IN THIS ARTICLE▾
Recurv's club billing pricing has no R5,000 monthly minimum, so it works the same way for a 40-member club as it does for a 400-member one.
A 40-member bowls club and a 400-member cricket club have very different collection volumes, but they hit the same wall when they look at automating subs collection through a bank's debit-order portal: a monthly minimum, often R5,000 or more, that makes no sense for the smaller club and barely registers as a rounding error for the larger one. For a club running on subs of a few hundred rand a year per member, a R5,000 monthly minimum can be a meaningful chunk of the club's entire annual budget, enough, on its own, to keep a small club stuck on manual collection indefinitely.
This piece is about a pricing model that doesn't create that wall, one that works the same way, proportionally, whether the club has 40 members or 400.
Why the minimum exists on most rails
Bank debit-order portals and many incumbent providers set a monthly minimum because their own cost of onboarding and supporting a client is roughly fixed regardless of that client's size. A R5,000 floor makes the economics work for the provider across every client, but it has the side effect of pricing out exactly the clubs, small, volunteer-run, budget-constrained, that would benefit most from automating a task currently run by hand.
What a no-minimum, two-stream model looks like
Recurv's pricing splits into a fixed monthly platform fee, set at a level that doesn't require a large club's volume to be worthwhile, plus a per-debit transaction fee that scales naturally with how many debits the club actually runs. There's no floor that penalises a 40-member club for being smaller than a 400-member one, and no annual commitment required before the club has seen even one billing cycle run.
A 40-member bowls club with R500 annual subs pays for roughly 40 debits' worth of transaction fees plus the fixed platform fee, a modest, proportionate cost. A 400-member cricket club pays more in transaction volume, reflecting the larger number of debits actually processed, but the pricing logic doesn't change shape as membership grows. There's no threshold where a growing club suddenly needs to renegotiate.
Why this matters specifically for the volunteer-run segment
Smaller, volunteer-run clubs are exactly the segment where tooling spend gets the most scrutiny, every rand spent on software is a rand not spent on facilities, equipment, or the next tournament, and a volunteer committee has to be able to defend the cost at the AGM. A pricing model that doesn't require a R5,000 monthly floor, and doesn't lock the club into an annual contract before it's proven itself, is much easier for a Treasurer to bring to committee and defend to members.
Why month-to-month matters for a committee that has to vote
Club decisions run through a committee, and committees are, reasonably, cautious about locking a club into a contract before they've seen a system work through even one billing cycle. A month-to-month commercial term means the club can adopt the system, run a season with it, and decide from there whether to continue, without having committed to twelve months upfront on the strength of a demo alone.
What this means for the club's budget
The fixed monthly platform fee is the single predictable line in the club's operating budget, unaffected by how many bar tabs or competition entries run through a given month. The per-debit fee scales with actual collection activity, so a quiet off-season month costs less than a busy season month, rather than a flat minimum applying regardless of how much billing actually happened.
What this isn't
It isn't a claim that Recurv is free, or that a tiny club with a handful of members and a token annual sub will find any collection-automation cost worthwhile, for clubs below a certain size, manual collection may simply remain the more sensible option, and that's a reasonable call for a committee to make.
It isn't a one-time pricing decision the club is stuck with. A committee that adopts the system for one season can review the actual cost after a few billing cycles and decide from there, without an annual contract forcing the decision to be made in advance, sight unseen.
It also isn't specific to the smallest clubs only, larger, professionally-managed clubs benefit from the same proportional structure, since their transaction volume is what scales the cost, not an arbitrary minimum unrelated to how the club actually uses the system.
Related reading
See how Recurv handles recurring billing for sports & social clubs.
View Sports & Social Clubs use case →