Perspire Sauna Studio

I absolutely love the Perspire studio in Berkeley! The facility is clean, the sauna's are high quality and I love the ambiance of the rooms. Most importantly, every time I leave a session, I feel mentally and physically refreshed. I was dealing with inflammation in my skin, and after two sessions my skin completely cleared up. I'm pleased to have purchased a monthly membership, and feel confident that this is the best investment I've made for my entire body.

Perfect lil gem in Berkeley! The staff go out of their way, above and beyond, to ensure such a smooth experience. The facility is top tier clean, quiet, and perfect for relaxation and sweating off pounds of fat, water, and toxins. I love this place.

I have been coming here for almost a year now. The facilities are very clean, easy to book and the staff are pleasant. I just wish the sessions were a bit longer than 40 minutes or be able to book more than 1 session per day. 🙂.

I’ve been going to Perspire in Berkeley since they opened. The owners are super friendly, as are all the staff. Facilities are clean and the sauna always makes me feel great! I have an unlimited package and it has certainly been worth it. Sometimes the sauna is the only down time I get in a week between school and work and it really helps me stay healthy.

This place is fantastic. As someone who does CrossFit regularly, my body often feels wrecked — but I genuinely feel a difference after every infrared sauna session here. It’s not a magic fix that makes your aches vanish instantly, but if you stay consistent (at least once or twice a week), you’ll notice significant improvements in soreness and mobility. Even my massage therapist was surprised and asked what I had been doing because he couldn’t find as many trigger points! I also love the generous entertainment options — you get access to Netflix and YouTube, which makes the session fly by. My only wish is that the facility had a shower, especially after a sweaty session. But even without one, it’s still an excellent recovery tool I highly recommend.

Did not get the experience I seek when going to a sauna. One, the sauna took 30 min to heat up to temperature, which took up most of my 45min session. Two, they dont have a rinse-off area, so you leave covered in the toxins you just sweated out. They also soaked the moist rag in essential oils that caused my skin to itch for hours after...lastly, they charge per person, not per room. So even though each sauna can comfortably fit two people, they charged me and my partner again at the door. Not worth the money tbh. Will not be coming back.

The studio is part of a growing franchise operation that has found a way to market relatively inexpensive infrared sauna technology (not a conventional heat sauna) in a wellness context for extremely high prices. Although the operators claim to be family run and locally owned this is misleading. The overall business design and billing systems are controlled by the franchise headquarters, and if you run into a problem all you will hear is that their policies are "set by corporate." We learned a painful lesson about this when we discovered the Perspire silently restarted billing us monthly after we tried to cancel.This kind of scammy, automated membership scheme is the kind of thing California consumer protection laws were meant to guard against, but it would probably save you some time and headache to avoid getting caught in the first place. We've asked for a chargeback from our credit card company and will probably get it. PS (Added 11/5/25): In case anybody out there appreciates very small ironies, they can read the response to my review, which again misleadingly claims Perspire is locally owned, and then read the reply to a separate negative review which they state "In terms of our pricing, it's preset by corporate..." In fact, a thirty second web search will show that Perspire is "one of the biggest wellness franchises in the U.S" founded by CEO Lee Braun in 2010. Nothing against successful wellness franchises, but I think a truly local business wouldn't try to extract an extra $1000 from somebody who never returned to the studio and then was shocked to find the charge on their credit card. The reputational damage would be too high.