marked as kept for your records is hidden from the client's normal account view but is not exempt from a client's lawful request to access information held about them, and Fitsylvania may be required to disclose note content in response to such a request or a valid legal demand.
• Comply with applicable law, tax rules, consumer obligations, advertising standards, safeguarding obligations, and professional requirements.

Fitsylvania may request identity, legal, qualification, insurance, payout, or other supporting documents. Trainer approval is discretionary and may be delayed, revisited, suspended, or withdrawn where trust, safety, fraud, legal, or quality concerns arise.

Fitsylvania may also impose partial restrictions instead of full suspension, including limiting new course sales, limiting new session sales, removing search visibility, pausing profile edits, or restricting other trainer-facing features while a review is ongoing or as part of an enforcement outcome.

Approval does not mean Fitsylvania certifies your competence or assumes responsibility for your services. Trainers remain responsible for their own representations, services, and legal compliance.

• You must use Fitsylvania's required booking, cancellation, refund, messaging, and moderation flows where the Platform requires them.
• Where Fitsylvania offers studio links, direct booking links, recurring coaching plans, or other trainer-owned acquisition tools, you remain responsible for the claims, pricing clarity, lawfulness, and delivery expectations of the offers you publish through them.
• You must not use messages, reviews, or profile content to solicit prohibited off-platform payment, evade fees, or bypass moderation requirements where Fitsylvania requires the transaction to remain on-platform.
• You must respond professionally, avoid discriminatory, abusive, or harassing conduct, and cooperate with safety and support reviews.
• Where Fitsylvania reasonably requires it for safety, fraud prevention, or support review, trainers must cooperate with booking investigations, live-session closures, or documented moderation interventions.
• If you publish a recurring coaching plan, you must provide clear plan-specific terms covering missed sessions, rescheduling, late arrivals, cancellation notice periods, and any rules that affect how included sessions are counted or reinstated.

• Trainers remain responsible for the legality, accuracy, safety, and non-infringing nature of their course content and promotional claims.
• By uploading course content or trainer materials, you grant Fitsylvania a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, format, watermark, moderate, excerpt, preview, advertise, display, distribute within the Platform, and otherwise use the content to operate, support, secure, market, and improve the Platform.
• Fitsylvania may create branded previews, thumbnails, stills, snippets, excerpts, metadata, and promotional materials from trainer content.
• Where a course has enrolled learners, Fitsylvania may block permanent deletion of the course or purchased lesson materials in order to preserve learner access, progress, records, and transaction history.
• Trainers may update, improve, or supplement course content, but must not materially strip down, replace, or withdraw purchased content for existing learners without Fitsylvania's approval.
• Archiving or unpublishing a course normally stops new sales only. It does not by itself remove access for existing enrolled learners.
• Fitsylvania may require edits, supporting evidence, compliance clarification, or landing-page changes before or after a course goes live. Fitsylvania may also place a course into review, pause new sales, remove it from discovery surfaces, or disable it entirely while a review is ongoing.
• Fitsylvania may disable a course immediately for legal, safety, infringement, fraud, regulatory, deceptive-marketing, prohibited-content, consumer-protection, or platform-integrity reasons. In that case Fitsylvania may remove learner access, stop new sales, preserve evidence, review payout impact, and offer affected learners a refund-review path where appropriate.

Platform fee

• Rate. Fitsylvania charges a platform fee equal to twenty per cent (20%) of the gross transaction value. For session bookings and recurring coaching charges this is subject to a minimum of £6 / $7 / €7 per transaction and a maximum (cap) of £40 / $50 / €45 per transaction (or the equivalent stated in payment settings). Course sales are not subject to any minimum or maximum.
• Minimum session price. Because the per-transaction fee floor above is £6 / $7 / €7, session prices cannot be set below that minimum (a lower price would leave you with nothing after the fee). Above that minimum, you set your own prices freely.
• Once-per-pair by product class (sessions and subscriptions). For session bookings and recurring coaching, the platform fee applies only to the first session booking and the first marketplace-attributable subscription charge in which a particular client engages you through Fitsylvania marketplace discovery (search, browse, recommendations, or affiliate referral). Subsequent session bookings and subscription renewals between you and that same client carry no platform fee. Stripe processing applies to every card transaction and is deducted from your proceeds after settlement.
• Courses. Course sales always carry the platform fee on every sale, regardless of any prior or later transactions with the same client, and with no minimum or maximum.
• Direct-link transactions. Session bookings and subscriptions originating from your direct profile link (rather than from marketplace discovery) carry no platform fee. Course sales carry the platform fee regardless of how the client arrived.
• No Fitsylvania client-side fee. Fitsylvania does not currently charge a separate client-side service fee. The platform fee and actual Stripe processing fee are deducted from your gross.
• Changes to the fee. If we change the platform fee rate, floor, or cap, we will notify you by email to your account address at least thirty (30) days before the change takes effect for you. The change applies only to transactions occurring on or after the stated effective date. If you do not accept the change, you may stop selling and close your account before it takes effect; continuing to sell after the effective date constitutes acceptance.

