What membership software actually costs
We read every vendor’s own pricing page and help center, wrote down what we found, and dated it. Here is the whole picture, including the parts that don’t appear on the price page.
The short version
A chamber or association running a website, a member directory, events, dues and email in one system is generally looking at somewhere between $1,500 and $4,000 a year, plus a setup fee of anywhere from $1,200 to $12,000 before the first member logs in.
But the headline price is rarely the price. Four costs sit underneath it, and none of them appear on a pricing page: setup fees, module surcharges, a cut of every payment your members make, and whether anyone can find you in a search engine.
How to read this page. Every dollar figure below was read on the vendor’s own website in September 2026 and is listed with its source at the bottom of this page. Prices change — we re-check quarterly and date the page. Five-year totals and the do-it-yourself stack are our arithmetic on top of the vendors’ figures, so treat those as estimates. If we’ve got something wrong, email us the correct figure and we’ll publish it. We’d rather be accurate than right.
What everyone publishes
Entry-level or starting figures, as published by each vendor. Scroll sideways on a phone.
| Platform | Recurring, as published | Setup fee | Priced by | Website |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Purple Pushpin | $129/mo | $2,000 build | Contacts, and only above 10,000 | Included |
| ClubExpress | 42¢ per member/mo, $24/mo minimum | Separate purchase | Active members | Extra |
| MembershipWorks | $35–$259/mo | None stated | Accounts | No |
| Join It | $29–$199/mo +1.5–4% | None | Members | No |
| Raklet | $49–$399/mo +1–4% | None | Contacts | No |
| Neon CRM | from $99/mo +30% for dues & events | Not published | Your annual revenue | No |
| StarChapter | $79–$279/mo billed annually | $1,169–$3,041 | Members + contacts | Included |
| Chamber Nation | $135–$650/mo | $1,250–$1,450* | Members | Extra, per page |
| MemberLeap | from $320–$460/mo | $4,000–$12,000+ | Features × active records | In setup |
| Glue Up | $3,000–$18,500/yr | Not published | Org size + add-ons | — |
| MemberClicks | from $3,500–$4,500/yr | Not published | Members, or revenue | — |
| GrowthZone / ChamberMaster | from $3,900/yr | “Onboarding fees apply” — no amount | Not disclosed | Extra, scope-based |
| Novi AMS | $829–$3,622/mo | $3,600–$20,900+ | Your annual revenue | Included |
| Hivebrite | from $895–$1,995/mo | Not published | Feature tier + size | — |
* Chamber Nation’s own pricing page states “$1,450” in its text and “$1,250” in its table. We’ve published both rather than guess which one is right.
Looking at one of these in particular?
We write a full cost comparison for a platform once we have read its documentation properly. These are the ones done so far.
vs Wild Apricot →
Five-year cost at every contact tier, the payment processing fee most people miss, and an honest note on where Wild Apricot is cheaper.
vs ChamberMaster →
The $3,900 floor, the 5% fee your members may pay at checkout, and how to check whether Google can see your directory.
vs Chamber Nation →
Per-member pricing against ours, at 100, 300 and 1,000 members — plus the website charged by the page.
vs StarChapter →
The closest comparison on this list. They are cheaper below about 250 members and we show exactly where that changes.
vs MemberClicks →
Two products, two starting prices, no published setup fee — and what WebLink customers should know.
vs ClubExpress →
They win on price under 350 members. The argument is web addresses and whether your directory can be found.
vs MembershipWorks →
Cheap, takes no cut, and often the right answer — if you already have a website you are happy with.
vs Squarespace →
The 5 to 7 percent Squarespace takes on dues, the spreadsheet you get if you avoid it, and when it is still the sensible choice.
The four costs that don’t show up in the headline price
Every figure in this section is quoted from the vendor’s own website or help documentation.
The setup fee
Almost every platform in this market charges to turn the thing on, and it is often bigger than a year of subscription. These are published figures:
- MemberLeap — $4,000 for a template build, rising to $12,000+ for a custom one, plus $1,200 for QuickBooks.
- Novi AMS — $3,600 onboarding at the smallest tier, $20,900+ at the largest.
- StarChapter — $1,169 to $3,041 depending on tier.
- Chamber Nation — $1,250–$1,450, plus $12.50 for each member record beyond half your member count.
