Links retires in

Links is retiring. We're building what comes next.

We've been working with RMIT since early 2025 on a purpose-built replacement. One platform for memberships, bookings, group fitness, POS, check-in, and reporting. Built on Shopify Plus. Integrated with university SSO.

If you got the June 2027 retirement email, this is worth your attention.

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Live Platform

2 of 3 slots open

Active Members

12,847

Across 3 campuses

Today's Check-ins

1,204

Classes Today

Court Bookings

89%

Utilisation rate

Revenue MTD

$124k

+12% vs last month

"We've consolidated our student merch store, student club management, and student active programs onto Shopify Plus. Students get one login and one singular experience for everything Student Life runs digitally. IT gets one platform to support. That's the bar now for any new service we bring online."

Tim Burdeu - Associate Director, Student Life, RMIT University

Links was never built for students.

Links has no student-facing platform. No app. No web portal. No self-service of any kind.

Every membership enquiry, every court booking, every class question goes through your front desk. Your staff are the interface. They have been for years, because Links was built as a back-office administration tool and nothing else.

The alternatives? Generic gym software dressed up with a logo. Rigid templates. Clunky navigation designed a decade ago. Nothing that belongs in a university environment.

We built on Shopify Plus instead.

The same commerce infrastructure powering some of the world's most demanding retail and membership environments. A student-facing platform fully customised to your university's brand, integrated into your existing student experience ecosystem, and built to the UX expectations students actually have in 2026.

And it doesn't stop at the gym.

The same Shopify Plus ecosystem powers your merchandise stores (separated per department or unified into one), your student clubs through our proprietary Hive club management platform, and your POS. Everything your sport and recreation operation touches, in one place.

No app. No portal. No self-service.

That's what Links gives your students today.

Built on Shopify Plus

World-class commerce and membership infrastructure.

Fully customised

Your brand, your ecosystem, your students.

One ecosystem

Recreation, merch stores, clubs, and student services. One login. One experience.

June 30, 2027

Links end of life. The date your replacement needs to be live.

What Links charges for a student-facing platform. Because there isn't one.

3+ systems

What most Links universities run alongside it just to cover the gaps.

1 login

What students get across every recreation service with university SSO built in.

What the platform does

Everything your campus recreation team needs. One system.

Designed with RMIT's recreation and IT teams to replace Links and everything patched around it. One platform covering every part of how a university recreation operation actually runs, with a student-facing experience built to the standard students expect in 2026.

Student Experience

A student-facing platform that actually works.

A fully branded, mobile-first portal students use to browse memberships, book facilities, register for classes, and manage their recreation account. Built on Shopify Plus. Accessible from any device, integrated with their university login, and designed to sit alongside every other student service they already use. No separate app to download. No separate account to create.

Memberships

Student and staff memberships

Tiered membership plans for students, staff, alumni, and community members. Direct debit, casual visits, semester passes. Automatic student verification via university SSO.

Bookings

Court, pool, and facility bookings

Real-time availability for every bookable space. Courts, pools, studios, multi-purpose rooms. Students book from their phone, staff manage from a dashboard. No double-bookings.

Group Fitness

Classes, PT, and group exercise

Timetable management for group fitness classes. Waitlists, cancellations, instructor scheduling, and personal training session bookings. Capacity limits enforced automatically.

Operations

POS, check-in, and daily ops

Point of sale for retail and cafe. Contactless check-in at the front desk. Real-time occupancy tracking. Staff dashboards showing everything happening across every facility, right now.

Reporting

Reports that don't eat your Monday morning

Usage analytics, revenue tracking, membership growth, facility utilisation. One-click exports. No more pulling data from three systems and formatting it in Excel every Monday.

SSO

University single sign-on, built in

SAML, LDAP, Active Directory. Students log in with their university credentials. No separate accounts, no password resets, no IT tickets. This is what your IT team has been asking for.

Platforms we build on and integrate with

Integration expertise

We connect your recreation platform to everything else.

Your gym platform needs to talk to your identity provider, your finance system, your LMS, and your CRM. We've done all of it.

