For associations & chambers of commerce
Your website shouldn’t be clunky and expensive.
A website with the member side built in — roster, events, registration, directory, dues, email and the money side — run by the volunteers who actually have to run it. $129 a month, billed annually, and it stays $129 until your list passes 10,000 people.
Which one are you?
The job is not quite the same, so we wrote it up both ways.
The bit nobody mentions until renewal
Your members are not your contact count.
Most member platforms price by contacts — the mailing list, lapsed members, anyone who ever bought a ticket to one event in 2019. A chapter with 450 members, or a chamber with 180 member businesses, can easily carry 2,000 contacts, and guess which number the invoice is written against.
Priced by contact 😬
- The bill grows every time somebody buys a ticket, whether or not they ever come back.
- Wild Apricot’s published plans jump from 2,000 contacts straight to 5,000 — nothing in between, so a chapter at 2,100 pays the 5,000 price.
- Deleting old contacts to duck under a cap means deleting your own history.
- Growing the mailing list — the thing every board is trying to do — costs you money.
Priced by site 😌
- $129 a month up to 10,000 contacts. Unsubscribes and bounced addresses don’t count, and most organizations never get close.
- Keep every past attendee, every lapsed member, every address you’ve ever collected.
- Payments land in your own Stripe account. We never hold your money. Not once, not ever.
- It’s a WordPress site, so you’re never inside a platform you can’t get out of.
That Wild Apricot pricing is from their own published plans, September 2026. Go and check it — genuinely, that’s rather the point of us.
Why this exists
We’ve been the person on the other end of this.
Mike Andersen, who builds every Purple Pushpin site, spent years inside the problem — first at an association management company, then working directly with a chapter, and since then through his agency with a long line of associations and chambers.
Same conversation every time. Software that costs a fortune and that nobody on the board enjoys opening. Years of history locked inside it, which is exactly why nobody ever leaves. An event form that looks like it was built at the dawn of the internet. A registration journey that quietly loses people — attendees and sponsors both. And pricing tiers that punish an organization for growing its mailing list, when growing the mailing list is the thing everyone should be applauding.
There had to be a better way. He builds websites all day. The problem was clearly solvable.
So we built it. Small team, low overhead — which is exactly why the price looks the way it does — and a straight answer to the question every board ends up asking each other: why are we spending this much on our website and getting so little back from it?
What you get
The parts a membership organization actually uses.
All of it built and running today. Nothing on this page is a roadmap item in a nice screenshot.
A directory people can actually find
Your members pay to be listed somewhere customers will look. Every category and every search is an ordinary link with its own address, so those pages exist to a search engine — and each listing publishes LocalBusiness markup, which is what puts a member into local results you would never rank for yourself. Address, phone, hours and a map, without a Google billing account.
Two things on it you can sell
A featured listing sits at the top of the directory with a badge and renews with the membership. Member of the month puts one business on the home page — and the label is yours, so the same slot can read Business of the Year and run all year. Both show nothing at all when nobody is chosen.
Sponsorships sold the way you already sell them
A sponsorship is a ticket type that includes seats. A golf sponsorship with a foursome counts four golfers against the cap, automatically. Tiers, perks and prices set on the same screen as the event.
One cart, one invoice
Somebody buying a table at the conference and a hole sponsorship at the golf outing checks out once. The invoice lives at its own web address, prints, and forwards to whoever actually pays — because that’s rarely the person who filled in the form.
Check people in at the door
A board member signs in on their phone and checks people off as they arrive. Search by name, add the walk-ups, undo a mistake with one tap. Lose the venue wifi and it keeps working — the check-ins queue on the phone and send themselves when the signal comes back.
Your member list, imported — and undoable
Upload the export you already get. Columns matched for you, nothing written until you approve a dry run, nothing ever deleted, and the whole thing undoes in one click. Moving platforms is the scariest part of leaving one; this is the part we made reversible.
And the rest of it, because you’d notice if it were missing.
- Events people can actually register for. Named ticket types, member and non-member rates, seat limits per ticket, a room capacity, hidden tickets for invited guests, comped seats for sponsors.
- Questions you can actually count. Meal choices come back as Chicken 18, Fish 7 — not a comments column you read at 9pm the night before.
- Guests, handled like grown-ups. Decide per event whether members may bring people, how many, and whether you need every name or just a headcount for the bar.
- Confirmations that turn up. Every registration gets an email with a calendar invitation attached. Online event? The joining link goes in there, and nowhere public.
- A roster the board can search. Find people by company, title, city, or the groups you tag them into. Built to stay usable at a thousand members, not a hundred.
- Where the money actually stands. Registrations, sponsorships and invoices add up on one screen, per event and across the year. The treasurer stops rebuilding it in a spreadsheet.
- Email your members. Send to the whole list or a segment of it, from your own chapter address. Most chapters pay for this separately, scaled to list size.
- News and announcements. Post an update; it lands on the site and stays findable. The thing you currently send as an email and then lose.
