Veldun vs. ClubExpress

ClubExpress serves a wide range of organisations - clubs, associations, homeowner groups, and a good number of bar associations. It has been doing it a long time, the feature list is deep, and their pricing page is one of the more transparent in this market. If what you need is a capable system at a low monthly cost and you have someone willing to configure it, ClubExpress is a reasonable answer and we would say so.

Veldun is narrower on purpose. It is built for organisations where the public website is the front door - where prospective members, event attendees and sponsors judge you by it before they ever see the member area. Our answer to that is not a better builder. It is that we do the design work ourselves and keep doing it.

ClubExpress is usually the cheaper subscription, and we are not going to bury that. Their rate steps down as you grow: 42 cents per active member up to 200 members, 38 cents from 201 to 300, 34 cents from 301 to 500, and 30 cents from 501 to 1,000, on a $35 monthly floor. At 250 members that is about $95 against our $99. At 300 members it is about $114 against our $149. At 500 members it is $170 against our $149, which is one of the few sizes where we are the cheaper line.

Both of us price in bands, so the answer flips more than once as an organisation grows rather than crossing over just once. Do not take a rule of thumb from either of us here - put your own member count against both ladders.

Two honest caveats on that arithmetic. Their floor is $35 a month, so a very small club pays far less with them than with us. And the two platforms count differently: they bill active members, we bill members once plus any newsletter subscribers beyond three times your member count. For most organisations those two numbers are close, but if you keep a very large subscriber list relative to membership, check ours against your own numbers rather than trusting the comparison.

ClubExpress also charges a one-time setup fee, with packages running from a do-it-yourself option up to a full build-out service. They do not publish those amounts, so we are not going to guess at them.

This is the real difference, and it is not a claim that their sites look bad. Plenty of ClubExpress sites are clear, organised and perfectly respectable. The point is what happens when yours is not, or when it stops matching how your organisation presents itself.

On ClubExpress you pick a template and configure it, and the deeper design and training options are a separate paid line on their price list. So the work lands on a volunteer, or it lands on your budget. That is the standard arrangement in this market and it is why so many association sites quietly stop being updated.

Veldun does not sell you a builder. We design and build the site, and we keep maintaining it, at no extra cost. When you want the homepage restructured before your gala, you ask us and it changes. Nobody on your board has to learn a layout editor, and nobody has to approve a design invoice.

ClubExpress builds a merchant account into the website so you can accept cards. What that merchant account charges is not published on their pricing pages, and we could not read it anywhere on their site, so we are not going to state a number for it. Ask them directly, and ask specifically whether the rate is theirs or a processor's.

Veldun connects to your own Stripe account. Dues and ticket money land in the organisation's bank account, the rate is Stripe's published card rate, and Veldun takes nothing on top. Your treasurer can read the fee on Stripe's own site rather than on ours, which is the point.