Veldun vs. MembershipWorks

MembershipWorks states plainly that there are no hidden fees and that they do not take a fee or portion of your payments. Your gateway charges its normal card rate and that is the end of it. That is exactly our position too, and it is rarer in this market than it should be - most platforms at this price take somewhere between one and five percent of everything you collect.

So if you have arrived here from a comparison where the headline was that a platform skims your dues, that argument does not separate us from MembershipWorks. Both of us leave your money alone.

Their pricing is also published and unusually gentle at the small end: free up to 50 accounts, $35 a month to 300, $59 to 600, $95 to 1,200. For a small organisation that is materially less than our $99.

MembershipWorks is a membership system you add to a website. It integrates with WordPress, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, Duda and hand-written HTML, and they also offer a hosted option. Whichever route you take, the website is a thing your organisation owns, chooses, lays out and keeps looking right.

That is a perfectly sound way to build it, and if your organisation already has a website it is proud of, adding MembershipWorks to it is a smaller and cheaper change than moving to us. We would say so.

Veldun is the other shape. We design and build the public site, we host it, and we keep changing it as the organisation changes. There is no builder for your board to learn and no separate web person to brief. The membership system and the website are the same product because in practice the same volunteer was going to be responsible for both.

At 300 accounts, MembershipWorks is $35 a month. Veldun at 300 billable contacts is $149, because our Starter tier tops out at 250 and a 300-contact organisation sits on Growth. So the real gap is wider than a glance at the two starting prices suggests, and we would rather you got that number from us than found it at checkout. The honest way to read it is not that one is overpriced. It is that MembershipWorks is charging for software and we are charging for software plus design labour.

So the question is what your website would otherwise cost. If a board member builds it, the answer is their evenings. If you hire someone, small association sites are commonly quoted in the low thousands to build, plus a retainer or a per-change fee to keep it current. Against either of those, the gap between their subscription and ours is not the expensive part of the decision.

If neither applies, because you have a site you like and someone who maintains it happily, then MembershipWorks is the better buy and we would rather you knew that now.