If you are a user of Wild Apricot’s web software and hosting, you most likely received an email in the recent past about an impending price increase. If you somehow didn’t get it, or haven’t seen it online when you log in, the information is here:
http://www.wildapricot.com/2015-pricing-changes
It goes into effect for renewals on June 1, although you can lock in on the old prices for a while if you prepay.
Now, nobody’s thrilled about price increases in anything they are paying for, but it’s true, it’s been a long, long time since Wild Apricot changed their prices. We’ve been using them for 6 years and there has never been a change, even though the software keeps upgrading and improving and the service level never dips. The price increases seem fairly reasonable when taken within that long of a time span.
And that’s the issue for online services – if costs increase on a per client basis (and they often do), online services have to determine some sort of orderly and regular framework for updating prices as well as the software.
I still look at Wild Apricot as a great deal out there for associations wanting to provide contact, content, membership and transaction management for their membership. And I think Wild Apricot has the track record of putting revenue back into product and service that means this will be a good thing going forward.
But, like all online services with fee structures, they’re going to need to figure out a more routine way of increasing prices, whether it just be on an annual basis, or some other way that allows customers to recognize that A) price increases will happen; and B) they can expect them in a given time frame. I’m sure they will, but at the same time, online clients cannot be surprised when online service prices increase. We’ll all be seeing more and more of that as time goes by.