Hanging midair may be difficult, but running an aerial or pole business comes with even higher stakes

Whether you’re suspended five metres above the ground on silks or spinning around a pole, the physical risks of aerial silk and pole classes are obvious. What’s less visible is the financial balancing act required to keep a studio open in Singapore.

The country has seen waves of fitness trends, from spin and reformer pilates to HYROX, many of which have shuttered in recent years. In contrast, aerial and pole studios have been around since over a decade ago, still surviving amid a saturated fitness scene thanks to a tight community and the versatility of the sports. 

Vulcan Post speaks to three studio owners to understand the economics behind their businesses and how the financial and operational stress keeps them on edge more than any stunt ever could.

The unglamorous side of running a studio

Setting up an aerial or pole studio isn’t as simple as renting any open space. Because both disciplines require significant ceiling height and structural integrity, not every commercial unit can accommodate the equipment safely.

For aerial silks, hoops, and pole rigs, ceilings must be high enough to allow tricks and inversions, while the floors and beams need to withstand dynamic loads—sometimes dozens of students swinging or spinning at once.

As such, for many studio owners, finding a suitable location proved unsurprisingly difficult, including the founder of Adedance Artistic & Aerial Productions (Adedance), Adelene Chua-Adams. 

“Aside from the old badminton hall in Geylang, nowhere was very big and able to cater to aerial properly,” shared Adelene. This led her to start offering small-scale aerial classes at her Yio Chu Kang family home in 2017, before eventually taking the gamble of opening her own studio in Tai Seng. 

But the hunt for her own space was far from smooth. Adelene shared that many of the units she liked were classified under Zone B1, a commercial zoning category that requires businesses to pay 12 to 24 months’ upfront government levies before they can operate legally.

“We tried many avenues of appeal, but ultimately couldn’t get around this extra cost from the URA and SLA. Lesson learned there.”

That’s just one operational cost. Adelene also shared that starting an aerial and/or pole studio requires three to four months’ rent as a deposit, and renovations can cost anywhere from S$50,000 to over S$100,000, not to mention the additional cost of purchasing and installing the truss, sound systems, air conditioning, lighting and signage. 

All in, opening an aerial or pole studio can easily require a six-figure upfront investment before the first class even begins.

Jasmine Han, founder of MAD Collection (formerly known as SLAP Studio), pointed out that finding a space with strong ceilings and flooring is essential to protect the safety of the instructors and students. However, she emphasised the need to negotiate favourable quotes for renovations, as it can set the owners back before they can break even. 

“You need to have a professional engineer to come and certify the safety and ensure the rigging is up to a certain standard,” she added. “Nothing we do is rocket science, but it’s a lot of little, little things.” 

She also pointed out that most studios often run without the help of external investors and have to pay recurring expenses, such as managing their online payment systems, studio maintenance and staff salaries, even during holiday closures. 

Beyond capital, owners must also be able to adapt to unforeseeable situations, from finding last-minute teacher replacements to handling customer complaints and even fixing broken toilets. For them, the physical fear of falling is easier to manage than the constant uncertainty of running a small business in Singapore.

As a business owner, every single day, you are stepping on Legos and eating glass all at the same time. But this is what you need to have the ability to change directions quickly, to be able to get up when somebody punches you in the face.

Jasmine Han, founder of MAD Collection

Diversifying revenue streams in a competitive market

The costs of setting up and running aerial and pole studios make steady, predictable revenue essential: businesses cannot rely on hype alone.

All three studios offer class packages for students, ranging from trial classes to weeks to months-long term-based systems with varying price points. Here is a breakdown of their offerings and prices:

With classes priced roughly between S$38 and S$48, studios operate within narrow margins—high enough to cover overhead costs, but low enough to remain competitive, especially in a market that has grown more saturated over the years.

According to Tracy Mak, the co-owner of Milan Pole Dance Studio Singapore (MPDS), there are over 30 aerial and pole studios in Singapore, among the highest per capita globally. 

“With increasing competition within aerial and pole, as well as the lifestyle dollar of travel and other fitness options, people are spoilt for choice, less committal and increasingly price sensitive,” she pointed out. 

As such, studios have to expand their class offerings to create additional revenue streams. For example, Adedance offers acrobatic, contortion and handstand classes, and MAD collection and MPDS offer heels and dance classes apart from pole. 

These studios also offer corporate packages, where they perform for events such as dinners, dances and brand launches. Adelene noted that 75% of Adedance’s income comes from classes and 25% of it comes from performances, which provide higher-ticket revenue but are less predictable than weekly classes. 

“We’ve performed for massive events ranging from F1, the SEA Games Opening Ceremony, Mercedes car launches overseas and more,” she said. 

Collaboration is key to survival and growth

Over the years, aerial and pole have grown steadily in popularity, a trend the three business owners largely attribute to the strength of their community. In the early days, studios relied almost entirely on word of mouth to attract students.

Pole, in particular, has also seen a shift in perception, according to Tracy. 

