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The Wild Apricot Contact-Counting Trick That's Costing Your Organization Hundreds a Year

Wild Apricot doesn't price based on how many members you have. It prices based on every contact in your database: members, non-members, lapsed records, anyone. The difference is hundreds of dollars a year. Sometimes thousands.

One extra contact, nearly double your bill.

Wild Apricot's 250-contact tier costs $886/year. The 500-contact tier costs $1,663/year. Adding the 251st contact moves you up a tier. That single contact costs $777 a year. Your bill goes up 88% for one extra row in your database.

That contact doesn't have to be a paying member. It can be a former member who lapsed three years ago. A donor who gave $25 once. A guest who registered for one event back in 2022. A newsletter subscriber who hasn't opened an email in eighteen months. It can even be a once-archived former member who logged in recently, got auto-restored to active status, and is now back in your billing count. Still lapsed, still not paying dues, but counting all the same.

If you're operating an organization that's been around for more than a year or two, you almost certainly have a contact list that exceeds your active membership by a wide margin. Wild Apricot is happy to bill you for the difference. (%a{href: "/compare/wild-apricot-pricing"} See the full Wild Apricot pricing comparison.)

This is the contact-counting trick. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And you start to understand why so many organizations feel like their Wild Apricot bill keeps creeping up even when their actual membership stays flat.

What counts as a "contact."

In Wild Apricot, every one of these gets billed as a contact:

  • Active dues-paying members
  • Members who lapsed last year, five years ago, or ever
  • Anyone who registered for an event, including non-member guests
  • Newsletter subscribers, even unengaged ones
  • One-time donors
  • Anyone who filled out a contact form on your site
  • Anyone manually entered into the system for any reason

There's no middle ground. There's no "prospect" status that's free, no "former member" status that doesn't count toward the tier. If they're in the database, they're billed.

Wild Apricot does offer an archive function that removes a contact from your active count. Per Wild Apricot's own help documentation: "Archived records are automatically excluded from receiving emails."

An archived contact can come back to active status three ways: an admin can click the %strong Restore from archive button on the record, an admin can bulk-restore by exporting contacts and re-importing with the Archived column set to No, or the contact can trigger their own restoration by logging in, registering for an event, applying for membership, making a donation, or subscribing to a forum.

But every one of those paths puts the contact back into your active count, which means back into your billing tier. The archive isn't a way to keep someone on your books for free while still being able to email them. It's a tradeoff. To reach an archived contact, you have to un-archive them. And un-archiving them puts them right back in the count you were trying to reduce.

That's by design. The kind of outreach that actually wins lapsed members back, proactively reaching people who've gone quiet, costs you money. To do it, you have to keep them in your active count and pay the higher tier.

Three organizations, three real bills.

Here's what this looks like in practice. All numbers use Wild Apricot's April 2026 pricing, 1-year prepay annualized.

A local club, 150 active members.

A typical small organization. 150 active members means they should fit in the 250-contact tier at $886/year. But over the years they've accumulated 80 lapsed members, 60 one-time event registrants, and 40 newsletter subscribers who never converted. %strong Total contacts: 330. That bumps them into the 500-contact tier at %strong $1,663/year. They're paying $777/year (nearly double) for contacts who aren't members. Over five years, that's $3,885 paid for non-membership data.

A regional nonprofit, 400 active members.

Active membership math says they should be at the 500-contact tier at $1,663/year. But add 250 lapsed members, 100 donors, 200 past event attendees, and 150 newsletter subscribers, and the total is %strong 1,100 contacts, which puts them into the 2,000-contact tier at %strong $2,862/year. %strong Overpaying by $1,199/year.

A larger association, 1,500 active members.

Should fit comfortably in the 2,000-contact tier at $2,862/year. With 800 lapsed members, 400 donors, 1,500 event attendees over the years, and 1,000 newsletter subscribers, they're at %strong 5,200 contacts, and there's no 6,000 tier or 7,500 tier. The next step up from 5,000 is 15,000. So 5,200 contacts costs them %strong $6,307/year. %strong Overpaying by $3,445/year. Over five years, that's $17,000. The cliff is brutal: at 5,000 contacts they'd pay $5,238/year. The 5,001st contact costs $1,069 by itself.

These aren't worst-case scenarios. They're the typical shape of any organization that's been operating long enough to have any institutional history at all.

Why the trick works.

Most software priced by usage uses %em capacity as the variable: how many users, how much storage, how much bandwidth. The customer can size their plan honestly to their actual usage.

Wild Apricot's variable is %em database size. That's a metric the customer can't easily reduce without losing functionality, and that's the point. It's the %a{href: "/blog/wild-apricot-price-increase"} same pricing model that produced a 5% increase across every tier in April 2026: a model designed so the bill goes up over time, with or without your involvement.

Here's what makes it worse for organizations that keep good records: thoroughness increases your bill. The more data you keep, for auditing, for member history, for outreach, the more you pay. Organizations that should be rewarded for thoroughness are penalized for it instead.

And it doesn't just affect the past. Prospects count too. Want to email a list of potential members about an upcoming event, a membership drive, or a recruitment campaign? They have to be in your Wild Apricot database to receive that email, which means they count toward your billing tier. %strong You're paying to reach the people you're trying to recruit. Growth itself becomes a line item.

This isn't a bug. It's the model. Every contact you add is another row on Wild Apricot's billing sheet. (%a{href: "/compare/wild-apricot"} See the full Wild Apricot vs. Groupable comparison.)

What you can actually do about it.

If you're stuck on a tier you don't think you should be on, you have four options:

  • Audit and archive. Reduces your count, but you can no longer email archived contacts. Restoring them (whether an admin clicks the Restore button, bulk-restores via import, or the contact triggers it themselves by logging in or engaging) puts them back in your active count and your bill. Win-back campaigns, donor reactivation, and event announcements all stop working for archived members until you've re-paid for them.
  • Delete records permanently. Per %a{href: "https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/151-archiving-and-deleting-contacts"} Wild Apricot's documentation, deletion permanently removes contacts from your database "along with their event registrations, invoices, and payment records." Renewal forecasting, donor stewardship, and audit trails all rely on that history. Once it's gone, it's gone.
  • Pay the higher tier. The simplest option, and it's also the path Wild Apricot designed for you to take.
  • Switch to a platform that prices on active members instead of contacts.

The first three options ask you to either lose data or lose money. The fourth one doesn't.

What active-member pricing actually looks like.

Groupable counts active members in good standing: dues-paying, endowed, perpetual. If they're not actively a member of your organization right now, they don't count toward your tier. Lapsed members, donors, event attendees, and newsletter subscribers are all unlimited. You can keep every record you need without paying more for any of it.

That same 150-active-member club from the first example pays $399/year on Groupable Solo, regardless of how many lapsed members or event attendees are in the database. The 400-active-member nonprofit pays $749/year. The 1,500-active-member association pays $1,299/year. (%a{href: "/pricing"} See current Groupable pricing.)

Pricing does adjust gradually. We make small adjustments every one to three years, sized to sustain the platform, but the cadence and magnitude look nothing like Wild Apricot's. No double-digit jumps. No 5% increases triggered by a new private equity owner. We've been independently held for over 20 years, and our pricing reflects the actual cost of running and improving the software, not quarterly revenue targets.

Find out what you're actually paying for.

Send us your active member count and your current Wild Apricot tier. We'll tell you what you'd pay on Groupable, and what the gap looks like over the next five years. No pitch deck. Just the math.

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