Membership Management Software for Nonprofits: What It Actually Costs in 2026
Try to find out what membership management software costs. Go on — pick any three vendors and try to get a number before a sales call.
We did it for ten of the best-known platforms in the nonprofit and association space. Four of them publish no price at all. Most of the rest publish a “starting at” figure that stops being useful the moment you ask what tier your organization actually lands in. And with one exception, not a single vendor publishes what they charge to process a payment — the fee that quietly comes out of every membership renewal and every donation you take.
This article is the answer to the question those pricing pages avoid. Every figure below was taken from the vendor’s own site in August 2026, and where a number could not be verified, it says so rather than guessing.
What membership management software actually costs
Entry-level published pricing, as each vendor states it:
| Platform | Entry price | Published? | Own platform fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zeffy | $0 | Yes | 0% (donor tip model) |
| Join It | $29/mo ($26.10 annual) | Yes | 1.5–3.0% |
| WildApricot | $66/mo ($59.40 annual) | Yes | None charged by vendor |
| Neon CRM | $99/mo | Floor only | Not published |
| Bloomerang | $242/mo billed annually | Floor only | Not published |
| Hivebrite | $895/mo billed annually | Yes | Not published |
| Glue Up | $3,000–$6,500/yr | Range only | Not published |
| MemberClicks | From $3,500/yr | Floor only | Not published |
| GrowthZone | Not published | No | Not published |
| ChamberMaster | Not published | No | Not published |
The spread is the first thing worth noticing: from $0 to over $10,000 a year for software that, described at a high level, does the same job. The second is that the cheapest options and the most expensive options are the ones that tell you their price. The middle of the market is where the sales calls live.
What each pricing model is actually measuring
A monthly figure means nothing until you know what makes it go up. There are three models in this market, and they behave very differently as you grow.
Priced by contact count
WildApricot is the clearest example. Its $66/mo entry tier covers 100 contacts, and the ladder climbs through 250, 500, 2,000, 5,000, 15,000 and 50,000. Every tier includes identical features — you are paying purely for capacity.
The thing to watch here is what counts as a contact. Lapsed members, event attendees who never joined, and newsletter subscribers often sit in the same database as your actual members. Organizations regularly find themselves paying for a tier two steps above their real membership because the record count includes everyone they have ever met.
Priced by your revenue
Neon CRM starts at $99/mo and scales on how much money you bring in, not how many people you track. Contacts and users are unlimited. Modules add a percentage on top of the base: Memberships and Volunteers each add 10%, Events adds 20%.
Revenue-based pricing has an obvious character: a good year costs you more. Whether that is fair or irritating depends on your temperament. What makes it hard to plan around is that the revenue bands themselves are not published — the $99 floor is confirmed, but what level of income it covers is behind a form.
Priced by negotiation
GrowthZone and ChamberMaster publish nothing. MemberClicks publishes a floor — MC Trade from $3,500/year, MC Professional from $4,500/year — and then says pricing depends on “organization and functionality needs.” Glue Up publishes ranges wide enough to drive a truck through: $3,000–$6,500/yr for its Professional tier, rising to $8,000–$18,500 for Advanced.
This model is not automatically bad. Complex associations with committees, chapters, certifications and trade memberships genuinely do need scoping. But it does mean you cannot compare these against anything without booking a call, and it means the price you pay is partly a function of how well you negotiate.
The cost nobody puts on the pricing page
Here is the finding that surprised us most. Across all ten platforms, exactly two publish what it costs to take a payment.
- Zeffy charges 0% and absorbs card fees entirely.
- Join It charges its own platform fee of 3.0% on Starter, 2.0% on Total, and 1.5% on Extra — on top of whatever your payment processor charges.
Everyone else is silent. WildApricot states it takes no per-transaction fee of its own, but the processing rate through its included payments product is not published, and other processors carry “an additional fee.” GrowthZone’s payments page promises “one simple rate” and never says what the rate is. Neon One says processing fees “range between products,” notes extra charges for Mastercard, Discover and Amex, and adds that using an external processor starts at $50/mo. Bloomerang, MemberClicks, Glue Up and Hivebrite publish nothing at all.
This matters more than the subscription for any organization that actually collects money. A group processing $80,000 a year in dues and donations pays $2,400 at 3% and $800 at 1%. That $1,600 difference dwarfs the gap between most of the subscription tiers above — and it is the number that is hardest to find.
A note on the number you will see everywhere. 2.9% + $0.30 is Stripe’s published rate for US domestic cards, and it is real — it is what a good many of these platforms are quietly passing through to you. What makes it a poor assumption is not the number itself. It is that most of the vendors above will not tell you which processor they use, what rate you will actually be given, or whether they add a margin of their own on top. Ask for the all-in figure, in writing.
