How Many Subscriptions Is Your Community Actually Paying For?

Ask a board treasurer what the community spends on software and you'll usually get one number — whatever the biggest line item is. Ask them to list every tool the community actually uses and the number roughly doubles.

This isn't carelessness. It's what happens when tools get added one at a time, by different people, to solve one problem each, over several board terms.

The usual stack

Most amenity-driven communities end up with some version of this:

| What it does | Typically | |---|---| | Court or facility booking | A dedicated reservation product | | The website | An HOA site builder, or a volunteer's Wix account | | Dues and payments | A separate portal, or paper checks and a spreadsheet | | Email to members | Mailchimp, or someone's personal Gmail | | Documents | Google Drive, shared by link | | The member list | A spreadsheet. Always a spreadsheet |

Nobody chose that stack. It accumulated. The court system was bought by the tennis committee in 2021, the website was set up by a board member who has since moved away, and the roster lives in a Google Sheet that three people have different versions of.

Start with the audit

Before you evaluate anything new, write down what you already pay for. Include:

• The obvious subscriptions — anything with a recurring charge on the community card
• The invisible ones — tools on a personal account being expensed, or worse, quietly absorbed by a volunteer
• Per-transaction fees — payment processing, and whether a platform takes a cut on top of card processing
• The annual ones — domain registration, SSL if you're still paying for it, anything that renews in a month nobody's watching

Two things usually surface. First, the total is higher than anyone thought. Second — and this matters more — at least one subscription is on a former board member's credit card, and nobody knows the password.

The cost that isn't money

The subscription total is the easy part. The expensive part is what having several systems does to your operations.

Roster drift. This is the big one. A household joins in March. They get added to the member list, and to the payment system, because those are the ones the membership chair touches. Nobody adds them to the court booking system. In June they show up to play and can't book. Someone has to be found. It happens again in July with a different family.

Two member lists will always drift apart, because there's no mechanism keeping them together except a volunteer remembering. Volunteers rotate.

Offboarding is worse than onboarding. When a household sells and moves, you remove them from the systems you remember. The one you forget still lets them book a court in August.

Every system needs an owner. Each tool has a login, a billing contact, an admin who knows how it works. When that person's term ends, the knowledge leaves with them. Boards routinely discover they've been paying for something nobody can get into.

Members feel the seams. From a member's side, "the community website" is one thing. Being sent to a different site with a different login to book a court, and a third to pay dues, reads as disorganization — even when each individual tool is fine.

What consolidating actually saves

Run the arithmetic on your own stack rather than trusting a vendor's. But the pattern usually looks like this:

• The direct subscription saving is real but rarely dramatic — often a few hundred dollars a year
• The operational saving is larger and harder to see. One roster that can't drift. One login for members. One system for the next board to inherit
• The onboarding saving compounds: adding a household once, and having court access, directory listing, dues, and event access all follow from it

The test worth applying: when a new family joins, how many places does someone have to type their name? If the answer is more than one, that's your actual cost, and it recurs with every new household forever.

When separate tools are the right call

Consolidation isn't automatically correct, and it's worth being honest about where it isn't.

• You run a competitive racquet program with lessons, leagues, ladders and a pro shop. That's a real domain and dedicated software does it far better than a general community platform will.
• Your accounting is genuinely complex — a large association needing formal financial statements should keep proper accounting software and not expect a community platform to replace it.
• Something works and everyone likes it. Replacing a tool your members already use, purely for tidiness, spends goodwill you'll want later.

The realistic goal usually isn't one tool. It's one member record, with as few systems hanging off it as the community can manage.

A short exercise for your next meeting

1. List every tool, what it costs, and who owns the login.
2. Mark the ones storing member names and contact details.
3. For each of those, ask when it was last reconciled against the master list.
4. Count how many places a new household has to be entered.

Step four is usually the number that changes the conversation — not because the money is shocking, but because nobody had noticed the answer was four.

---

Gather Commons puts reservations, events, the member directory, documents, dues and your public website on one member record, so joining the community is what grants access to all of it. See what's included, how it compares to court booking tools, or what it costs.