There is a pricing model, standard across CRM and email software, that works like this: you pay for the number of people in your database. Cross a threshold — two thousand contacts, five thousand, ten — and your bill steps up. The software has not changed. Your team has not grown. What changed is that more people know you exist.
For a sales team, you can at least construct the argument: every contact is a prospective deal, so the database is an asset with a pipeline value, and pricing against it is pricing against expected revenue. We think the argument is thin even there. Applied to a community organization, it inverts into something perverse.
The database is the community
A nonprofit’s contact list is not a pipeline. It is the membership, the donor base, the volunteer roster, the alumni, the people who came to the gala three years running. Growing that list is not a cost centre that happens alongside the mission — for most community organizations, growing that list is the mission, or as close to a measurable proxy for it as anything they have.
Per-contact pricing takes that success and converts it directly into software spend. The consequences are predictable, because we have watched organizations live them:
- Lists get pruned to stay under a tier — meaning the charity deliberately forgets people who once cared about it.
- Historical donors get archived, and with them the giving history that would have told you who to call for the capital campaign.
- Imports get postponed. The membership spreadsheet stays a spreadsheet, because loading it would double the bill.
Software pricing is incentive design. This particular design tells a community organization to stay small in the one dimension it should never economise on.
A seat is not an audience
The industry’s confusion has a root: one word, “user,” covering two entirely different relationships with the software.
A seat is someone who works in the tool. They log in, build the campaign, review the pipeline, issue the receipt. Seats consume support, training, and product surface. Charging for seats is charging for the work the software does for the people operating it. That is a fair trade.
An audience member is someone the organization serves through the tool. They receive the newsletter, buy the ticket, take the course, get the receipt. They never see your admin screens. They did not choose your software. Billing the organization for them is billing for the existence of the community — rent collected on the relationship between a charity and its donors, by a third party neither of them chose.
Most tools collapse the two because the collapse is profitable. The audience grows on its own; seats do not.
What we charge for, and what we refuse to
Mercleo’s pricing draws the line where the work is. The platform — the shared workspace, the person record, and your Engagement Hub — comes with every account. You pay for the products you turn on and for authoring seats: the people doing work in the tools.
The audience side is never metered. Contacts on the person record, newsletter recipients, ticket holders, learners, donors, members signing in to your Hub — none of it appears on an invoice, at any volume. Not as a promotional tier that hardens later. As the line we designed the pricing around.
When your list doubles, that should be a good year — not a renegotiation.
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