She recounted that when she tried pole 18 years ago, she was admittedly sceptical as the sport was seen as taboo due to its association with strip clubs in the West. Today, more people view it as a “serious” form of fitness that is suitable for all ages.

“There are still lingering stereotypes, but overall, people are far more open,” added Tracy. “There’s much more recognition and respect, especially as people see how physically demanding and impressive it is when we perform tricks in the air.” 

Midea has used KBIS 2026 to show it’s no longer just a budget-friendly appliance maker.

At this year’s Kitchen & Bath Industry Show in Orlando, the brand unveiled one of its broadest line-ups yet — spanning kitchen, laundry and even climate tech. However, it’s the kitchen gear that stands out for 2026.

Leading the charge is an expanded French Door refrigerator range, now available in 30-, 33- and 36-inch sizes in both standard and counter-depth formats. Some models feature OneTouch AutoFill with MaxSpace, designed to optimise storage while cutting down on the usual fridge juggling act. It’s a practical upgrade, but the real headline grabber sits elsewhere in the kitchen.

A world that runs on increasingly powerful AI coding tools is one where software creation is cheap — or so the thinking goes — leaving little room for traditional software companies. As one analyst report put it, “vibe coding will allow startups to replicate the features of complex SaaS platforms.”

Cue the hand-wringing and declarations that software companies are doomed.

Open-source software projects that use agents to paper over long-standing resource constraints should logically be among the first to benefit from the era of cheap code. But that equation just doesn’t quite stick. In practice, the impact of AI coding tools on open source software has been far more mixed.

AI coding tools have caused as many problems as they have solved, according to industry experts. The easy-to-use and accessible nature of AI coding tools has enabled a flood of bad code that threatens to overwhelm projects. Building new features is easier than ever, but maintaining them is just as hard and threatens to further fragment software ecosystems.

The result is a more complicated story than simple software abundance. Perhaps, the predicted, imminent death of the software engineer in this new AI era is premature.

Quality vs quantity

Across the board, projects with open codebases are noticing a decline in the average quality of submissions, likely a result of AI tools lowering barriers to entry.

“For people who are junior to the VLC codebase, the quality of the merge requests we see is abysmal,” Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the CEO of the VideoLan Organization that oversees VLC, said in a recent interview.

Kempf is still optimistic about AI coding tools overall but says they’re best “for experienced developers.” 

There have been similar problems at Blender, a 3D modeling tool that has been maintained as open source since 2002. Blender Foundation CEO Franceso Siddi said LLM-assisted contributions typically “wasted reviewers’ time and affected their motivation.” Blender is still developing an official policy for AI coding tools, but Siddi said they are “neither mandated nor recommended for contributors or core developers.”

The flood of merge requests has gotten so bad that open-source developers are building new tools to manage it.

Earlier this month, developer Mitchell Hashimoto launched a system that would limit GitHub contributions to “vouched” users, effectively closing the open-door policy for open-source software. As Hashimoto put it in the announcement, “AI eliminated the natural barrier to entry that let OSS projects trust by default.”

The same effect has emerged in bug bounty programs, which give outside researchers an open door to report security vulnerabilities. The open-source data transfer program cURL recently halted its bug bounty program after being overwhelmed by what creator Daniel Stenberg described as “AI slop.”

“In the old days, someone actually invested a lot of time [in] the security report,” Stenberg said at a recent conference. “There was a built-in friction, but now there’s no effort at all in doing this. The floodgates are open.”

It’s particularly frustrating because many of open-source projects are also seeing the benefits of AI coding tools. Kempf says it’s made building new modules for VLC far easier, provided there’s an experienced developer at the helm.

“You can give the model the whole codebase of VLC and say, ‘I’m porting this to a new operating system,’” Kempf said. “It is useful for senior people to write new code, but it’s difficult to manage for people who don’t know what they’re doing.”

Competing priorities

The bigger problem for open-source projects is a difference in priorities. Companies like Meta value new code and products, while open-source software work focuses more on stability.

“The problem is different from large companies to open-source projects,” Kempf commented. “They get promoted for writing code, not maintaining it.”

AI coding tools are also arriving at a moment when software, in general, is particularly fragmented.

Open Source Index founder Konstantin Vinogradov, who recently launched an endowment to maintain open-source infrastructure, said AI tools are running into a long-standing trend in open-source engineering.

“On the one hand, we have exponentially growing code base with exponentially growing number of interdependences, And on the other hand, we have number of active maintainers, which is maybe slowly growing, but definitely not keeping up,” Vinogradov said. “With AI, both parts of this equation accelerated.”

It’s a new way of thinking about AI’s impact on software engineering — one with alarming implications for the industry at large.

If you see engineering as the process of producing working software, AI coding makes it easier than ever. But if engineering is really the process of managing software complexity, AI coding tools could make it harder. At the very least, it will take a lot of active planning and work to keep the sprawling complexity in check.

For Vinogradov, the result is a familiar situation for open-source projects: a lot of work to do, and not enough good engineers to do it.