- GrowthZone / ChamberMaster — confirms “Onboarding fees apply” and publishes no number at all.
It is worth asking why a setup fee exists. It exists because a person has to configure the thing. Platforms with no setup fee are usually the ones where nobody does.
A cut of every payment your members make
Card processing costs what it costs — roughly 2.9% plus 30¢, wherever you go. What varies is whether the platform takes a slice on top, and who they take it from.
GrowthZone’s “Zero Fee” program passes a flat 5% to the person paying. From their own help desk:
“5% platform service fee is surfaced to the payer as a separate line item during checkout on top of their purchase price.”GrowthZone Help Desk, “Fee Recoupment Overview”
The same article notes the fee “does not appear as revenue for the association” and the funds “never enter your banking or reconciliation.” Separately, GrowthZone’s processing rate rose 0.14% on non-Amex cards effective May 1, 2026. Their base rate is not published.
Join It charges a service fee “between 1.5% – 4% depending on monthly Package,” on top of Stripe’s fee. Raklet does the same at 1–4% plus 60¢; their own worked example shows $4.80 coming out of a $100 payment.
Neon CRM charges you for not using their processor: “The fee for using an external payment processor starts at $50/month.” Neon Pay’s own rates are not published — “Exact rates vary and are confirmed during setup.”
Credit where it’s due: StarChapter does not do this. Their documentation says plainly, “You will continue to use your current payment gateway and merchant account until you choose to switch,” and they publish StarPay’s rate (3.25% + 40¢) if you do switch. Novi’s is 2.95% + 25¢ and also optional. Not everyone in this market plays the same game.
The modules, and the ceiling you’ll hit
Neon CRM advertises “starts at $99/month,” then prices the parts an association actually needs as a percentage of that: memberships add 10%, events add 20%. Both, and you’re paying 30% above the advertised number before anything else.
MemberClicks lists its learning module, job board and virtual events as separate purchases. Glue Up prices add-ons for “events, emails, admins, contacts, or integrations.”
Then there’s the ceiling. Much of this market prices by contacts rather than members — and contacts includes every past attendee, every newsletter subscriber, every prospect. Grow your mailing list, pay more. We know of a small-town chamber with barely more than a hundred paid members sitting on a 500-contact plan, periodically deleting contacts to stay under it.
Worth noting as the exception: MembershipWorks explicitly does not count public event registrants or donors toward your tier. Ours only steps up past 10,000 contacts, and unsubscribes and bounced addresses don’t count.
Whether anyone can find you
This one never appears on an invoice, which is exactly why it’s worth the most. A chamber’s events and its member directory are the two things people actually search for. If a platform hides them from Google, you are paying for a membership system and losing a marketing channel you thought you’d bought.
Wild Apricot is the clearest case, and every fact here comes from Wild Apricot’s own documentation.
Their marketing page says:
“WildApricot’s website builder includes built-in SEO tools… You can customize page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs, add alt text to images, and publish pages that search engines can easily crawl.”wildapricot.com, membership website builder features page
Their help center says:
“You can assign a custom URL to any Wild Apricot page including the homepage. You cannot, however, assign a custom URL to individual events or blog posts.”Wild Apricot help center, “Custom page URLs”
So every event lives at an address like /event-6495075, permanently. For an organization whose events are its best content, that’s the whole game given away.
It goes further. Their platform-wide robots file tells search engines not to fetch /Sys/MemberDirectory/LoadMembers — which is the exact address the member directory uses to load its listings. Open a live Wild Apricot directory and there is not one member profile link in the page for Google to follow. And there is no sitemap: their own SEO article tells you to build one “using a sitemap generator” and upload it, so it never updates when you add an event.
We checked live Wild Apricot sites for structured data — the markup that lets Google show your event with its date and location. There is none. No canonical tags either. On one chamber’s events page, 48 of 48 images had no alt text.
To be fair to ChamberMaster: on this particular point it is better than Wild Apricot, not worse. It gives you a meta description field on every individual event and every member record, its URLs are readable (/events/details/community-yard-sale-6194), and it publishes proper event markup. Its problem is different: on the two live chambermaster.com sites we checked, the robots file blocks the entire directory and events area from every search engine. We could not verify whether running it on your own domain changes that, so we’re not claiming it does.
