What a year of building membership software taught us about the problem
Sixty-four percent of chambers are considering switching their membership software. That number comes from the ACCE Pulse Survey 2025, up from 52% in 2023, and the reasons given were poor support, poor mobile experience, and poor integrations.
A number that large stops being a complaint about individual products. Two thirds of a market does not want to leave because a lot of vendors independently wrote bad software. Something structural is producing that result.
We spent a year looking at what. Here is what turned out to be built into the model rather than accidental.
Most vendors will not tell you the price
Start with the thing you notice first. Ask five membership platforms what they cost and three will ask you to book a demo.
GrowthZone, ChamberMaster and Glue Up all require a sales conversation before you learn whether the product fits your budget. MemberClicks publishes part of its pricing. Only Membee and Wild Apricot put real numbers on a public page.
This is not shyness about a complicated product. It is information asymmetry, and it works in one direction. The vendor knows what comparable organizations pay. You do not. By the time you have sat through a demo and answered questions about your member count and your renewal volume, the quote is built around what the vendor has learned about your budget rather than around a list price.
The practical cost to a chamber is that you cannot shortlist. You cannot put three options in front of a board with a number beside each one. You have to spend a week of calls to produce a comparison that should have taken an afternoon.
We publish our pricing. Essential is $129 per month billed annually, Professional is $249. Those numbers are on the pricing page in Canadian dollars, and they are the numbers you pay.
The price you are quoted is rarely the price you end up paying
The second pattern is more expensive and much harder to see in a demo.
Several platforms charge on a metric that grows on its own, without you choosing to grow. Wild Apricot counts contacts rather than members, and contacts include lapsed members and people who registered for one event four years ago. Organizations cross a tier boundary they did not know they were approaching and find the bill has jumped by half.
Membee scales by administrator seat. A three-person staff costs about $258 CAD per month. Hiring a fourth person takes that to $338. The software gets no better. The organization simply added a person and got an invoice for it.
Both models share a property worth naming: the thing that increases your bill is the thing you were trying to achieve. Grow the member list, keep old event records, add a staff member, and the price of your software goes up as a consequence of doing your job.
Sembr charges per organization. No per-member fee, no per-contact fee, no per-seat fee. A chamber of 90 and a chamber of 390 pay the same, and the fourth staff member is free.
Ownership changes the product after you have signed
Wild Apricot is owned by Personify. MemberClicks is owned by Momentive. ChamberMaster is GrowthZone. Several of the platforms a small chamber is likely to shortlist are now inside private equity portfolios.
The pattern that follows an acquisition is consistent enough that customers describe it in the same words on review sites: support response times get longer, contract terms tighten at renewal, and prices rise. The product does not usually get worse in a dramatic way. It stops getting better, which takes longer to notice and is harder to justify leaving over.
This matters more for a membership organization than for most software buyers, because the switching cost is unusually high. Your member records, your renewal history, your event registrations and your financial reconciliation all live in one system. Leaving means moving all of it. A vendor who knows that has room to let service slide.
We are founder-built with no outside capital, which is a fact about ownership rather than a promise about behaviour. The promise that follows from it is the next section.
Leaving has to be possible or none of the rest is real
Every commitment above is worth exactly as much as your ability to act on it.
If the price rises and you cannot move, the published price was a courtesy rather than a constraint. If support degrades and your data is trapped, the support quality was never really part of the deal. The only thing that makes a vendor's good behaviour reliable is the customer's ability to leave, easily, at a time of their choosing.
So export is not a feature we added because a competitor had it. It is the thing that makes the rest of the product honest. Full export in JSON, CSV and SQL, available in the dashboard, no support ticket, no exit fee, no notice period. Cancel whenever you want and take everything.
That includes the parts vendors usually keep. Not just the member list, but the renewal history, the invoices, the payment records, the event registrations and the audit trail.
What we got wrong on the way
Two things worth admitting, because a retrospective that only lists good decisions is marketing.
We priced in US dollars first. Every competitor does, including Wild Apricot, which is headquartered in Toronto and still bills Canadian chambers in USD. We followed the convention without examining it, then reversed it. A Canadian organization budgeting in Canadian dollars should not have a line item that changes with the exchange rate. Pricing is CAD across every surface now.
We also built the AI before we had decided what it was allowed to see. That order was backwards. It meant rebuilding the boundary afterwards so that member names and documents are pseudonymized before anything leaves our systems, rather than designing that in from the first line. The feature is better for the rework and it should not have needed it.
What the year actually taught us
The membership software market is not short of features. Most of these platforms do roughly the same things, and several do them well.
What the market is short of is products that stay honest after the contract is signed. Published pricing that does not move. A bill that does not punish growth. An owner whose incentives do not change. And a door out that actually opens.
Those four are the shape of the problem, and they are the reasons a chamber gives when it explains why it is looking at alternatives. They are also the reasons two thirds of a market is considering leaving at once.
If you are in that two thirds, the useful next step is not a demo. It is a list of what you currently pay, what triggers an increase, and what it would take to get your data out. Ask your current vendor those three questions in writing. The answers tell you most of what you need to know, and you can compare them to our pricing, which is on a page rather than in a quote.