Shopify Plus

Commerce platform

Salesforce

CRM integration

Workday

HR and finance

Canvas LMS

Learning management

SAML / LDAP / SSO

Identity and access

Payment systems

Direct debit, POS, billing

Reporting / BI

Real-time analytics

Legacy migration

Links, Phoenix, Envibe

In development with RMIT University

Designing the Links replacement with RMIT's recreation team

RMIT's recreation team came to us with a problem that will be familiar to anyone running campus gyms on Links. Memberships in one system, bookings in another, reporting done manually every Monday morning, and an IT team that had grown tired of vendors who couldn't deliver SSO properly. We spent early 2025 working through a full discovery and architecture process with RMIT's recreation operations and IT teams. What came out of that was a platform design built around how university recreation actually works, not how a generic gym software vendor thinks it does. The Links retirement announcement in mid 2026 put a hard date on what was already an urgent problem. RMIT is now moving toward implementation. The architecture is validated. The integration with their existing student experience ecosystem, including their Shopify Plus infrastructure, is mapped and ready to build.

Request Architecture Overview

Early 2025

Discovery and architecture commenced

Validated

Platform architecture and integration design

Mapped

SSO, Shopify Plus, and identity integration pathways

Ready

Moving toward implementation

"The architecture decision that changed everything was building on Shopify Plus. We already run our stores and merchandise on it. Extending that into recreation means students get one login, one experience, and IT gets an ecosystem they already know how to support."

David, Shopify Plus Product Owner, RMIT University

See it before you commit to anything.

We've built an interactive platform demo developed with RMIT's recreation and IT teams. Not a slide deck. Not a sales video. A working interface you can actually navigate, built around how university recreation operates.

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Beyond the gym

The gym platform is just the start.

Most university sport and recreation teams are managing more than just the gym. There's club administration, team merchandise, event ticketing, venue POS, and equipment hire. Each one running in a different system, with a different login, sending students somewhere different every time.

We built the gym platform on Shopify Plus for a reason. It's not just the best commerce infrastructure available. It's the foundation for consolidating everything your sport and recreation operation touches into a single student-facing ecosystem.

Merch Store

Team kits, club apparel, equipment

Native Shopify Plus. The same storefront your students already use, extended to cover everything your sport and rec teams sell. No separate platform, no separate checkout.

Hive - Clubs

Clubs management, co-developed with RMIT

Hive is a Shopify-based clubs management platform running live at RMIT Store. Club leaders manage their own clubs. Coordinators maintain oversight. Sport clubs, fitness groups, and active programs sit in the same ecosystem as the gym. Already installed and operational.

POS

Front desk, venue bar, event entry

Shopify POS works out of the box. One system, one reconciliation, one reporting dashboard. Your finance team will appreciate not having another merchant account to manage.

This ecosystem already exists at RMIT.

RMIT University already runs this ecosystem. Their student store, club management, merchandise, and procurement services all operate through a single Shopify Plus platform at store.rmit.edu.au. Students use one login. One storefront. One experience regardless of which part of the university is running what they're buying.

The gym platform completes that picture. When Active joins the same ecosystem as Store and Clubs, a student can manage their membership, buy their team kit, register their club, and book a court without ever leaving the same environment or logging in twice.

One ecosystem. One login. Every student touchpoint your sport and recreation team runs.

One Shopify Plus account. Every student-facing touchpoint your sport and recreation team runs. One place students go for all of it.

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Migration process

A controlled, repeatable migration. No surprises.

University procurement exists for a reason. We work within it, not around it. Here's exactly how a migration runs.

Discovery

Audit your current Links setup, integrations, data, and pain points. 2 weeks.

Architecture

System design, SSO planning, integration mapping, and procurement documentation. 3 weeks.

Build

Platform development, integrations, and staging environment for UAT. 8-12 weeks.

Migration

Full data transfer from Links, parallel running, zero-downtime cutover. 2 weeks.

Go-live

Staff training, launch support, monitoring, and 90-day optimisation period.

Security and compliance

Enterprise-grade. University-approved.

