Purple Pushpin vs Squarespace
Every board eventually asks it: why not just build the site on Squarespace and keep the members in a spreadsheet? It is a fair question with a specific answer, and the answer is a percentage.
Prices checked September 2026, from Squarespace’s own pricing page and help center.
We tried this first, honestly
Before Purple Pushpin existed we built membership sites on Squarespace and on Wix. They are genuinely good at what they are good at — the design is strong, the editor is pleasant, and a small organization can get something handsome online quickly.
Where it came apart every time was the same three places: events with real registration, selling sponsorships, and the member back end. You end up bolting three services onto a platform that was never built to host them, and then the person who understood the arrangement leaves the board.
Squarespace taxes your dues
This is the part that does not come up until you are already committed. Squarespace’s Memberships feature — the one you would use to charge recurring dues and put content behind a login — carries its own transaction fee on top of card processing.
| Squarespace plan | Monthly, billed annually | Memberships fee | Card processing | Total on a dues payment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $19 | 7% | 2.9% + 30¢ | 9.9% + 30¢ |
| Core | $29 | 5% | 2.9% + 30¢ | 7.9% + 30¢ |
| Plus | $49 | 1% | 2.7% + 30¢ | 3.7% + 30¢ |
| Advanced | $99 | 0% | 2.5% + 30¢ | 2.5% + 30¢ |
Put a real chamber through that. Two hundred members at $250 a year is $50,000 of dues. On the Core plan, $3,950 of it goes to Squarespace and Stripe before you have paid for anything else. Every year. To remove the 5% you have to move to the $99 plan, which is $1,188 a year on its own.
Purple Pushpin is $129 a month for up to 10,000 contacts, and your dues go to your own Stripe account at Stripe’s own rate. On that same $50,000, the difference is roughly $2,400 a year in fees alone — more than the entire annual cost of our platform.
Or you avoid the fee and lose the members
There is a way around the Memberships fee, and most chambers who go down this road end up finding it: sell dues as a product through the regular Squarespace store instead. The store transaction fee is 2% on Basic and zero on every plan above it.
But a store sells things to customers. It does not know what a member is. Going that way, you get no renewal dates, no expiry, no lapsed-member list, no members-only area, no member directory, and no way to tell who has paid this year without exporting orders to a spreadsheet and reading them by hand. You have swapped a percentage for a job, and the job lands on whoever runs the office.
That is the real choice on Squarespace. Either pay 5–7% on every dues payment for a paywall that is not really a membership system, or pay nothing and keep your membership in a spreadsheet. Neither one is a membership platform, and no amount of design quality fixes that.
The same gap applies to events. Squarespace can take a payment for an event. It cannot hold a capacity, manage a waitlist, take a sponsor’s logo and place it, or tell you who attended last year.
When Squarespace is the better choice
You are new, small, or mostly a brochure
If you are a brand-new chamber with thirty members, or an organization whose website is really an “about us, here is the board, here is how to join” brochure with a handful of events a year, Squarespace at $29 a month is an entirely sensible answer and we would be overselling you.
Collect dues however you like at that size — a store product, an invoice, a check at the meeting. Thirty renewal dates fit in a spreadsheet perfectly well. The percentage only starts to hurt once the dues are real money.
Squarespace is also, straightforwardly, a better design tool than most membership platforms ship with. If what your organization needs most is to look credible, that counts for something.
A note on their prices. The figures above are Squarespace’s list annual prices. A 50% promotional code was running on their pricing page the day we checked, and we have deliberately not used the discounted numbers, because a promotion is not a price. We could not get their monthly-billing figures to render, so we have not published those.
The differences that are not about money
- Renewal dates, lapsed members and a members-only area exist as features rather than as a spreadsheet someone maintains.
- Event registration knows about capacity, waitlists and sponsors, not just payments.
- A member directory that search engines can read, with readable addresses and event markup.
- No percentage of your dues, at any plan level, ever.
- Your site is WordPress, so it is portable in a way a Squarespace site simply is not.
If the dues are real money
$129 a month, locked for two years from the day you start, and a $2,000 website build. Your dues go to your own Stripe account and we never take a percentage of them.
See the demo → or tell us your renewal date and we will hold a build slot.
Sources
- Squarespace pricing — list annual plan prices, read September 2026
- Selling on the Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced plans — the Memberships and store transaction fees and the card rates
- Our own price is on the pricing page, and the wider market is in what membership software actually costs
If a figure here is wrong, email it to us with a link and we will publish the correction.