Wild Apricot Pricing in 2026: Plans, Real Costs, Limits and Alternatives

If your association or club is shortlisting membership software, Wild Apricot pricing is probably one of the first pages you have opened. Wild Apricot is a long-established membership management platform, popular with small associations and clubs, and its pricing model is simple to read but worth understanding in depth.

The headline number is only the start. What you actually pay depends on how many contacts you store, how you are billed, how members pay you and how much of your own time the platform saves. Those factors decide the total over three or five years far more than the monthly figure.

This Wild Apricot review looks at pricing in 2026 as published on the official site, what every plan includes, the questions to ask before you commit and the types of Wild Apricot alternatives worth comparing. It is written for boards, secretaries and executive directors of maritime, nautical and professional associations. Prices are quoted in USD at the time of writing: always check the official pricing page before deciding.

Wild Apricot's price is driven by one variable: the number of contacts in your database. Before comparing plans, count your records the way the platform counts them, not just your paying members, and model where that number will be in three years.

What Wild Apricot Is and Who It Suits

Wild Apricot is an all-in-one, cloud-based membership platform. It brings together a member database, online applications and renewals, event registration, email communication, online payments and a website with members-only pages.

Its natural audience is the organisation run by a small team or by volunteers: local clubs, alumni groups, hobby societies and small professional bodies. For them, one login for website, members and events replaces a patchwork of spreadsheets, a separate mailing tool and a website builder.

Because it has been on the market for many years, it also has a large user base, plenty of tutorials and a familiar way of working. That maturity is a genuine advantage when the person running the system changes every two years with the board.

The questions start when an association has specific needs: a formal vetting process, board votes, several chapters, member-facing pages in more than one language, budgets in euros or strict rules on where member data is stored. None of these rules Wild Apricot out, but each one should be checked against your own requirements.

Wild Apricot Pricing in 2026: Tiers and Billing Options

At the time of writing (September 2026), Wild Apricot publishes its prices in USD on its official pricing page. The model is transparent: all packages include the same features, and the price depends only on how many contacts your account holds.

The contact tiers listed on the pricing page are:

• Up to 100 contacts
• Up to 250 contacts
• Up to 500 contacts
• Up to 2,000 contacts
• Up to 5,000 contacts
• Up to 15,000 contacts
• Up to 50,000 contacts

This article quotes only the entry tier. It is where most small associations start, and prices for larger tiers are best read directly on the official page, where they are kept current.

The entry tier: monthly versus prepaid

For the 100-contact tier, Wild Apricot lists $66 per month billed monthly. Prepaying lowers the monthly equivalent to $59.40 with a one-year commitment and to $56.10 with a two-year commitment.

On a yearly basis, that is $792 when paying month by month, $712.80 for a one-year prepayment and $1,346.40 paid up front for two years, the equivalent of $673.20 a year. The prepaid options work out at roughly 10% and 15% below the monthly price.

The discount is real, but so is the commitment. A two-year prepayment makes sense when you are confident about the platform and about your contact count. If you are still evaluating, or expect to outgrow the tier soon, monthly billing may be worth the difference.

What the pricing page says about fees

The pricing page states that there are no setup fees, no customization fees, no training fees, no per-transaction fees and no cancellation fees. It also notes that processing fees apply when you use alternative, third-party payment systems. There is a 60-day free trial, with no credit card required.

How Contact-Based Pricing Scales in Practice

Contact-based pricing is easy to explain, but contacts are not the same as paying members. A contact database usually grows faster than the membership itself, and that growth is what moves an account from one tier to the next.

Think about who ends up in a typical association's records. There are current members, of course, but also past members who did not renew, applicants who never finished the process, non-members who registered for an event, sponsor contacts and newsletter subscribers.

Depending on how the platform counts them and how your account is set up, some or all of these records can count toward your tier. Ask Wild Apricot directly how contacts are counted, whether archived or inactive records are included, and which options exist to keep the count under control.

What happens when you cross a tier

The second question is what happens when the database passes the limit of your current tier, for example after a busy event or a data import. Check whether the upgrade is automatic, how it is billed during a prepaid period and whether you can move back down after cleaning up old records.

None of this is unusual for contact-based software. It simply means the number to model is not how many members you have today, but how many records you will hold in three years, including everyone who dealt with the association once.