Built to meet the security, privacy, and compliance requirements that university IT teams demand.

SOC 2 Aligned

Security controls mapped to SOC 2 Type II framework

Australian Data Sovereignty

All data hosted in Australia. No offshore processing.

ISO 27001 Aligned

Information security management best practices

WCAG 2.1 Accessible

AA accessibility compliance for all users

2 implementation slots remaining for 2026

Three engagements per year. That's the cap.

Universities need a partner they can trust to deliver on time, on spec, and with the security rigour their IT teams expect. That only happens with dedicated focus. We limit ourselves to three university engagements per year so every institution gets the full attention of our team from discovery through to post-launch support. We're scoping our 2026 university cohort now. With Links retiring June 30 2027, and implementation taking up to 20 weeks, the window for a controlled migration is narrower than it looks. When these slots fill, we're closed until 2027.

A quick note from me.

I'm Tim. University recreation platforms are what I do. Not one of fifty services on a website. This is the thing.

We're Melbourne-based and we genuinely care about the outcome. I know everyone says that. But we're the ones who capped ourselves at three projects a year because we'd rather do it properly than scale for the sake of it.

If you're in Melbourne, let me buy you a coffee and talk through what you're facing. No slides. No sales process. Just a conversation about your Links migration and whether we can help.

Book a Coffee

Tim Sullivan, Founder, Sonder Sites

How we work

Safe, controlled, and thorough.

University procurement exists for a reason. We work within it, not around it.

Strategy and Architecture

System design, procurement support, stakeholder alignment, and migration planning tailored to university IT governance.

Engineering and Integration

Full-stack development, API integration, SSO implementation, data migration, and zero-downtime deployment.

Launch and Support

Staff training, go-live support, performance monitoring, and ongoing optimisation. We don't disappear after launch.

Common questions

What universities ask us.

How long does a full migration take?

Typically 16-20 weeks from discovery to go-live. This covers a full audit of your current Links setup, architecture design, platform build, data migration, staff training, and a 90-day post-launch optimisation period. We run parallel systems during cutover so there is no downtime. With Links retiring June 30 2027, universities starting procurement in the second half of 2026 are already cutting it closer than they should be. Factor in your internal approval cycles and the maths gets tight quickly.

Will we lose any historical data from Links?

No. Our migration architecture is built to transfer all historical data including membership records, booking history, transaction data, and reporting archives. Full data integrity is a non-negotiable part of how we design every migration, not something we retrofit at the end.

How does SSO integration work?

We support SAML 2.0, LDAP, and Active Directory out of the box. Students and staff log in with their existing university credentials. No separate accounts, no additional passwords. Your IT team reviews and approves the integration during the architecture phase, not after the platform is already built.

What happens to our existing student-facing systems?

For most universities running Links, recreation sits in a completely separate digital environment from everything else students interact with. Our platform is designed to change that. Built on Shopify Plus, it integrates directly with your existing student experience ecosystem so recreation memberships, bookings, and programs sit alongside clubs, stores, and student services under a single student login. If your university is already running Shopify Plus infrastructure, the integration pathway is significantly faster.

Can we see the platform before committing?

Yes. We've developed an interactive platform demo with RMIT's recreation and IT teams. Not a slide deck. A working interface built around how university recreation actually operates. Book a 30-minute call and we'll walk you through it together and talk through how it maps to your specific Links setup. We can also arrange a reference conversation with RMIT directly.

What happens if Links retires before we're ready?

That's exactly why starting early matters. Universities that begin the process now get a controlled, well-planned migration. Those that wait risk emergency procurement, rushed implementation, and premium pricing when every other university is scrambling at the same time.

Where is our data hosted?

All data is hosted in Australia on Australian infrastructure. No offshore processing, no data leaving the country. We comply with Australian Privacy Principles and can support your university's specific data governance requirements.

Links retires in .
Let's talk before it's urgent.

A 30-minute call to understand your current setup, discuss migration options, and see if we're the right fit. No pitch deck. Just answers.

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Or email directly: tim@sondersites.com