Collection of payments on your behalf (agent of the payee)

• Limited collection agent. You appoint Fitsylvania as your limited agent for the sole purpose of collecting payments from clients for the services and content you sell through the Platform, and of disbursing those amounts to you net of the platform fee, Stripe processing fees, refunds, chargebacks, and any other amounts you owe under these Terms. Fitsylvania collects through its payment processor (currently Stripe Connect).
• Discharge of the client's obligation. A client's payment to Fitsylvania (as your collection agent) discharges the client's payment obligation to you in full, even if Fitsylvania is delayed in, or fails to make, the corresponding payout to you. The client is not responsible for paying you again. Any failure by Fitsylvania to pay you is solely a matter between you and Fitsylvania.
• No banking or stored value. Fitsylvania holds collected amounts as your agent pending disbursement and does not provide banking, deposit-taking, or stored-value services. Amounts shown in your wallet are a record of sums collected on your behalf, not a deposit held by Fitsylvania for your independent use.

Wallet, hold period, and Stripe processing fees

• Each transaction creates a wallet entry recording the gross, the platform fee (if any), the Stripe processing fee, and your trainer net.
• New wallet entries are held in a pending state to mirror the statutory consumer Cooling-Off Period under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. For courses and recurring coaching charges, the hold is 14 days from the transaction trigger date. For one-to-one session bookings, the hold runs until the later of (a) 14 days from the transaction trigger date or (b) 48 hours after the session ends, so the client's post-session refund window has closed before funds clear; where a session is flagged as a trainer no-show, the hold is extended to 14 days after the scheduled session date. After the applicable hold the entry becomes available for withdrawal, subject to the refund rules below.
• Stripe processing fees are recorded from Stripe's final balance transaction and deducted from trainer proceeds after settlement.
• Any earnings file you download (for example a CSV export) is a convenience record drawn from your wallet ledger. It is not an invoice or an official tax statement issued by Fitsylvania, and you remain responsible for your own tax reporting.

Stripe Connect onboarding (just-in-time)

• You can list services, accept bookings, sell approved courses, sell coaching plans, and accumulate wallet balance without first completing Stripe Connect onboarding. Onboarding is required before your first withdrawal, not before your first sale.
• Your trainer application requires a supported country of residence. At launch, Fitsylvania accepts trainer residence countries only where the local payout/account operating currency is USD, AED, EUR, or GBP and where we can support Stripe Connect, Wise, or another approved payout route. Your Stripe Connect country must match the country of residence on your trainer application unless Fitsylvania approves a documented correction.
• When you first request a withdrawal, you will be redirected to Stripe to complete identity verification and provide bank-account details. Until Stripe confirms that your connected account can receive transfers, no withdrawal can be processed and your wallet balance remains held.
• Country selection at onboarding is permanent. Stripe Connect accounts are bound to a single country and cannot be relocated after onboarding. Choose the country in which you are tax-resident, ordinarily resident, and lawfully entitled to provide your services.
• You are responsible for keeping your Stripe Connect account information accurate, complete, and current, and for responding promptly to any further-information requests from Stripe.

