The moment a website has logins, it stops being a website and becomes a small piece of software. That is the whole reason membership sites cost what they do. Accounts have to be created, passwords reset, payments taken and renewed, people removed when they leave, and somebody has to be responsible for all of it on a Wednesday evening.
This is where the money goes on a membership site, what a club or association usually actually needs, and the simpler option a lot of committees never seriously consider.
What are you actually asking for?
"Membership website" covers at least four different projects, and the price gap between them is enormous. Work out which one you mean before you ask anybody for a quote.
- A normal website with a private area. One shared password, a handful of pages behind it: minutes, the handbook, a members directory. Barely more than a standard site.
- Individual member logins. Each member has an account. Now you have registration, password resets, and an administrator who manages the list.
- Logins plus paid subscriptions. Members pay online, annually or monthly, with renewals, reminders and access ending when payment stops. This is the big jump.
- A full membership system. Tiers, event bookings, a members forum, content dripped out over time, a directory members can edit themselves. Software territory.
A surprising number of clubs ask for four and need one. The usual reason is that somebody saw a members area on a much larger organisation's website and assumed it was standard. It is standard for a professional body with eleven thousand members and a full time administrator. It is not standard for a bowls club with ninety.
Where the cost actually comes from
Not the pages. The parts you cannot see.
- Accounts and access rules. Who can see what, what a lapsed member can still see, what happens to somebody halfway through a renewal.
- Payments and renewals. Taking the money is the easy bit. Failed cards, changed cards, part year joiners, members who pay by cheque at the AGM, and the awkward cases where somebody leaves halfway through a season and expects something back.
- Data protection. You are now holding personal details for a list of people. Somebody has to own that, and check what the club's obligations are with the Information Commissioner's Office.
- Support. The permanent cost nobody quotes. Every membership site generates a steady trickle of "I cannot log in", and on a volunteer committee that lands on one person until they resign.
- Keeping it current. Members joining, leaving, changing email addresses. If nobody does this, the list rots within a season.
When people say a membership site cost more than expected, it is almost never the build. It is the third year of the above.
The simpler option most clubs miss
Use a purpose built membership platform for the members, and keep your website a website.
There are established services in the UK that handle member records, subscriptions, renewal reminders and payments for clubs and associations, charged monthly or per member. Your website then does what websites are good at: telling the public who you are, publishing the fixtures or the events, and linking to the membership system for anything private.
The trade off is that members log in somewhere that is not your domain, and you are working within somebody else's shape. What you gain is enormous: you are not maintaining a payment system, the renewal reminders happen without a volunteer remembering, and when the treasurer stands down the system carries on.
For most sports clubs, village associations, trade bodies and societies, this is the right answer, and it is usually a fraction of the cost of building the same thing into a website.
When building it into your own site does make sense
- When the membership is the product. A paid content library, a professional association whose members expect a proper portal, a subscription service. Here the members area is the business and it should be built properly.
- When you have significant numbers. Per member pricing on a platform adds up, and at some point owning it becomes cheaper.
- When you need something genuinely unusual that no platform does.
- When you have somebody who will look after it. Paid, ideally, or a volunteer who is genuinely committed rather than the one who was not at the meeting.
If none of those apply, think hard before building.
What does a members area cost to build?
Rough UK ranges for the four projects above, as a one off build.
- A shared password area on an ordinary site: little more than the site itself, so an ordinary small business build.
- Individual logins, no payments: roughly £1,500 to £4,000 on top of a normal site.
- Logins plus paid subscriptions: roughly £4,000 to £12,000, depending on how complicated the renewal rules are.
- A full membership system: £10,000 upwards, and treat it as a software project with a specification.
Add ongoing costs to all of them: hosting that can cope with logins, the payment provider's own fees, and a maintenance arrangement, because a site holding member data and taking payments must be kept updated. That is not optional and it is set out in what website maintenance actually costs in the UK.
Taking subscriptions: the practical options
This is where most committees discover the project is bigger than they thought, so it is worth understanding before you commit.