What we do. Every Purple Pushpin site is built on WordPress with readable URLs on events and member listings, a sitemap that updates itself, event and organization markup so search engines can read what an event is, and per-page control over titles and descriptions. That isn’t a feature we added. It’s what a website is supposed to do.
Mike Andersen, who builds every Purple Pushpin site, has been doing search optimization since 2006 and has more than 200 websites behind him. This is the half of the job most membership platforms treat as somebody else’s problem, and it’s the part we refuse to get wrong.
And if you just do it yourself?
Plenty of chambers run on Squarespace or a self-built WordPress site. Both are legitimate. Both cost more than the sticker.
Squarespace taxes your dues
Squarespace’s own Memberships feature carries a transaction fee of 7% on the Basic plan and 5% on Core — on top of the 2.9% + 30¢ card rate. A chamber collecting dues through it on Core is paying roughly 7.9% + 30¢ on every payment. There’s also no dues renewal engine, no member directory, and no event attendee management.
Do-it-yourself WordPress renews at nearly double
Hosting, a premium theme, an events plugin and a membership plugin come to about $733 in year one at advertised rates — and about $1,079 every year after, because hosting renews at 3.7× to 6×, the theme at 1.5× and the membership plugin at 2×. All of that is in the vendors’ own fine print. None of it includes a domain, email, backups, or one hour of anybody’s time.
The ones who won’t say
Four platforms in this market publish no price at all. YourMembership routes you to “Request a personalized quote.” CC-Assist has a quote form that asks your member count and user count. Forj says it prefers “to offer flexible pricing that meets your unique requirements.” GrowthZone maintains a page titled Pricing that contains no price, though its association-software page does state subscriptions start at $3,900 a year.
Our favorite artifact of this market: ChamberMaster publishes an article called “What Chamber Software Actually Costs.” It contains no costs.
And you can’t look it up either. We went looking for real numbers in public records — board minutes, municipal contracts, RFP awards, 990 filings. We found nothing, for any vendor. Chambers are 501(c)(6) nonprofits rather than public bodies, so their minutes are voluntary and usually summarized, and a 990 buries software inside “Information technology” without naming anyone. There is no paper trail. That’s not an accident, and it’s a large part of why a demo request is the only way to get a number.
Where we sit
$129 a month, locked for two years from the day you start, and a $2,000 website build. That’s the whole price. It doesn’t change when your mailing list grows, there’s no module to unlock, and your dues go into your own Stripe account — we never touch the money, so we never take a cut of it.
We’re cheaper than most of this table and more expensive than a few. Where we’re more expensive, it’s usually because the cheaper option doesn’t include a website.
How we checked
Every figure was read on the vendor’s own pricing page or help documentation in September 2026, never from a comparison or review site. Where a vendor’s own pages disagree with each other, we’ve said so rather than picking the flattering one.
Tell us we’re wrong
Prices move and we won’t always catch it the day it happens. If a figure here is out of date — including your own company’s — email it to us with a link and we’ll publish the correction. We’d rather be accurate than right.
Sources
All read September 12, 2026. Where a figure came from a help center rather than a pricing page, that is noted.
- Chamber Nation — chambernation.com/pricing
- ClubExpress — clubexpress.com pricing page
- Forj — forj.ai/forj-community-platform
- Glue Up — glueup.com/pricing
- GrowthZone / ChamberMaster — pricing, main pricing page, Fee Recoupment Overview, Payment Processing Rate Update FAQ
- Hivebrite — hivebrite.io/pricing
- Join It — joinit.com/pricing and its support center on service fees
- MemberClicks — memberclicks.com membership software pricing
- MemberLeap — monthly lease and initial website setup costs
- MembershipWorks — membershipworks.com/pricing
- Neon CRM — neonone.com/pricing and Neon Pay
- Novi AMS — noviams.com/pricing and its per-tier pages; processing rates from the Novi help center
- Raklet — raklet.com/pricing and its help center on transaction fees
- StarChapter — pricing, StarPay, payment providers
- YourMembership — quote request page
- CC-Assist — chamberdata.com/get-a-quote
- Wild Apricot — Custom page URLs, Search engine optimization, website builder features page. Our full cost comparison is on the Wild Apricot page.
- Squarespace — pricing and selling on the Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced plans
- Do-it-yourself stack — Hostinger, SiteGround, Astra, The Events Calendar, MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro
Prices checked September 2026. Next review: December 2026.