Tarification

Every figure below is editable — the comparison recalculates instantly. Defaults are conservative averages drawn from a range of publicly available sources (shown in GBP; US and Australian equivalents typically run higher).

The traditional route

The SaaS platform route

The subscription adds ~£1.30 per member per year on top of the base — association-grade platforms price by contact count.

The conference stack (traditional & SaaS routes)

Membersites pricing: £299/month membership site · £399/month conference site (only for the months it runs) · onboarding from £2,495 (membership), £1,495 per conference — each conference is set up and themed afresh — and £3,495 for membership plus first conference.

The five-figure build

Published agency price guides place membership portals and other complex builds at £10,000–£50,000+, and specialist membership developers quote £40,000–£250,000 for fully bespoke builds, with a members portal alone at £5,000–£30,000. International agencies are comparable or higher. Everything those builds deliver — member login, gated content, subscription payments, directories — is included in the Membersites platform as standard. Our £15,000 default sits at the very bottom of those published ranges, deliberately.

The tools around the website

A working membership operation needs more than the website: an email marketing tool priced by contact count (roughly £15–£100+/month as your list grows), a transactional email service so renewals and receipts actually arrive (~£10–£20/month), plus hosting, licences and someone to keep it all updated — commonly quoted at £1,000–£5,000/year each for hosting and maintenance. Our defaults sit below those ranges. On Membersites, newsletters, member emails, hosting, security and updates are part of the subscription.

The SaaS platform route

Membership SaaS platforms bundle a template website with member management — but the subscription is only part of the bill. Association-grade platforms are typically quoted at £3,600–£8,000+ per year scaling with contact count (enterprise systems run well into five figures), plus an implementation fee, plus design work to make the template look like your society rather than everyone else’s, plus email marketing beyond plan limits. Your site lives on their template with their constraints, custom development isn’t an option, and an academic conference still needs separate software. Membersites is fully customisable — bespoke design and custom development are part of what the platform is.

The conference stack

Run separately, an academic conference pays per event: leading abstract-management platforms publish prices of roughly £650–£2,490 per event with paid add-ons for multi-stage review, symposia and certificates, and delegate registration typically carries a service fee of around 2.5% of ticket revenue (often capped) charged on top of card processing — general ticketing platforms take 6% or more, uncapped. We default to the lower academic figures and apply the cap. On Membersites, abstracts, review, programme, certificates and registration are part of the conference site — no per-event software fee, no service fee on your tickets, no per-delegate charges. Each conference is set up and themed afresh (from £1,495 per conference), mirrored on the other route by re-theming its website each cycle. And because you only pay for the months the site runs, a biennial or triennial conference costs nothing in the years between.

One network, one login

A Membersites conference site isn’t a separate system — it joins your society’s network. Members sign in with their existing credentials (single sign-on across every site in your network), which is what makes member-aware registration pricing, student verification and clean data possible. On the other routes the conference platform is a separate island: separate accounts, separate data, manual reconciliation.

Support beyond the platform

Day-to-day support, hosting, security and updates are part of the subscription — that’s what all-inclusive means. When your society wants extra hands — custom features, content work, research projects, bespoke reporting — our additional services are £95/hour, with lower rates on retainer packages (see Additional Services above).

Payments: your money, your account

Membersites takes no cut of your revenue — no per-delegate fees, no per-submission fees, no percentage of ticket sales. Payments run through your association’s own merchant account: we support Stripe among other providers, and recommend Stripe for its rates, its global availability, and how well it handles international tax obligations. Standard card-processing fees are paid by you to your provider on any route, so they’re excluded from all columns — what the other columns show is the registration platform’s service fee charged on top.

What we deliberately left out

The other columns exclude a design refresh every 4–5 years, SaaS per-member overage creep, and the volunteer hours spent stitching tools together. All would widen the gap — we would rather understate your saving than oversell it.