Toolworker
Constant Price Increases Since Bought by Personify; Development Nearly Halted
Wild Apricot used to be a nimble, technically savvy company oriented toward constant platform improvement and customer response. Since being taken over by Personify in 2018, it has turned into a cash cow with a user wishlist whose top requests, including several simple changes needed for good member communication, have languished for years. In the last six years prices have gone up three times, a total of 118%, plus introduction of a 20% surcharge if you don't use their credit card processing system. Account pricing is based not on number of members but on contacts, which includes each person in a family and any nonmembers who ever registered for an event, unless removed by hand. Wide gaps between price levels can lead to a price shock as your organization grows. It was easy to move over to. We depend on it for running our club, particularly events and membership renewal. It's given us a good-looking website, easy to edit and expand, although a lot of time is spent in working around quirks in line spacing that have been a source of constant complaints for many years yet have never been fixed. But frequent price increases and almost nonexistent feature improvement have turned a decent platform into one in decline. It's often necessary to fight its limitations, particularly in event creation and registration. It assumes that memberships are individuals and bundles of individuals, each with their own record. This makes it a challenge to maintain, communicate with and register for events couples and families. Reports are limited in flexibility and not particularly useful - it's usually necessary to export data to Excel and format your own. Any complex platform is going to have situations where you need to wrestle it into doing what's needed. A well maintained platform will have a program of smoothing and eliminating these as time goes on. Wild Apricot no longer tries.