BUILT BY
DANCERS.

Hi — I'm Steve Farnworth, the person behind DanceHow.

This started with a personal problem. I wanted to learn to dance, properly. Not a one-off taster, not a corporate Zumba clone, not a YouTube tutorial I'd never repeat. An actual local class, taught by a teacher who knew what they were doing, that fit my week and matched my level.

Finding one was harder than it should have been. Every studio had its own site, half the schedules were a PDF from 2019, prices were buried two clicks deep, and Google Maps surfaced the same five high-bidders no matter what I searched for. The result: people who'd love dancing never find their way in, and great studios stay invisible to the dancers who'd love them.

I'm a software engineer and a long-time dancer. I had the tools to do something about it. So I started building a directory the way I'd want it to work as a learner — class-level, not just studio-level. Real day, real time, real level, real price. If a studio doesn't publish its schedule, we don't make one up. If a price is unknown, we don't fill it in. If we got something wrong, we fix it the same day a studio tells us.

DanceHow is small and deliberately so. There's no VC, no algorithmic feed, no growth-hacking funnel pretending to be a directory. Just a useful list, maintained carefully, that I'd want to use myself.

— Steve

Where studios come from

For each city we cover we build a studio list from public Google Maps listings for searches like "dance studio" and "dance classes", de-duplicated by Google's place ID. Re-running the import refreshes ratings and review counts and picks up new studios.

Where schedules come from

We fetch each studio's homepage plus the pages most likely to contain class data — typically named timetable, schedule, classes, or book. An AI model extracts class-level fields (style, level, day, time, length, price) from the text of those pages and is told never to invent a value that isn't stated. It's instructed to skip one-off socials, parties, workshops and trademarked branded programmes, because mixing those into a regular schedule misleads beginners.

How we set prices

The headline price on every city and style page is the median drop-in price across the studios we have data for in that area. Term packages, class packs and memberships are excluded because they aren't comparable without normalisation. Sample size is shown next to the figure, and prices update whenever a studio's site is re-read. Full pricing methodology →

How fresh the data is

A nightly batch re-reads every studio whose data is more than seven days old. Each successful re-read replaces that studio's schedule, so classes that no longer appear on the studio's site drop off the directory. If a re-read comes back empty or badly broken, we keep the previous schedule rather than wiping it. Every class links back to the studio's own website — confirm times there before you go.

What we don't do

• We don't buy data from third-party aggregators.
• We don't generate fake activity or fake reviews.
• We don't auto-translate listings between languages — local context matters.
• We don't sell visitor data. Privacy policy.