Stripe onboarding failure, held balances, and manual payout fallback

• What counts as onboarding failure. Stripe onboarding is considered incomplete or failed while Stripe has not enabled charges and transfers, while required information is currently due, while verification is disabled or rejected, while bank-account details are missing or invalid, while sanctions/fraud/risk review is unresolved, or while your submitted country, identity, tax, business, or address information does not match the country and legal details required for your trainer account.
• Missing documentation is not forfeiture. If verification fails because documents or information are missing, unclear, expired, inconsistent, or rejected, you must upload the requested information through Stripe or the support path Fitsylvania provides. Your cleared wallet balance remains recorded, but you cannot withdraw until the payout route is legally and operationally usable.
• Service disruption. Fitsylvania may restrict new bookings, course sales, coaching-plan sales, profile merchandising, or trainer features if onboarding remains incomplete, fails, or becomes disabled after you have earned balance, especially where continued sales would create refund, chargeback, tax, compliance, or payout risk.
• Manual fallback payout. If Stripe Connect cannot be completed after reasonable attempts, Fitsylvania may, at its discretion, review a manual payout through an approved route such as Stripe-supported payout tooling, Wise, bank transfer, or another lawful provider that supports the trainer's country, currency, identity, and recipient details. We do not promise a manual payout where no lawful, compliant, and commercially practical payout route is available.
• Deductions on fallback payout. Where a manual fallback payout is approved, Fitsylvania may deduct unrecovered Stripe processing fees, provider transfer fees, currency-conversion costs, bank-return fees, chargeback or refund exposure, tax withholding, compliance costs, and any other documented amount lawfully owed or reasonably required to reconcile the affected transactions.
• Final restriction or removal. If you cannot or will not complete verification, provide required documents, or use an available payout route, Fitsylvania may pause sales, keep funds held while risk remains open, offset refunds or chargebacks, close your trainer account, and prevent future trainer use of the Platform, subject to applicable law and any required notice.

Withdrawal mechanics

• Minimum. The minimum withdrawal amount is £25 / $30 / €30 (or local equivalent) per request.
• Frequency. You may submit at most one withdrawal request per twenty-four (24) hour period. This limit is in place to keep administrative review tractable at launch and may be relaxed in future.
• Administrator review. Every withdrawal request is reviewed by a Fitsylvania administrator before any transfer is initiated. We aim to review withdrawal requests within five (5) business days. Approval may be withheld or delayed only where: (a) we reasonably suspect fraud or unauthorised activity; (b) identity, tax, or Stripe Connect verification (KYC) is incomplete; (c) a refund, chargeback, or dispute affecting the funds is unresolved; or (d) a court order or legal or regulatory obligation requires it. Where we hold a withdrawal, we will tell you the reason and what is needed to release it. Approved withdrawals are paid out via Stripe transfer to your connected account.
• Failure and retry. If a Stripe transfer fails, the wallet entries remain locked and Fitsylvania may retry the transfer using the same idempotency key so that a successful prior transfer cannot result in a duplicate payout.
• Rejection. A rejected withdrawal releases the wallet entries back to available status. The reason for rejection is recorded and shown to you.

Refunds, chargebacks, and offsets

• If a transaction is refunded or charged back, the corresponding wallet entry is reversed. Where the entry has already been paid out, Fitsylvania will first reverse the Stripe transfer to recover the trainer net, and then refund the consumer. If the connected account has insufficient balance for the reversal, Fitsylvania may pursue recovery through any lawful means, including offsetting against future earnings.
• Wallet balances and payout eligibility may be adjusted, delayed, held in reserve, reversed, or offset where refunds, chargebacks, fraud checks, moderation, legal compliance, platform integrity, or other risk controls require it.
• Affiliate commission accrued on a refunded transaction is reversed by offsetting adjustment.

Affiliate commission

• If you participate in the affiliate program, commission is calculated only on transactions that actually carried a platform fee - i.e. only on the first marketplace-sourced transaction per client-trainer pair. Repeat transactions, direct-link transactions, and any transaction with no platform fee generate no affiliate commission. Self-referral on your own services is blocked. See the Affiliate Program Terms for full rules.

Taxes

• Fitsylvania does not act as your accountant or tax adviser. You are responsible for your own taxes, VAT registration where applicable, invoicing requirements, withholding obligations, and similar fiscal duties arising from your earnings.
• Where required by law, Fitsylvania may withhold or report on payouts and request additional identity or tax information before releasing a payout.

To the extent permitted by law, trainers will indemnify Fitsylvania and its affiliates, officers, directors, personnel, and contractors against losses, claims, liabilities, costs, and expenses arising from the trainer's services, injuries alleged to result from the trainer's conduct, misleading or unlawful claims, intellectual property infringement, unsafe advice, tax failures, or breach of these Terms or applicable law.