What “free” means in this market
Search for membership software for nonprofits and half the results promise something free. We have written before about which nonprofit tools are genuinely free, and the pattern repeats here. Almost none of them mean a free plan.
WildApricot leads with a 60-day free trial, no card required. That is a genuinely generous trial — two months is long enough to actually migrate and test. But it is a trial. There is no free tier on the current pricing page.
Join It offers a free trial with no card, plus a 10% annual discount and an additional 10% nonprofit discount that stack to roughly 19% off. Also a trial, not a plan.
Zeffy is the real thing, and deserves a straight description. It is free — $0 subscription, 0% to the nonprofit, card fees absorbed — with no documented volume or feature caps. Its revenue comes from an optional contribution prompt shown to your donors twice during checkout. Zeffy says roughly two in three donors leave a tip.
The catch is not hidden, but it is worth understanding: per Zeffy’s own documentation, the wording and suggested amounts in that prompt cannot be customized or removed by the nonprofit. You are trading control of part of your donor checkout experience for a genuinely free platform. For many small organizations that is an excellent trade. For others — particularly those with major donors who will notice — it is not.
One more thing to be clear about: Zeffy is a fundraising platform with a donor CRM. It is not a full association management system. If you need committees, chapters, certifications or complex membership hierarchies, it is not a like-for-like replacement for MemberClicks or GrowthZone, and comparing them on price alone will mislead you.
Where Kannect sits
We publish our pricing, so it would be strange to write this article and not state it. The full pricing page has the feature breakdown; here is the shape of it.
| Plan | Monthly | Billed yearly | People | Platform fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $29/mo | $23/mo | 500 | 2% |
| Launch | $69/mo | $55/mo | 2,000 | 2% |
| Growth | $149/mo | $119/mo | 5,000 | 1.5% |
| Scale | $299/mo | $239/mo | 15,000 | 1% |
To be explicit, since this article has spent fifteen hundred words criticising vendors who are not: the Kannect platform fee is charged on top of payment processing, not instead of it.
On a $100 paid membership on Starter: Stripe takes 2.9% + $0.30 ($3.20) and Kannect takes 2% ($2.00). You receive $94.80. On Scale, the Kannect share falls to 1% and you receive $95.80.
On a $100 donation to a registered 501(c)(3): Kannect takes nothing. Stripe takes $3.20 and you receive $96.80.
Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial. A card is required to begin it, and that is deliberate — card verification is how the Kannect network stays free of fake organizations and spam listings. There is no free plan, and we would rather say so here than after you have imported your member list.
On donations to registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits, the Kannect platform fee is 0%. You pay standard Stripe processing and nothing to us. The 2% / 1.5% / 1% figures above apply to paid events and memberships. Money settles directly to your own account.
Where we are not the right answer: if you need certification tracking, chapter management, or the kind of deep association machinery that MemberClicks and GrowthZone are built for, buy one of those. Kannect is built for organizations under about 15,000 people who want members, events, communication, payments and an app in one place — not for enterprise association management.
Five questions to ask before you sign anything
- What is the total percentage taken from a $100 membership payment? Not the subscription — the payment. Make them add up their platform fee and the processing rate and give you one number.
- What exactly counts toward my tier? Active members only, or every record in the database including lapsed contacts and event attendees?
- What happens when I cross the next threshold? Does it upgrade automatically, and at what price?
- Can I export everything, and in what format? Members, payment history, event attendance. Ask for the export format in writing before you migrate anything in.
- What is the price in year two? Introductory and nonprofit discounts frequently apply to the first year only.
How to actually choose
Work out your real numbers first, because they change the answer completely.
Count your actual active members, not your mailing list. Add up what you process in dues, event tickets and donations in a year. Then take each shortlisted vendor and calculate the annual total: subscription, plus platform fee on your payment volume, plus processing.
That total is frequently a different ranking from the one the pricing pages suggest. A platform with a higher subscription and no platform fee can beat a cheaper one that takes 3% of everything, well before you reach a thousand members. And a free platform that takes 0% may cost you nothing and still be wrong, if it cannot do the thing your organization actually needs.
Whatever you choose, the vendors worth trusting are the ones that will tell you all of this without a sales call. If you are still shortlisting, our software comparisons cover the platforms above in more detail.
All vendor figures were taken from each company’s own published pricing pages in August 2026. Prices change; verify before deciding. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, this article says so rather than estimating.