A payment link or a simple online form. The member pays by card, you get an email, you tick them off a list. Crude, cheap, and perfectly workable for a club of eighty people. No accounts, nothing to maintain.
Direct debit through a collection service. Common for UK clubs and associations, and the practical advantage is enormous: the renewal happens without anybody chasing. There is a per transaction charge and a setup process, and it works best when subscriptions are the same amount for everybody.
Card subscriptions through a payment provider. Automatic renewal on the card. Convenient until cards expire, which they do constantly, and then somebody has to chase.
Standing orders and cheques at the AGM. Still how a great many British clubs run, and there is nothing wrong with it. Just be honest that if half your members will keep doing this, an online system is only ever handling half the problem, and you still need the spreadsheet.
Whatever you choose, work out who reconciles the payments against the member list, and how often. That job does not disappear because the payments are online. It just moves.
What about events, bookings and a members forum?
These get added to the specification enthusiastically and used lightly, so price them separately and decide on each one honestly.
Event bookings are the one that usually earns its place, particularly for a club running ticketed events or a society with paid talks. A simple booking form with payment is not expensive, and it saves a volunteer an evening a month.
A members forum almost never works at club scale. It needs a critical mass of people posting, it needs moderating, and in practice the conversation is already happening in a messaging group on people's phones. Link to that instead.
A members directory that members maintain themselves sounds useful and creates a genuine data protection question, because you are publishing people's details to each other. If you do it, get explicit consent for exactly that, and make it easy to opt out.
What a club website usually needs instead
Having talked several committees out of members areas, this is what they nearly always actually wanted:
- A public site that explains the club and how to join, with the joining form working properly.
- Fixtures, events or a calendar that somebody can update without ringing anyone.
- News, which in practice means three posts a year, so keep it simple.
- A way to take subscriptions, which might be a payment link rather than a system.
- Documents members need, which for most clubs can be a page with a shared password, or an email attachment, or a link to a shared folder.
One more thing that costs nothing and matters more than any of it: keep the public side alive. A club website with last season's fixtures and a committee list from 2023 does active harm, because a prospective member reads it as a club that has gone quiet. Whoever ends up with the login, give them the job of changing one thing a month, even if it is only a photograph from the weekend.
That is an ordinary small website, and it is a fraction of the cost of what was originally asked for. The members area was very often a solution to a problem that a well written joining page and a shared drive had already solved.
Questions to ask before you commit
- How many members are we talking about, really? Under a hundred changes the arithmetic completely.
- Who will administer this, by name, in two years?
- What happens when they stand down?
- What are we doing today, and what is actually wrong with it? If the answer is a spreadsheet that works, be careful.
- Who is responsible for the member data, and have they checked what that involves?
- If we stop paying for this in three years, what happens to the member records? Get the export answer in writing.
Most of these are the same questions anybody should ask before commissioning any website, and there is a fuller list in ten things to check before you pay a web designer. They matter more here because a members area is the one kind of small website that keeps generating work after it is finished.
A note on committees
Membership website projects go wrong more often than any other kind of small website project, and it is rarely technical. It is that a committee specifies it, one volunteer champions it, that volunteer stands down, and nobody left understands what was bought.
If you are on a committee, do two things. Write down who owns this after the project finishes, as a named role rather than a person, and keep the design decisions with two people rather than nine. There is a method for organising that in how to brief a web designer, and it applies to a village hall as much as to a business.
The short version
Logins are expensive, and most of the expense arrives after launch. Before you buy one, price up doing the membership side on a purpose built platform and keeping the website simple, because for most clubs and associations that is both cheaper and more likely to still be working in three years.
If a straightforward site is what you need, we build and rent them from £49 a month excluding VAT for a single page up to £149 for ten pages, with hosting, SSL, business email and a yearly redesign included, the first three months paid up front and no setup fee, one design revision with the build and content changes unlimited and free, which suits a club where the fixtures change every week. You can price up your website to see the figure.
