Veldun vs. Wild Apricot

Wild Apricot prices by total contact count, and the 2026 tier structure has a notoriously sharp cliff. At 100 contacts, you pay $66/month. At 500 contacts, $154/month. The next tier is 2,000 contacts at $265/month - there is no 1,000-contact tier. Adding a single contact above 500 forces about a 70% price jump. (Annual billing shaves 10% off each tier.)

Veldun uses three transparent tiers: Starter ($99/mo up to 250 billable contacts), Growth ($149/mo up to 500), Professional ($199/mo up to 1,000). Every feature is included at every tier - the only difference is your billable contact count. No feature walls, no payment surcharges.

The structural advantage is the newsletter multiplier: every Veldun tier includes newsletter-only subscribers up to 3× your member count for free. A 300-member bar association with 400 newsletter-only subscribers (700 contacts total) has 300 billable contacts on Veldun, so it lands in Growth at $149/month. On Wild Apricot, the same org is pushed into the 2,000-contact tier at $265/month because the 500-contact tier caps at 500.

Annual cost for the typical newsletter-heavy bar association: $1,788/yr on Veldun Growth vs. $3,180/yr on Wild Apricot's 2,000-contact tier. Veldun is roughly $1,400/yr cheaper - the single largest pricing advantage we have against any AMS competitor today, and it exists because your newsletter list doesn’t force you across a tier boundary.

Then there are payment surcharges. Wild Apricot partners with AffiniPay (Personify Payments) as its preferred processor. If you use a third-party processor like Stripe, Wild Apricot adds a 20% Payment System Servicing Fee - calculated on your subscription price, not your transaction volume.

Veldun is built with AI in the platform - not bolted on, not announced with a chatbot greeting. You describe what you need and the system does the work.

Type a sentence describing your event. Title, description, pricing, confirmation email, reminder email - all populated in under three seconds. Edit anything, publish when ready.

Your newsletter assembles itself from the month’s activity: upcoming events, new members, renewal reminders. Add the board message and send.

Members at renewal risk are flagged 30 days before lapse. AI-drafted outreach is ready for the board president to review and send.

Wild Apricot has no AI features. Event creation requires filling 15+ fields across 5 tabs manually. Newsletters start from a blank page every time. Renewal reminders are basic countdown timers with no intelligence.

Veldun is a newer platform. Our feature set is narrower than Wild Apricot’s. We are honest about that.

But we respond to every support email within 24 hours - and the founder is often the one answering. When you report a bug, it gets fixed in days, not quarters.

Wild Apricot was acquired by Personify in 2017, then Personify was acquired by Community Brands. Support response times stretched to two weeks or more. The product roadmap slowed. The website builder hasn’t been meaningfully updated since 2019.

For a volunteer board that needs a responsive partner, not a ticket queue, smaller can be better.

Wild Apricot has 15 years of features: a donations module, an online store, a built-in website builder, multi-session event support, and integrations with Zapier and Make. If your org relies on integrations or modules not available in Veldun, Wild Apricot may still serve you.

But most volunteer boards use 20% of Wild Apricot’s features. The other 80% adds complexity - 50+ submenu pages, scattered settings, a 5-step email wizard for every message.

Veldun covers the features volunteer boards actually use - member directory, dues, events, email, and a public website - with a modern interface and AI assistance, at a fraction of the cost.