Website for membership organisations: logins, member areas and cost

en 2026-09-25 7 min read

A website for a membership organisation is a step 03 business website at EUR 1.500-3.500 while joining is a form and nothing sits behind a login. The moment members sign in, keep their own details up to date or pay dues through the site, it is step 04 work at EUR 3.500-7.500, built over 6-12 weeks.

An association, a professional body or a sports club has two audiences: people deciding whether to join, and people who already have. The second group needs the site to know who they are, and that is where the cost comes from.

Two jobs under one address

The public side is a normal business website: what the organisation stands for, what membership gets you, the events calendar, news and how to join. That is 4-7 pages with a CMS, so whoever runs the office or the board can publish without calling anyone.

The member area is an application. Before it shows a page, it has to know who is asking and what their membership entitles them to see. That means accounts, a record for every member, permission checks on the server and an admin screen. None of it shows in a mockup, which is why two quotes for similar-looking designs can sit a full step apart.

What moves the number

• Sign-in and accounts. Invitations, password reset, and what a member sees the day their membership lapses, all on a proven authentication provider rather than hand-written password handling.
• Membership types. One type with one price is simple. Student, full, retired and corporate types, each with different rights, multiply the rules the site has to enforce.
• Corporate or household memberships. One organisation paying for several people means an owner who can add and remove colleagues. Scope this first, because it is where step 04 starts turning into step 05.
• Dues and renewals. Taking money online is step 04. A provider such as Mollie or Stripe handles iDEAL and cards. An iDEAL payment is one-off, so automatic renewal needs a SEPA Direct Debit mandate, set up from the member's first payment, and the site has to cope when a collection fails.
• The member directory. Members looking each other up is useful, and it is personal data under the GDPR. Each member should choose what others can see, and the directory should only exist behind sign-in.
• Member-only content. Documents, recordings and a resource library, stored so a download link cannot be passed around outside the member area.
• The admin side. Approving applications, correcting an address, exporting a list for the general meeting. Check that every quote you compare includes it.
• Existing systems. If members live in a CRM or accounting software today, connecting the site through an API is step 04 work.

Which step your organisation needs

Every step and what it includes is on packages. A fixed quote always follows scoping, because the rules in the next section decide where in a range you land.

Renewals are where the rules live

A membership is not simply on or off. It is pending while an application waits for approval, then active, due for renewal, unpaid after a failed collection, lapsed or cancelled. For each of those states the site needs answers to three questions.

1. What the member can still see and do.
2. Which email goes out, and when.
3. What the admin screen shows, and who is allowed to change it.

Then the edge cases: an upgrade partway through a membership period, a refund, a student who graduates. These are decisions for your board, not a developer, and this is the part that waits on you. Write the rules down before scoping and the quote gets tighter.

Your member data stays yours

Member records are personal data your organisation is responsible for. The code, the repository and the database belong to you, so the member list moves with you if you ever change developer.

We can host the site, and that is agreed per project. After launch, Care at EUR 100-300 a month covers updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes. A new membership type, a new way to pay or a redesign of the member area is not a small fix and is quoted separately.

How the project runs

1. Scoping. Membership types, renewal rules, who sees what, and where member data lives today. The fixed quote comes out of this.
2. Design. Public site and member area together, so joining and signing in feel like one organisation. See design and engineering.
3. Build. Accounts, the data model, payments where they apply and the admin screens, on the stack described on our Next.js page.
4. Import and invitations. Your member list is cleaned and imported, and each member is invited to set a password. The cleaning is yours to do, and the invitations wait for it.
5. Testing with real members. Board members and volunteers sign in, pay and renew before everyone else is invited.

Step 03 takes 3-6 weeks, step 04 takes 6-12 weeks, and step 05 is timed after discovery.

When to spend less

• If your members only need news, an events calendar and a way to join, buy step 03 and send member updates by email. A login nobody needs moves you a full step for nothing.
• If you are a small club with little to publish, a step 02 mini-site at EUR 900-1.500, with 2-3 pages, a contact flow and a basic CMS, is enough. Keep collecting dues the way you do now.
• If you need accounts, dues and a directory and are content with how they work out of the box, hosted membership software such as Wild Apricot already does that. Put a step 02 or step 03 public site in front of it and link to its member area. Then do not hire us to rebuild what you can rent.
• Build a step 04 member area when the member experience is part of what people join for, or when your rules do not fit the rented software and your volunteers keep working around it by hand.

Questions before you commit

Can we keep our current member administration?

It depends on what that system can do. If it offers an API, the site can read and write members there, which is step 04 integration work. If it only exports a spreadsheet, it is simpler to move members into the new database once and retire the old system.

Will members have to set a new password?

If the old system can hand passwords over in a form the new one accepts, no. If it cannot, every member receives an invitation to set one. Write that email with care, because it is the first thing each member sees of the new site.

Is a shared password good enough for a members' page?

For a newsletter archive or general notices with nothing personal in them, it can be. You cannot remove one person's access without changing the password for everyone, and you cannot tell who opened what. The moment a page shows anything about an individual member, you need personal accounts.

Who is responsible for GDPR on the member data?

Your organisation is, and the site should make that easy to carry: members control what the directory shows, only signed-in members can see it, and admins can export or delete a record on request. Put those in the scope from the start.

If you want to know which step your organisation sits on, send your membership types and how renewals work today, and we will tell you straight. Start here.