What Is Included, and the True Total Cost

Because every Wild Apricot package includes the same features, the choice between tiers is purely about capacity. The comparison with other platforms needs a wider view: the subscription is only one line of the real budget.

When a board asks what a membership platform will cost, the honest answer includes at least these items:

• Subscription. The tier price, the billing period you choose and the tier you are likely to reach as the database grows.
• Payment processing. Fees charged by the payment provider on dues and event tickets, including the processing fees the pricing page mentions for alternative payment systems.
• Staff and volunteer time. Hours spent on renewals, reconciliation, event admin and member questions. The platform should reduce them, not move them elsewhere.
• Migration. Cleaning and importing existing data, rebuilding forms and email templates, and training the people who will run the system.
• Commitment. The money tied up in a prepaid period, and the cost of switching if the platform stops fitting before the term ends.

Time is the item most often left out. A platform that is cheap per month but forces a secretary to rebuild renewal lists by hand every quarter is expensive in a way no invoice will show.

Currency matters too. For an association that budgets and collects dues in euros, a USD subscription adds exchange-rate movement to the annual cost. The effect is usually modest, but it belongs in a multi-year comparison.

Strengths and Limits to Check Before You Choose

Strengths worth recognising

A fair Wild Apricot review should start from what the platform does well, especially for the organisations it was designed for.

The first strength is the simplicity of the pricing model. Every package includes the same features, so a small club is not locked out of event registration or online payments because it chose a lower tier. Growth changes the price, not the toolset.

The second is the long free trial. Sixty days without a credit card is enough time to import a sample of members, test a renewal and build a real event, rather than judging from a sales demo.

The third is the fee policy stated on the pricing page: no setup, customization, training or cancellation fees, and no per-transaction fees, with processing fees applying when alternative payment systems are used. For small budgets, predictable costs are worth a lot.

Finally, maturity. A long-established platform comes with documentation, a community of users and integrations built up over time, which lowers the risk for a volunteer-run organisation.

Questions to ask before you choose

No platform fits every association. The points below are not criticisms of Wild Apricot. They are the questions any association, and maritime or professional bodies in particular, should put to every vendor on its shortlist.

• Currency and billing. Is the subscription billed in your budget currency, and in which currencies can members pay dues and event fees?
• Data residency and GDPR. Where is member data hosted, which data processing agreement is offered, and does it meet your obligations as an EU association?
• Governance and voting. Can the platform run board and general meetings, quorum, motions and secret ballots, or will you need a separate tool?
• Chapters and regions. If you have national or regional chapters, can each one manage its own members, events and permissions under one account?
• Languages. Can member-facing pages, forms and emails be offered in the languages your members actually speak?
• Support hours. In which time zones and languages is support available, and how fast does it answer when renewals are due?

Two further checks matter for vetted professions. If admission depends on documents, references and a committee decision, test the application workflow with a real case. If members hold certificates that expire, check how qualifications and reminders are tracked.

Wild Apricot Alternatives: Four Types by Need

Searching for Wild Apricot alternatives returns long lists of product names. It is more useful to start from the pricing model and the type of platform, then shortlist products within the type that matches your association.

• Contact-based all-in-one platforms. The same logic as Wild Apricot: website, members, events and payments together, priced by database size. A good fit when the membership is small and stable.
• Per-seat platforms with unlimited members. Priced by the number of staff users rather than by members or contacts. A good fit when the member base is large or growing compared with the team that runs it.
• Open-source or self-hosted software. No licence fee for the software itself, but hosting, updates, security and support become your responsibility or a contractor's.
• A CRM plus add-ons. A general CRM extended with event, payment and form tools. Flexible, but every integration adds cost and maintenance, and membership logic such as renewals has to be built.

Within each type, compare total cost over the same horizon, test the workflows your staff use every week and ask the questions from the list above. Our buyer's guide to membership management software for associations sets out a complete evaluation checklist.

When a Maritime or Professional Association Might Prefer Guild

SupaMaritime's Guild module is association management software built for maritime, nautical and professional associations. It is a per-seat platform priced in euros, and it is more useful to explain how its model differs than to claim it suits everyone.

Guild plans at a glance

Free (€0) includes one staff seat, up to 250 active members, the directory and verification seal widgets, up to three concurrent events, two email campaigns per month and email support.

Pro (€199 per month) includes three staff seats, with extra seats at €25 per month each, and unlimited members. It adds governance and electronic voting, board reports with a year-on-year PDF, a custom domain and sending domain, all embeddable widgets, API access and webhooks, and priority support.

