A club that doubles its membership has twice the work and twice the reason to be organized. It also, on every hosted membership platform we could price, has a larger bill — for the same features.
That is not a criticism. It is the business model, stated plainly on the vendors' own pages.
Three different meters, all pointed at the same thing
ClubExpress — read 2026-09-03. Billed **per member, monthly, in bands*: "up to 200 members 42¢ per member billed monthly … 201-300 members 38¢ per member billed monthly … 20¢ for each secondary member … $24 minimum monthly hosting fee … 501-1000 members 30¢ per member billed monthly"*. There is a floor of $24 a month under it, so shrinking the roll stops costing less before it stops costing.
WildApricot — read 2026-10-11: **$56.10/mo at 100 contacts** prepaid for two years, $59.40 prepaid yearly, $66.00 billed monthly, with bands running to 50,000 contacts. The page is explicit that *"All packages offer the same WildApricot features and benefits"* — so the higher tiers do not buy more product. **They buy permission to have more contacts.**
Join It — read 2026-08-22, $29 a month at the tier we priced. It meters twice: the monthly fee, and a percentage of every membership payment your members make. Paying a smaller percentage means paying a bigger monthly fee.
The arithmetic, labeled as arithmetic
Published monthly figure × 60 months. No growth assumed — which is generous, because two of these three get more expensive precisely when the club is doing well.
| monthly | five years | |
|---|---|---|
| WildApricot (100 contacts, 2-year prepay) | $56.10 | $3,366 |
| Join It | $29 | $1,740 |
| ClubExpress (minimum hosting) | $24 | $1,440 |
| Membora | — | $59, once |
The ClubExpress line is the floor, not the bill. At 300 members its own published rate is 38¢ each, which is $114 a month — over five years, considerably more than the row above shows.
What Membora is
The register and the meeting, and not the website. It answers three questions a committee actually argues about: **who is in good standing, whether the meeting was quorate, and whether the motion carried.** A member in arrears is refused at the ballot and still counted toward quorum, because attendance is a record of fact — the rule is applied at the vote, never at the door.
Standing is derived from the payments recorded, not typed into a field, so it cannot quietly go stale. A motion cannot be carried in a meeting that was not quorate, and the refusal shows the arithmetic it refused on.
Who should stay where they are
Stay with ClubExpress or WildApricot if you want the club website, event registration and payment processing hosted together — Membora has none of those and is not trying to. **Stay with Join It if you want members to join and pay through the tool itself: Membora has no payment processing at all.** It records what was paid and derives standing from it.
If the website and the money are the job, buy one of theirs. If the register and the meeting are the job, keep reading.
The two links this guide owes you
Membora is $59, once, with the PHP source, and it does not care how many members you have. Open the demo first — same application, seeded with a club, no signup.
Try the Membora demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.