Free club membership software, and where it costs you

Free membership software is genuinely good for small clubs, and this page is not an argument against it. It is an argument for knowing what you are paying with.

Where the money comes from

Almost always the payment percentage. The software is free and the platform takes a cut of subs, match fees and event tickets. One to three percent is typical, sometimes with a fixed amount per transaction.

The rest is advertising to your members, or a paid tier holding the features you eventually need.

When free is clearly right

• Under about 150 members
• Low subscription values
• No paid staff
• No sponsors expecting anything
• Administration is the only problem you have

At that size a licence fee is money the club should spend on the pitch.

When it turns

• The percentage now exceeds a licence
• You want to email supporters and cannot prove consent
• Ads inside your members' experience compete with your own sponsors
• You cannot get a clean export of your own list
• Junior and senior members are jammed into one structure

The advertising problem for sponsored clubs

If a platform sells advertising inside the member experience, your title partner's logo may appear next to advertising you did not choose and earn nothing from.

That is awkward at renewal, and it is a question worth asking before signing rather than after a sponsor notices.

Before you move

Export first and check what you actually get. Names and emails are usually easy. Payment history, consent records and renewal dates often are not, and rebuilding those by hand is the real migration cost.

Ask for a sample export before committing to a move, not after. What a paid platform gives you instead is on membership and supporter data.

The three business models, priced

All three are legitimate. The problem is only that clubs rarely calculate which one they are actually on, or what it costs at their size.

The advertising conflict, in practice

Say your club signs a short-term insurer as a supporting partner. Your members open the club app to pay subs and see an advert for a competing insurer, sold by the platform, from which the club earns nothing.

Your partner will notice, because monitoring competitor placement is exactly what their marketing team does. You will then be explaining that you neither chose it nor benefit from it, which is a difficult position in a renewal conversation.

Ask before signing: does the platform serve third-party advertising, and can it be disabled at any price?

Consent records are the real lock-in

Names and email addresses export easily from almost any platform. Consent records — what each person agreed to, and when — frequently do not.

If you cannot export those, moving means re-permissioning your entire database from scratch. In practice that means an email asking everyone to opt in again, to which perhaps half respond, and a supporter list that halves overnight.

This is the single most important export question, and almost nobody asks it before signing.

A sensible upgrade path

You do not have to move everything at once. A workable sequence:

1. Stay on the free platform for administration — subs, availability, squad messaging
2. Build the supporter list separately, on something you own, with clean consent
3. Add the website and app when there is an audience to serve
4. Move membership last, in the off-season, once the rest is proven

That sequence means the commercially valuable data is yours from the start, while the administrative tooling that works stays where it is. It also avoids migrating membership mid-renewal, which is the one timing mistake worth avoiding entirely.

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