Purple Pushpin vs MembershipWorks
MembershipWorks is cheap, takes no cut of your dues, and does not count your event registrants against you. If you already have a website you like, it is probably the right answer and this page will tell you so.
Prices checked September 2026, from MembershipWorks’ own pricing page.
The short answer: it depends entirely on whether you have a website
MembershipWorks is not a website. It is a membership layer that you add to a website you already have — WordPress, Squarespace or Weebly. Their pricing is $35 a month up to 300 accounts, $59 to 600, $95 to 1,200, and free below 50.
Purple Pushpin is $129 a month and the website. So the comparison is not $59 against $129. It is $59 plus whatever your website costs to build and keep running, against $129 with it included.
You already have a good site
MembershipWorks roughly $3,540 over five years at 600 membersNothing we offer justifies the difference. Bolt it onto the site you have and keep the money.
You need a website too
Closer than it looks their $3,540 plus a build and five years of hosting and licencesA do-it-yourself WordPress stack runs about $1,079 a year once the introductory rates expire, before anyone’s time.
Two things they do that we wish everyone did
They take nothing from your dues
From their own pricing page:
“There are no hidden fees and we do not take a fee or portion of your payments. Do note that your payment gateway (Stripe, Paypal or Authorize.net) will assess fees on your credit card transactions in accordance with your processing agreement with the gateway.”MembershipWorks pricing page
That is exactly our position, stated more plainly than most of this industry manages. Several platforms we looked at take between one and five percent on top of card processing, and one charges a monthly penalty for using your own processor.
They do not count your event registrants
Most of this market prices by contacts, meaning every past attendee and newsletter subscriber counts toward your tier. MembershipWorks explicitly does not count people who register for your public events or donate through your public form unless you create accounts for them. That is a meaningful difference if you run large public events, and it is worth knowing before you compare their tier numbers to anyone else’s.
When MembershipWorks is the better choice
You have a website you are happy with, and someone who maintains it
This is the clearest recommendation on this whole site. If your chamber or chapter already has a website that looks right, works on a phone, and has somebody who can keep it updated — a board member, a volunteer, a designer you already pay — then adding MembershipWorks to it costs a fraction of what we do and solves the membership problem properly.
Come back to us when that person moves away, or when the website starts looking like it was built in 2014 and nobody knows the login.
When we are the better choice
When the website is the problem. When there is no volunteer with the time, when the current site is years out of date, when nobody can add an event without calling someone, or when the board has decided it wants one vendor accountable for the whole thing rather than a membership tool bolted to a site nobody owns.
The differences that are not about money
- The website is the product, not a prerequisite you supply.
- We build it and keep it running — hosting, updates and security are in the $129.
- Search is handled as part of the build: readable event addresses, a self-maintaining sitemap, event markup.
- No account ceiling. Their tiers step at 300, 600 and 1,200 accounts; ours does not step.
If the website is the part that is broken
$129 a month, locked for two years from the day you start, and a $2,000 website build. If your site is fine and you just need dues and events, we have just told you to go elsewhere, and we meant it.
See the demo → or tell us your renewal date and we will hold a build slot.
Sources
- MembershipWorks pricing — tiers, the quoted line on payment fees, and the note on not counting public event registrants
- The do-it-yourself website figure is built from published hosting, theme and plugin renewal rates; the arithmetic is in what membership software actually costs
- Our own price is on the pricing page
If a figure here is wrong, including if you work at MembershipWorks, email it to us with a link and we will publish the correction.