Fitsylvania may suspend listings, courses, messaging access, payouts, or account status while it investigates risk, safety, legal, fraud, or quality issues.

Enforcement outcomes may include warnings, required edits, delayed publication, removal from search or merchandising surfaces, temporary suspension of course sales or session sales, course disablement, payout reserves or offsets, and full trainer-tool suspension where reasonably necessary.

Where reasonably necessary to protect users or the Platform, Fitsylvania may immediately suspend or restrict some or all trainer abilities, including the ability to accept new session bookings, sell new courses, publish content, appear in search, or use trainer-facing tools. Fitsylvania may also restore some abilities while leaving others restricted, and may later remove, extend, or modify a restriction in response to new information.

Fitsylvania will ordinarily allow a restricted trainer to access payout history and request payout of eligible cleared funds, unless law, fraud, chargeback exposure, reserve policy, or another legitimate risk-control reason requires those funds to be held, offset, or delayed.

If a trainer disagrees with an enforcement decision, the trainer may request review by opening a support ticket. This appeal path also applies where Fitsylvania disables a course, closes learner access pending platform review, or closes a live booking or moderation-sensitive session. Fitsylvania may ask for additional information and may uphold, vary, shorten, or remove the restriction in its discretion, acting reasonably and with regard to safety, platform integrity, and available evidence.

Notice of termination

Other than immediate suspension for the risk, safety, fraud, legal, or quality reasons described above (and in cases of repeated or serious breach, or where the law requires it), Fitsylvania will give a trainer at least thirty (30) days' notice by email before permanently terminating their account, so the trainer can wind down bookings, deliver outstanding sessions, and withdraw eligible cleared funds. A trainer may close their account at any time, subject to outstanding obligations, refund or dispute investigations, and record-keeping duties that survive closure.

Changes to these Terms

Fitsylvania may update these Trainer Terms from time to time. Except where a change is required by law or to address an immediate safety, security, or fraud risk, we will give trainers at least fifteen (15) days' notice by email before a material change takes effect, together with the updated version and its effective date. Where a change affects the platform fee rate, floor, or cap, the longer thirty (30) days' notice described in the 'Changes to the fee' part of section 6 applies instead. If you do not accept a material change, you may stop selling and close your account before it takes effect; continuing to use trainer tools after the effective date constitutes acceptance.

This section sets out the main parameters that determine how trainers are ranked on Fitsylvania's discovery surfaces (keyword search, browse, and suggested-trainer listings), and the reasons for the relative importance of those parameters. It is published so that you can understand how your visibility is decided, in line with the platform-to-business transparency rules (Regulation (EU) 2019/1150, as it applies in the United Kingdom and in the European Union).

Step 1: eligibility to appear at all

Before any ranking happens, you must be eligible to appear on a discovery surface. You are excluded entirely, however good your profile is, if any of the following applies:

• your trainer profile is not approved, is not active, or has had search visibility removed or been suspended or restricted under section 3 or section 7;
• your account is suspended or closed, or search visibility is switched off on it; or
• you have nothing a client can buy. You need at least one of: a priced one-to-one session in any duration, a published and active coaching plan, or a published, approved course that has not been disabled. A profile with none of these does not appear in search or browse at all.

Reason. Discovery exists to connect clients with services they can book now. A listing a client cannot buy from wastes their attention and costs every other trainer in that result.

Eligibility is re-checked continuously rather than on every keystroke, so when you publish your first bookable session, plan, or course there can be a short delay of a few minutes before you start appearing. A restriction or suspension applies to your visibility immediately, with no such delay.

Step 2: the candidate pool, which is the most consequential parameter

Fitsylvania does not score every eligible trainer on every request. For each search or browse request we load a bounded batch of up to 300 eligible trainers from the database, and only that batch is ranked. Admission to the batch is therefore the single most consequential parameter in this section: a trainer who is not admitted does not rank low for that request, they do not appear in it at all.

There are two admission routes, run in parallel and then combined:

• Up to 220 places by discovery score. Eligible trainers matching the request, ordered by the stored discovery score described below, highest first.
• Up to 80 places by how recently you joined. Eligible trainers matching the request, ordered by account creation date, newest first.

