Price times hours used
“we always looked at it from a kind of the price volume relationship is how many hours do you have available? How many of those hours get used and how much do you get paid per hour during that?”
Founder conversationBuilder <$5m
How PodPlay Reached $3M in Contracted ARR Across 200+ Club Locations
Ben Borden explains how PodPlay licenses the technology behind PingPod's autonomous table tennis clubs to pickleball venues on per-court SaaS fees.
Ben Borden · PodPlay
Published February 18, 2026About this resource
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What you’ll learn
Ben Borden, co-founder of PodPlay, explains how the sports venue software company grew out of the PingPod autonomous table tennis clubs and now has about $3M in contracted ARR across more than 200 locations. He covers per-court SaaS pricing, the hardware-plus-software approach, and the $8M Series A led by Frontier Growth.
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Why one full stack wins
“So really kind of the magic in this is combining hardware software in a single kind of full stack solution.”
Per-court monthly SaaS fees
“all of these are priced on a kind of per court basis, roughly. You end up with a SaaS fee, so it's not a transaction based model. You're getting monthly SaaS fees.”
Compete on ROI, not price
“we want to compete on ROI, not price and kind of that ROI, the components of that is like, can we enable new lines of revenue for a club?”
Pick the white box location
“you would prefer a slightly lesser location that if you can get kind of that white box that doesn't have a lot of structural work and you can put less money into it and get open faster than getting that kind of prime location”
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Ben Borden
Co-founder · PodPlay
- Company revenue
- $3M
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