Membership software for a small business costs anything from nothing to a few hundred pounds a month, and the band depends entirely on which kind of membership you run. Club and society tools are the cheapest: membermojo is free for small clubs with paid plans from £40 a year. Walk-in shop platforms such as PerkClub run from £59 a month plus 1.5% + 20p per transaction. Charity CRMs such as Beacon start at £37 a month. Gym and studio software starts around $75 a month with Gymdesk. Online community platforms start around $89 a month plus a 2% transaction fee with Circle, while Patreon charges no monthly fee and takes 10% of your earnings instead. We build one of these platforms, and every figure below was checked against each provider’s own published pricing in 2026.

Typical cost by type of membership

  • Clubs, societies and associations. membermojo is free for small clubs, with paid plans on a sliding scale from £40 a year for up to 100 members, inclusive of VAT and with no transaction charges of its own. At tens of pounds a year, this is the cheapest end of the market by a wide margin.
  • Charities with supporter memberships. Beacon, a UK charity CRM with membership built in, starts at £37 a month, or £33.50 on annual billing, with Standard at £127 and Premium at £325.
  • Walk-in shops: cafes, barbers, salons, bakeries. PerkClub is £59, £99 and £199 a month by member count, plus 1.5% + 20p per transaction on member billing, on rolling 30-day terms.
  • Gyms and fitness studios. Gymdesk publishes flat monthly rates by active member count in US dollars, from $75 a month for up to 50 members to $200 for up to 400. TeamUp is usage-based and scales by customer count, with the 101 to 200 band listed at $189 a month and GBP billing available. Glofox does not publish pricing at all.
  • Online communities and creators. Circle is $89 a month with a 2% transaction fee, $199 a month with the fee at 1%, and a custom tier at 0.5%. Patreon is free to start and takes 10% of the income you earn on the platform, plus processing, currency conversion and payout fees.

What a walk-in shop actually pays

If you run a cafe, barbershop, salon or bakery, the cost is a monthly plan plus a cut of what you bill your members. On PerkClub that is Starter at £59 a month for up to 20 members, Standard at £99 for up to 50, Max at £199 for up to 100, and a Custom plan above that, with a 1.5% + 20p transaction fee on member billing. The transaction fee rises to 2.5% for EEA cards and 3.25% for international or American Express cards. There are no setup fees, no onboarding fees and no charge for designing your QR codes. Optional add-ons are additional sites at £39 a month each, with the first site included, and Gifts at £19 a month per site. Terms are rolling 30 days and there is no free trial. See our pricing page for live figures and which membership platforms have low setup fees for how that compares with the rest of the market.

A worked example

Numbers make this concrete. Fifty members paying £40 a month is £2,000 of monthly recurring revenue. Transaction fees at 1.5% + 20p come to roughly £40 a month. The Standard plan at that member count is £99 a month. Net to the shop is around £1,861 a month, before any additional spend those members make while they are in. The software cost in that example is about 7% of the revenue it collects, which is the ratio worth holding in mind when you compare platforms: the monthly fee on its own tells you very little.

The costs that are not on the pricing page

Three things move the real total. The first is currency: several capable platforms publish only in US dollars, so a fixed cost becomes a floating one. The second is whether the fee scales with your success, because a flat plan and a revenue share diverge sharply once a programme works. The third is contract length, since a twelve-month minimum term is a far larger commitment than any one-off fee. On top of that, quote-only pricing, which is how Glofox sells, makes comparison shopping impossible until you have taken a sales call.

How to work out your own number

Start with the segment rather than the software. Decide whether you are running a walk-in shop membership, a class-based gym membership, an online community or a volunteer-run club, because the right platform for one is the wrong platform for the other three. Then price the whole stack: monthly plan, transaction fees at each card type, per-site charges and any add-ons. Finally, put that total next to the recurring revenue the programme should collect. If the software costs a single-digit percentage of the revenue it bills, the maths works.

The full by-use-case comparison, with each provider’s sources, is in our roundup of the best membership software for UK small businesses. For a plain-English primer, see what is membership software, and for the evaluation checklist, see what to look for in a membership platform.