Meet Ellever, Studio Software Built for the Teacher, Focused on the Student

Dance teacher Shanae Sainsbury recalls staying up late, surrounded by towering piles of handwritten notes at her coffee table during evaluation season. With each student being evaluated on more than 50 elements—and upwards of 80 students—that’s what it looked like every evening for weeks. Yet, despite the time and care poured into each evaluation, the insights remained locked on paper, with no long-term record to track progress or patterns over time.

When Sainsbury’s business-minded husband, Thane Pearson, observed this process, he sought out existing studio-admin platforms that might help. Sainsbury had used some of them herself, but she always knew something was missing for dance teachers. “The message was always ‘Let me take care of your business so you can focus on what you love.’ In my head I was thinking, ‘I don’t just want to focus on what I love—I want tools that actually help me do it better!’ ” Pearson decided to create a solution tailored to his wife’s needs, and Ellever was born.

Tools That Matter to Teachers and Studio Owners

“He started creating tools for [student] evaluations,” says Sainsbury. “Then it turned into: Can you create something where I can write notes about a particular student to reference later? Can I create lesson plans? Can I include images or video attachments for those lesson plans? Can I share a note with another teacher or share my lesson plan with my assistant?”

This finely tuned product, built to serve teachers’ needs directly, became Ellever, the web- and app-based platform Pearson and Sainsbury co-founded out of those coffee-table brainstorming sessions.

Ellever now serves more than 2,000 users and 1,200 students in dance studios of all sizes and styles. Dance instructor Ryann Westrop, owner of The Refinery Academy of Dance, in Heber, Utah, says that Ellever has been a game-changing time-saver. “It’s very user-friendly, more so than any other software I’ve had experience with,” says Westrop, noting Ellever’s intuitive layout and navigation and its step-by-step tutorials, which made switching from her previous software painless. 

She’s quick to note the expanded features and tools that she hadn’t encountered on other platforms. When initiating payments, for example, “Let’s say five new enrollments come in after we’ve already posted a costume fee and they’re all in different classes,” she says. “I can just type their names and customize the list, fill out the payment information once, and it posts to all five of their accounts.” Before Ellever, Westrop found that she and her colleagues were collecting and keeping information in multiple places, sometimes on paper. Now, she just needs to log in to Ellever to access everything, such as class schedules, student info, lesson plans, and a robust suite of bookkeeping tools (including automated reports, which she used to have to calculate manually for tax season). Gone are the days of reminding her faculty to log their hours—instructor time and payments are calculated in tandem with the platform’s class schedule and are adjusted when a substitute teacher needs to step in. Even subs benefit from Ellever, with instant access to attendance—with students’ names and photos—and the regular teacher’s lesson plan so everyone can stay on track.

Pricing

Westrop says the cost of Ellever is more than worth it: “I know 100 percent that the money I spend on Ellever is not near as much as what I was spending for people’s time to do things manually.”

Ellever’s pricing model is simple, and flexible, making it accessible to studios of all sizes. Studios can start with a free, 60-day trial. From there, the comprehensive standard plan includes everything needed to manage a studio efficiently, with the option to add Pro and Elite features for enhanced capabilities. 

Pricing is based on actively enrolled students, not the total number of students in the system, ensuring that studios only pay for what they need. (Many studios choose to pass that expense along to their families.) Because the tuition-payment tools are built in, the software fee can appear as a line item on families’ monthly invoices from their studio, explains Pearson.     

Notably, parents’ reactions to an added fee for Ellever have been positive. For them, the time saved more than justifies the small cost: “An extra dollar or two a month is nothing compared to the time parents used to spend hunting down information or trying to manage their students’ dance life,” explains Pearson.

Student Participation and Parent Satisfaction

Student success is exactly what Pearson and Sainsbury wanted Ellever to optimize. Pearson knew that the administrative tools had to improve upon what was already available on the market, but the platform’s magic is that it focuses on the two user types that matter most: instructors and their students. 

Ellever’s mobile app helps students stay accountable by allowing them to report absences and set training goals in collaboration with their teachers. On the much-loved Class Boards feature, students can access class resources, from filmed choreography and rehearsal content to supplemental exercises and studio updates—anything that a teacher wants to share with a particular class.

The ability to share video via Ellever was another idea Pearson developed after seeing Shanae’s experience as a teacher choreographing routines: “Shanae would video the choreography and then would be swarmed by 20 students asking for the video to be texted or AirDropped.” The disorganization meant that some students—whether en route to another class or too young to have a phone—missed out on this valuable information.

Parents also have much more transparency. They can view their child’s student profile to stay up to date on schedules, attendance records, injury reports, evaluations, and learning goals. What’s more, parents can trust that studio decisions are being made with a data-driven approach. “Because it’s all done through the app and not through paper, the data is collected over time. It helps to build more intention, helping students succeed as much as possible physically, emotionally, and mentally,” says Sainsbury.

In addition to addressing the administrative needs of a studio, Ellever serves the entire dance-studio ecosystem. “So many studios want teachers who strive for excellence, but until now, there hasn’t been software designed with the teacher in mind,” says Sainsbury. Because teachers give their best every day, they deserve the best tools in return. Ellever is here to help.

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