Comparison
Purple Pushpin vs Wild Apricot
They charge by how many contacts are in your database. We charge by the site. Here is what that actually costs over five years — including the cases where they come out cheaper.
We re-check Wild Apricot’s published pricing every quarter, and date this page when we do. Last checked September 2026.
What would you actually pay?
How many contacts are in your database?
Add what you would pay someone to design the site itself (optional — Wild Apricot’s price does not include this)
Do you take payments through your own processor? (Stripe, PayPal, Square — anything that is not theirs)
Wild Apricot · 5 years
$8,316
$138.60/mo on their annual plan · no setup fee, no site
Purple Pushpin · 5 years
$9,740
$129/mo billed annually, plus a one-time $2,000 build
One number on that page moves when your membership grows. The other one does not. That is the entire difference between the two products, and everything below is a consequence of it.
Before you pick a number: contacts are not members
This trips up almost everyone. Wild Apricot counts every record in your database, not your paid membership. Lapsed members you have not deleted. Everyone who ever registered for an event. Newsletter subscribers. Board prospects. Sponsors. The person who filled in your contact form in 2019.
A chamber with 150 paid members routinely has well over 500 contacts. If you are not sure which tier you are on, that is the answer to check first — it is usually higher than people expect, and it is the number your invoice is based on.
What happens when you go over
Wild Apricot’s own help center is plain about it. Once an account exceeds its plan’s limit, “you cannot add any more contacts, including new event registrants or donors” — new visitors cannot register for an event, make a donation or buy from your store. The same help center says Wild Apricot “does not automatically upgrade or downgrade your subscription based on your usage,” so watching the count is your job. (Upgrading or changing billing plans; Plan functionality and limits, checked September 2026.) We have watched that warning appear on an account two contacts over its limit.
Ours works the other way round. We email you at 9,000 contacts. If you pass 10,000, you get 30 days to tidy up, and only if you are still over after that do you move to $179 — paying the difference for the rest of your year, not a new year. Nothing on your site is ever switched off because of your contact count.
One small step, or a staircase
Five-year total cost, by contact count
Notice what happens at each step. A chamber that recruits its way from 480 members to 520 does not get a slightly larger bill — it gets moved into the next tier. Growing your membership is the thing that makes the software more expensive.
Their price has moved twice. Yours cannot.
We looked up archived copies of Wild Apricot’s own pricing page. Their published month-to-month rate:
| Wild Apricot’s published rate | 100 contacts | 500 contacts | 2,000 contacts | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2023 – January 2025 | $60 | $140 | $240 | — |
| February 2025 | $63 | $147 | $252 | +5% |
| By March 2026, and today | $66 | $154 | $265 | +5% |
About 10% in fourteen months, applied across every tier. That is not an accusation — it is a normal thing for a software company to do, and we will raise our own price eventually too.
The difference is what happens to you when we do. Your rate is locked for two years from the day you start, in writing, in the agreement you sign. A rise that lands in month six is somebody else’s problem, not yours. And when the lock ends, you get sixty days’ written notice before any new rate applies — enough time to put it on a board agenda and decide, rather than discovering it on an invoice.
When Wild Apricot is the better choice
Genuinely under 500 contacts? They are cheaper. Stay where you are.
At 100 or 250 contacts, Wild Apricot costs less over five years than we do, and it is not close — our build fee alone is most of their first three years. If that is really you, we are not the right call, and a comparison page that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading.
They are also the faster answer if you want to be running this afternoon. They have a 60-day free trial and you can sign up without talking to anyone.
The part that does not show up on the invoice
There is a version of “under 500 contacts” that is not really under 500 contacts. We have watched a small-town chamber — barely more than a hundred paid members — sit on the 500 plan and periodically delete contacts to stay under the ceiling. Old event registrants. Lapsed members. People who might have joined.
That works, in the sense that the invoice stays the same. But look at what it costs: you are throwing away your own history to avoid a price increase. The lapsed member you deleted is the one most likely to rejoin. The event attendee you deleted is next year’s prospect. Your database is being pruned to fit a pricing tier rather than to fit your organization, and the person doing the pruning is usually the one person who does everything else too.
And it only defers the problem. A chamber that grows — which is the entire job — crosses the threshold eventually. The move you are avoiding this year is a slightly bigger move next year, with a year more data in it.
The differences that are not about money
- Your members pay you directly, and keeping your own processor costs you nothing. Registration and dues go into your organization’s own Stripe account. We never receive, hold or route your money, and we take no percentage of it. Wild Apricot charges for that same freedom: their Payment System Servicing Fee adds 20% to your subscription price if you use any online payment system other than their own, for organizations in the US and Canada.
- The website is part of what you are buying. Wild Apricot’s monthly rate gets you their site builder and their templates — the actual building is yours to do, or yours to hire out. Our build fee is the site being designed and built for you, your content moved across, and your members and events set up before it goes live. That is a different transaction, not a more expensive one.
- And it is a real website, not a page inside a platform. Standard WordPress, on hosting in your name, with your own domain. Any WordPress developer on earth can work on it.
- Leaving does not require our cooperation. Export is a button in your own dashboard — members, events, registrations, invoices, documents — in standard formats, available whenever you like.
- There is no premium tier. Every feature is included at every size, so there is nothing for anyone to upsell you into later.
- You talk to the people who built it. There are two of us. Support is not a queue.
- Wild Apricot’s current rates: their published pricing page, read in September 2026. Five-year figures use their annual-prepay rate, which is their cheapest published option short of a two-year prepay.
- The 20% Payment System Servicing Fee is Wild Apricot’s own term, documented in their help centre: a 20% fee “applied to the WildApricot subscription price for organizations based in the US and Canada that use an online payment system other than WildApricot Payments/AffiniPay”, charged at the subscription renewal date.
- Historical rates: archived copies of that same page from August 2023, January 2025, February 2025, December 2025 and March 2026, via the Internet Archive.
- Purple Pushpin: $129 a month billed annually, plus a one-time website build from $2,000. Both published in our pricing section, and set out in our terms.
- Neither figure includes payment-processing fees, which you pay to your own processor in both cases, or a domain name at roughly $20 a year.
- Wild Apricot is a trademark of its owner. We are not affiliated with them. If anything here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will fix it.