The two lists are de-duplicated, so a trainer who qualifies on both routes takes one place. On most requests, fewer than 300 eligible trainers match and every one of them is considered; the split only bites on broad queries that match more trainers than the batch can hold.

Reasons for the relative importance of the two routes. The quality route takes the larger share because clients get the best outcome when the strongest matching trainers are always considered, whatever date they joined. The recency route exists because a trainer with no reviews yet sits at a neutral starting score, so a batch ordered purely by score would keep new trainers out of broad, competitive queries more or less permanently. Reserving places for the newest accounts guarantees new supply real exposure while it is new.

Step 3: how the trainers in the pool are ordered

Browse and suggested listings (no search term). Trainers are ordered by discovery score, highest first. Where two scores are equal, the trainer with more verified reviews ranks first. Where that is equal too, which is normally the case for trainers who have no reviews yet, order is decided by a rotation key that is fixed for a given day and reshuffles daily, so trainers who are genuinely level share exposure over time instead of being frozen in one order. Because the key is fixed within the day, the order a client sees stays coherent across pages during their visit.

Keyword searches. Trainers in the pool are ordered by how well the profile matches the words the client typed. The fields that count towards relevance are your name, your bio, your experience summary, your profile headline, your coaching intro, your location, and your trainer-type tags. Fields are weighted differently: your name and your trainer-type tags carry more weight than your coaching intro, and a profile that matches every word the client typed is rewarded over one that matches only part of it. Relevance is then adjusted by:

• Review signals. Your average verified rating, weighted by the number of verified reviews behind it, so a strong average built on many reviews counts for more than the same average from one review.
• Price against a stated budget. Where the client's query names a budget (for example "under £50"), a trainer whose lowest session price is at or under that figure is favoured and one above it is pushed down. Price is not a ranking parameter when no budget is expressed, and we do not rank you higher or lower simply for charging more or less.
• Meaning-based matching. Where the semantic search feature is switched on, we also compare the meaning of the query against your profile text and blend that result list with the keyword list, so a client can find you when they describe what they want in words you did not literally use.

Reason for the relative importance. On a keyword search, relevance to what the client actually asked for outranks everything else, because a highly rated strength coach is the wrong answer to a search for prenatal yoga. Review signals and budget fit adjust the order among trainers who are already relevant; they do not override relevance.

Your discovery score

Your discovery score has exactly one input: your verified client reviews. It is your average verified rating, smoothed towards a starting value of 4.6 that carries the weight of 8 reviews, so your score moves further from that starting point the more genuine reviews you accumulate. Nothing else feeds it. Not your prices, not your sales volume, not how much platform fee or commission you generate, and not any manual adjustment. It is recalculated when your reviews change, with a scheduled refresh as a backstop.

The effects of the smoothing are deliberate. One five-star review does not put a brand-new trainer above a trainer holding 4.9 across hundreds of clients, one poor review does not bury an established trainer, and a trainer with no reviews yet starts from the neutral value rather than from the bottom.

What does not affect your ranking

• No paid placement. Fitsylvania does not sell ranking, position, or visibility. No payment or other remuneration from a trainer, direct or indirect, has any effect on where that trainer appears.
• No commission influence. How much platform fee or affiliate commission your transactions generate is not an input to ranking, directly or as a proxy.
• No manual boost. There is no administrative control that raises or lowers an individual trainer's position. Moderation can remove or restore your visibility as described in sections 3 and 7, but it cannot re-order results.

Automated decisions, changes, and how to challenge an outcome

Ranking is fully automated. No person decides where a specific result appears. We may adjust these parameters to improve search quality for clients; where a change to the main parameters described here is material, we will update this section and give notice under the 'Changes to these Terms' part of section 7 before it takes effect.

We do not publish the underlying algorithm, weightings, or code. Doing so would let profiles be engineered to rank rather than to describe the service honestly, which would mislead clients and disadvantage the trainers who fill their profiles in good faith.

If you believe your visibility is wrong, for example that you are eligible but are not appearing, open a support ticket and a person will review your account, your eligibility state, and any restriction applied to it. Ranking position itself is not guaranteed: Fitsylvania does not promise any level of impressions, ranking position, traffic, or bookings.