- Documents that are genuinely locked. Minutes and bylaws a logged-out visitor cannot open. Not hidden behind an unguessable link — actually refused.
- A job board.New Roles at member organizations, each with a closing date, so a filled job takes itself off the page instead of sitting there all year.
- A public business directory.Chambers Every member business with address, phone, hours and website — searchable, filterable by category, on a map, and every listing on its own page that Google can index.
- A back end built for volunteers. Plain language, the jobs a board does in the order it does them, and nothing else. No plugin menus. No dashboards nobody asked for.
And one thing we deliberately leave out.
There’s no member-to-member lookup. A roster every member can browse is a prospecting list waiting to happen, and nothing makes somebody regret joining faster than the sales calls that follow. The board can search the roster. Members can’t shop it.
Why it looks like this
Built for whoever gets handed the website next year.
The person running a chapter website is usually a volunteer with a full-time job who didn’t ask for the role and will hand it on within two years. So the back end has one screen per job, tells you what it’s about to do before it does it, and never nags anybody about an event flyer they chose not to upload. Deleting an event asks first and puts it back if you change your mind. Importing a member list undoes. That’s the whole design brief.
Pricing
Straight numbers. All of them, now.
One builds the site. One keeps it online. The monthly only changes if your list passes 10,000 people, and most organizations never get close.
The plan
Hosting, the member and event software, updates, backups, security — and every improvement we make, at no extra charge.
- Every feature included. A bigger list pays for size, never for features.
- Up to 10,000 contacts. Unsubscribes and bounced addresses don’t count.
- Role-based chapter email addresses
- Mailing list sending included
- One bill a year, because that’s how a board budgets
Bigger list? $179/month up to 25,000. Past that, we’ll quote.
The website
Designing and building the thing, setting up your members and events, and moving your existing content across. Quoted properly once we’ve seen what you’ve got.
- Your domain stays in your name
- Your events loaded and live at launch
- Your member list imported and checked
A domain runs about $20 a year and is billed by your registrar, not by us. Three costs in total — and you’d rather hear all three from us now than find the third one later.
On the timing
Not up for renewal for another six months?
Even better. Tell us when your current platform expires and we’ll have your site finished and waiting on the day it does — content moved, members imported, events loaded. Nothing rushed into a two-week panic, and no month where you’re paying for both.
Telling us your date commits you to nothing. When you decide to go ahead there is a short agreement and the build fee to hold your place — but that is a later conversation, not this one.
The foundation
It’s a WordPress site. On purpose.
Not a closed platform with a website bolted on the side. WordPress runs a serious share of the web, which means your site sits on something that will outlast any single vendor — us very much included.
Your domain, your name
Registered to the organization, not to us. Nobody should be able to hold a chapter’s web address hostage. Here, nobody can.
Your data, whenever
Members, registrations, payments, documents — exportable any time, without asking us and without anything having gone wrong.
Your Stripe, your money
Payments go straight to the organization. We don’t receive, hold or touch a single dollar of your funds. By design, permanently.
Nobody’s locked in
Standard WordPress: any competent developer can work on it, and it moves to any host. We’d rather keep you because you want to stay.
Questions we actually get
Fair enough.
We’re a chamber, not an association. Does this fit?
Yes. Members, dues, events and email work the same either way, and the pricing complaint is word for word identical. The directory is the one real difference — an association lists people, a chamber lists businesses — so a chamber gets its own: address, phone, hours, category filtering, a map, and every listing on its own page that Google can actually index, with each business keeping its own details current. There’s a working one on the demo.
How do people pay us?
Into your own Stripe account, or by invoice — every order produces one, at its own web address, ready to print or forward to a finance department. You can list ACH details and a cheque address on it. We never receive, hold or touch your money.
What does support actually look like?
Email, answered by a person — usually within a day or two, and always by somebody who built this rather than a queue. Genuine breakage jumps the queue. No phone number, because nobody has time for a phone tree, us included. And you’ll notice we’re not claiming 24/7 support: everybody advertises it, but ask what happens at 2am on a Saturday and it’s a help page with a search box. Ours is help@purplepushpin.com, and it goes to a human.
Can our board update the site themselves?
That’s the entire point. Adding an event, importing the new member export, publishing minutes, changing the address in the footer — all board jobs, none of them a support ticket. Anything you’d rather hand over, we’ll quote.
How long does it take?
A few weeks, and most of that is waiting on content and on your current platform. The build isn’t the slow part. If your renewal is months away, that’s genuinely the best time to start.
What happens to the site we already have?
Your content comes across and your web address keeps working. If your domain is currently locked inside another platform’s account, untangling that is usually the first thing we do together — we’ve done it before.
How big is the team?
Small, on purpose. It’s why the price is what it is, and it means you get the people who built the thing instead of the third person to read your ticket. It also means we’ll tell you plainly what we can and can’t take on. Ask, and you’ll get a real answer rather than a sales one.
Have a look before you talk to anybody.
A working chapter site with the back end open. No form, no discovery call, no salesperson breathing on you.