“AI does not increase the number of active, skilled maintainers,” he remarked. “It empowers the good ones, but all the fundamental problems just remain.”

Apple is reportedly developing a trio of AI-powered wearables, including smart glasses, camera-equipped AirPods and a new AI pin device.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the products are designed to give Siri more “contextual awareness” by letting it see and interpret the world around you.

The headline device appears to be a pair of Apple-designed smart glasses aimed squarely at competitors like Meta’s Ray-Ban collaboration. Rather than partnering with an established eyewear brand, Apple is said to be developing its frames in-house.

• Apple Music is rolling out five new features in iOS 24.6, including the new Playlist Playground and Concerts Near You functions
• It’s also getting a new UI design for albums and playlists
• Despite its new look, it’s divided users who have called out Apple for its lack of accessibility features

Apple will unveil its next slew of new products in a couple of weeks at its March 4 event, but it’s already teasing some of the new upgrades coming to Apple Music in iOS 24.6 — and there’s no doubt they’ll breathe new life into one of the best music streaming services.

If you’re enrolled in the iOS 24.6 beta, there’s a chance you’ve already caught a glimpse of the new Apple Music features that are expected to roll out widely in the coming weeks. Unlike Spotify, it’s not in Apple Music’s character to churn out one new feature after the next, so the fact that it’s bringing five new upgrades at once is big news.

Are you ready to feel old? Lemmings just turned thirty-five. The famous puzzle game first came out in February of 1991 for the Commodore Amiga, before eventually being ported to just about everything else out there, from the ZX Spectrum to the FM Towns, and other systems so obscure they don’t have the class to start with two letters, like Macintosh and DOS. [RobSmithDev] decided he needed to commemorate the anniversary with a real floating lemming.

The umbrella-equipped lemming is certainly an iconic aspect of the game franchise, so it’s a good pick for a diorama. Some people would have just bought a figurine and hung it with some string, but that’s not going to get your project on Hackaday. [Rob] designed and 3D printed the whole tableau himself, and designed magnetic levitation system with some lemmings-themed effects.

The mag-lev is of the top-down type, where a magnet in the top of the umbrella is pulled against gravity by an electromagnetic coil. There are kits for this sort of thing, but they didn’t quite work for [Rob] so he rolled his own with an Arduino Nano. That allowed him to include luxuries you don’t always get from AliExpress like a thermal sensors.

Our favorite part of the build, though, has to be the sound effects. When the hall effect sensor detects the lemming statue — or, rather, the magnet in its umbrella — it plays the iconic “Let’s Go!” followed by the game’s sound track. If the figurine falls, or when you remove it, you get the “splat” sound, and if the lemming hits the magnet, it screams. [Rob] posted a demo video if you just want to see it in action, but there’s also a full build video that we’ve embedded below.

A commemorative mag-lev seems to be a theme for [Rob] — we featured his 40th anniversary Amiga lamp last year, but that’s hardly all he gets up to. We have also seen functional replicas, this one of a motion tracker from Aliens, and retrotech deep-dives like when he analyzed the magical-seeming tri-format floppy disk.

If you’re an iPhone user who likes to keep tabs on where your stuff is, you can’t go far wrong with an AirTag. The second-gen model that Apple just released outpaces the original in every way (aside from the galling lack of a keyring hole, that is). While it’s easy enough to replace the battery in both versions of the AirTag, you might not want to have to worry about the device’s battery life for a very long time. Enter Elevation Lab’s extended battery case for the AirTag, which is currently on sale at Amazon for $16.

The case usually sells for $23, so that’s a 30 percent discount. It’s not the first time we’ve seen this deal, but it’s a pretty decent one all the same.

Elevation Lab

Elevation Lab says its AirTag case can extend the battery life of the tracking device to 10 years, and now it’s on sale.

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This is arguably one of the more useful AirTag accessories around for certain use cases. It won’t exactly be helpful for an AirTag that you put in a wallet or attach to your keys, as it’s too bulky for such a purpose — and it doesn’t have a hole for a keyring anyway. Still, if you’re looking for an AirTag case that you can place in a suitcase or backpack and not have to touch for years, this could be the ticket.

Elevation Lab says that, when you place a couple of AA batteries in the case, it can extend the tracker’s battery life to as much as 10 years (the brand recommends using Energizer Ultimate Lithium batteries for best results). The AirTag is slated to run for over a year on its standard CR2032 button cell.

The case gives the AirTag more protection as well. It’s sealed with four screws and it has a IP69 waterproof rating. What’s more, it doesn’t ostensibly look like an AirTag case, so someone who steals an item with one inside is perhaps less likely to realize that the object they pilfered is being tracked.

There are some other downsides, though. Since the AirTag is locked inside a case, the sound it emits will be muffled. Elevation Lab says the device’s volume will be about two-thirds the level of a case-free AirTag. However, the second-gen AirTag is louder than its predecessor, which should mitigate that issue somewhat.

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