Why we charge what we charge
A real, no-bullshit breakdown of what your fee covers, how we compare to Wild Apricot & the others, and where every dollar goes.
The plans
Every tier gets every feature. The only thing that changes is how many households you can manage.
Optional: setup & audit
Most clubs set themselves up in an afternoon — a short checklist on your dashboard walks you through it and it costs nothing. If you would rather hand it over, we will import your roster from whatever you keep it in, check the data, configure your tiers and dues, and hand you a working club: $500 flat, delivered in five business days, refunded in full if we miss fourteen. Clubs over 200 households add $1 per household past 200. One-off, and genuinely optional — the free first season is free either way. Full details of what's included.
The short version
Pool clubs are run by volunteers. Volunteers don't have time. Volunteer time is worth real money — even if no one's writing them a check. So pricing should reflect the hours you save, not the cost of writing the code.
Our pricing rule: charge a fraction of the value we create. A typical 150-household neighborhood club saves 200+ board hours per year. That's $5,000+ of volunteer time at $25/hour — Pro is $2,400 — under half the time value alone, before counting the dues that land on time instead of in June.
How we compare
Real annual costs for a 150-household club:
| Product | Year-1 cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Poolside Pro | $2,400 | Memberships, dues, payments, programs, parties, gate, archive — all of it. Setup is optional, not required. |
| Member Splash Essentials+ | $2,500 | $2,000/yr + $500 one-time setup. Closest direct comp; pool-club focused. |
| Member Splash Premium | $5,000 | $3,500/yr + $1,500 setup. Adds a website + advanced forms. |
| ClubExpress | $1,400-3,000 | $0.30-0.42 per member per month — scales up with every member. |
| Wild Apricot | $1,400-2,400 | Per-contact tier. Generic; built for chambers of commerce and dog rescues. |
| TeamUnify (competitive swim) | $14,400+ | $6-12 per swimmer per month. Aimed at year-round competitive teams. |
| MemberClicks (associations) | $4,500+ | For trade associations and nonprofits up to $2.5M budget. |
| Excel + Venmo + email | $0 | 200+ board hours per year. Spreadsheet inheritance crisis when the treasurer rotates. |
The direct comparison is Member Splash — built for community pool clubs like Poolside. We're not the cheapest line on that table and we don't pretend to be: Essentials+ costs about the same as Pro in year one and a little less after. What it doesn't include is the gate integration, the phone app your members actually sign in to, or SMS. For those you're looking at Member Splash Premium, which is roughly double Poolside Pro.
Against the upmarket products we're 2-6× cheaper without skimping on features, and the reason isn't "we're underpriced." It's: we built this for pool clubs specifically, so we don't carry the bloat of a generic membership platform built for chambers of commerce + dog rescues + alumni associations.
If price is the only thing that matters to your board, the honest answer is a spreadsheet and Venmo. It's the last row of that table, it costs nothing, and it costs 200 board hours.
Where the money actually goes
Out of every $2,400 Pro subscription:
| Where | Approx |
|---|---|
| Stripe processing fee on your subscription | $72 (3%) |
| Supabase (database + auth + storage) | $8 |
| Resend (your members' sign-in link emails) | $2 |
| Twilio (sign-in codes, approvals, reminders, club texts) | $40 |
| Vercel (hosting) | $3 |
| Domain + cert + back-end ops | $8 |
| Subtotal — what it costs us to run your club | ~$135 |
| What's left to keep developing the product | ~$2,265 |
That margin is what funds the next thing you'll ask us to build. Customer service. Dunning. Season-long payment plans. The keyfob and gate integration. The Drive auto-archive. Things you didn't ask for that you'll be glad we built when you need them.
Why the first season is free
There used to be a Free Forever tier capped at 20 households. It sounded generous and mostly wasn't: almost no real pool club is that small, so it advertised a plan you couldn't actually run a club on.
A free first season is the honest version. You get every feature and no household limit for a full season — long enough to open the pool, collect a season of dues, run your parties and swim lessons, and close out. If it saved your treasurer the spring, pick a plan. If it didn't, you've lost nothing but an afternoon of setup, and your data exports on the way out.
We'd rather be judged on a season than on a 14-day trial nobody has time to use in February.
Why no feature paywalls
Most SaaS products gate the good stuff behind higher tiers — "you can't use SMS sign-in unless you upgrade to Pro" — to manufacture upgrade pressure. We hate that. Volunteer boards have enough decisions to make without "do we need to upgrade just to send SMS?"
Every tier gets every feature. The only thing that changes between tiers is how many households you can have. Outgrowing a tier is a good problem — your club is doing well and you have too many members. That's the right time to upgrade.
About the small percentage on member transactions
Every fee we charge — subscription, transaction, gate, the lot — is listed together on one page. This is the short version.
When your members pay through Poolside (via Stripe), we take a small platform fee on top of Stripe's processing rate:
| What's being paid for | Poolside fee |
|---|---|
| Annual dues | 1.0% |
| Programs, swim lessons, clinics | 1.5% |
| Parties and events | 1.5% |
| Donations to the club | 0% — always free |
| Reactivating a lapsed payment plan | 1.0% |
If you stick with Venmo / check for everything, this never applies — you only pay the subscription. The transaction fee covers the actual benefit of using Stripe (auto-charging saved cards, payment plans, instant verification, no chasing members for dues).
About the payment-plan fee
A member who would rather spread dues across the season instead of paying in one go can choose a payment plan. That costs them $4 per payment, capped at $16 for the whole plan — the same way an installment plan works on insurance or a utility bill.
Two things worth being clear about, because this is the one fee a member sees added to their own bill:
- The club's books don't move. Your installments are the dues, exactly. The fee rides alongside and comes to us, so a club nets the same whether a household pays once or six times.
- Paying in full avoids it entirely. It's a fee for the convenience, not a fee for paying.
The cap is the important part. Without it, a flat fee across an eight-payment plan would take $32 on $600 of dues — over 5%, which is the sort of number that makes a board tell its members to write checks instead.
Money-back, no drama
If you're not happy in the first 30 days, email us and we'll refund your subscription, no forms or "exit interview." We'd rather you find the right tool than feel stuck.
"I run a pool club too. Every feature in here exists because some board member told me they needed it — not because I dreamed it up in a vacuum."
— Doug, founder