Enterprise is priced on request for federations and large associations, with unlimited staff seats and chapters and 24/7 support with an SLA. Member import and full data export are included on every plan, so your data stays portable.

A worked example: per-contact versus per-seat logic

Take a sailing association with 180 paying members. Over the years its records have also collected 150 past members and 120 people who registered for a regatta or signed up for news. That is 450 records in total.

On a contact-based plan, if all those records count as contacts, the association sits in the 500-contact tier rather than the 250-contact tier its membership alone would suggest. The price to budget is the one on Wild Apricot's official page for that tier, not the entry price.

On a per-seat plan, the same association is priced by the people who run it. With 180 active members and one administrator, it fits Guild Free, provided three concurrent events and two campaigns a month are enough.

If it needs governance, its own domain, or a treasurer and a secretary with their own logins, Guild Pro costs €199 a month for three seats, whether the association has 180 members or 1,800.

The comparison cuts both ways. A small club with fewer than 100 contacts and one volunteer pays between $56.10 and $66 a month on Wild Apricot's entry tier, which is less than Guild Pro. Per-seat pricing pays off when members far outnumber staff, when growth would push a contact-based plan up several tiers, or when governance and vetting are core needs.

Where Guild is built differently

Beyond price, Guild covers needs that are common in maritime and professional bodies: application review stages that match your statute, a verifiable membership seal and a register of qualifications such as STCW, MCA and RYA certificates with expiry reminders.

It also handles chapters with custom roles, dues paid by card or SEPA into the association's own Stripe account, and a console and member portal available in six European languages. The complete list is on the Guild features page.

Guild can run alongside an existing Wild Apricot or WordPress site. Its widgets, such as the directory, events calendar, application form or seal, can be embedded on the current site while you move over at your own pace.

A Migration Checklist for Any Membership Platform

Whichever platform you choose, a migration is a project with a clear sequence. The steps below apply to any move, including from Wild Apricot to Guild.

1. Export everything from the current system: contacts, membership levels, renewal dates, invoices, payments, event registrations and email consent records.
2. Clean the data before importing: merge duplicates, archive records you no longer need and agree what each membership status means.
3. Map old fields and levels to the new platform, and write down every value that has no direct equivalent.
4. Run a dry-run import on the full file and review every warning before anything is written.
5. Rebuild application forms, renewal emails and payment settings, then test them with two or three real members.
6. Run both systems in parallel for one renewal cycle or one event, keeping widgets embedded on the old site until the switch is complete.
7. Announce the change to members, and close the old account only after a final export has been checked.

In Guild, the import wizard recognises the column names of a Wild Apricot export, shows a dry run with counts and issues before writing anything, and lets you undo an import within 24 hours. Full export is available on every plan, Free included.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Wild Apricot cost in 2026?

At the time of writing, the entry tier for up to 100 contacts costs $66 per month billed monthly, $59.40 per month with a one-year prepayment and $56.10 per month with a two-year prepayment. Tiers go up to 50,000 contacts. Prices are in USD; check the official pricing page for current figures.

Do all Wild Apricot plans include the same features?

Yes. According to the pricing page, all packages include the same features and the price depends only on the number of contacts. A larger association pays more for capacity, not for extra functionality.

Does Wild Apricot charge transaction fees?

The pricing page states there are no per-transaction fees, and no setup, customization, training or cancellation fees. Processing fees do apply when you use alternative, third-party payment systems, so check which payment option your association would use.

What is the difference between per-contact and per-seat pricing?

Per-contact pricing grows with the size of your database, which can include past members and event attendees if they count as contacts. Per-seat pricing grows with the number of staff users and, on paid plans such as Guild Pro, keeps members unlimited. It suits associations whose membership is large compared with their team.

Can we try Guild alongside Wild Apricot before switching?

Yes. Guild has a Free plan, and its widgets can be embedded on an existing Wild Apricot or WordPress site: the directory and seal on Free, all widgets on Pro. Members can be imported with a dry run and a 24-hour undo, so a trial migration carries little risk.

If your association is weighing Wild Apricot pricing against a per-seat model, compare the plans on the Guild pricing page, review the full feature list or book a walkthrough of a demo association. For a vendor-neutral evaluation framework, read our guide to membership management software, and see how Guild fits with the other SupaMaritime modules.