The cost of a membership comes down to four items, and the dues are the only one the club announces. The other three are attendance time (meeting, travel, preparation, follow-up), travel and meals, and the contribution work expected: a meeting role, a committee, organising an event. They appear on no document, vary from one member to the next for identical dues, and weigh heaviest during the first months, at exactly the point where the member has received nothing yet. Hence the recommendation: build your full cost sheet and state it at the door. We put forward no market dues figure and no real club's pricing: nothing of the kind has been verified here. The only figures are Terrilink's public prices, set out at the end of the article.
Dues are the only item announced, and rarely the one that makes people leave
Dues have a quality the other items lack: they are written down. They appear in the brochure, they are voted on in general meeting, they produce an invoice, they fit into a budget. They are the figure the committee handles when it discusses the cost of membership, and the only one a candidate knows before joining.
For the member, that legibility is an advantage: dues are easy to defend internally, being an accounting line attachable to a business development budget, with a receipt. Of all the items, they are the easiest to get past a partner or a finance director.
Which is precisely why they are rarely the real reason for leaving. A member who goes says “it was too expensive” because that is the shortest and least confrontational formula, but what they stopped paying, most of the time, was not the dues: it was the time. A committee that responds by freezing the amount is therefore treating the item it was shown, not the one that decided.
Attendance time: the heaviest item, and the only one never written down
The second item appears on no document and is called in by no invoice. It is made up of four elements a member adds up without naming them: the meeting itself, the journey there and back, the preparation of what they will say, and the follow-up meetings the session generates. The last two are the ones committees most underestimate: a member who takes an introduction seriously spends a lunch, a call, sometimes a written proposal on it.
A business owner who bills by the hour knows how to convert this item into money, and does so, silently. An employee converts it differently, into evenings and Saturdays, which is no cheaper. In both cases the useful unit of account is not price but the number of half days per quarter. A club that cannot state that number for an ordinary member does not know what its own membership costs.
This item also governs how absences should be read. A member who stops attending before they stop paying has not lost interest: they have reallocated half days. Seeing the shift early enough to talk about it requires an attendance record that separates the absent from the excused and can be reread over time, as we set out in measuring attendance at club meetings.
Travel and meals: a cost of geography, not a cost of the club
The third item creates the most real inequality between members paying identical dues. Two members of the same club, twenty minutes and an hour and a half from the meeting venue, do not have the same membership cost, and no one has ever told them so. Mileage, parking, train fares, a meal taken on site: all of it depends on the member's geography and on the address of the meeting, which is to say on a committee decision.
The choice of venue, day and time is therefore a pricing decision in disguise. Moving a meeting to eight in the morning in a congested city centre amounts to raising the dues of outlying members, with no vote and no announcement. A committee debating its calendar without asking that question believes it is discussing convenience when it is discussing price. Two corrections cost nothing: rotate the venue where a subgroup is geographically coherent, and let members follow remotely those meetings whose point is information rather than encounter.
Contribution work: the item the club asks for without costing it
The fourth item is the most unevenly spread. A club works because members hold a role: chairing the meeting, writing the minutes, welcoming visitors, running a committee, organising the annual event. That work is not a nice extra, it is the operating condition, and it is supplied free of charge by a minority.
A well defined role costs little, because it is bounded and predictable. A vague role costs a great deal, because it absorbs everything nobody else does. The difference lies not in the person but in how the role is written, a subject we cover in who does what in a club: the meeting roles. A club that has not written its roles is not distributing work, it is concentrating it, and it is the contributors who burn out, not the passive members.
Why the calculation is at its worst at the start
The four items are not spread evenly over time, and that explains a good share of first year non renewals. During the first months the cost is at its peak: full dues, attendance at every meeting in order to become known, longer preparation since the room is unfamiliar, and a role accepted willingly in order to be useful. At the same time the return is at its lowest, because nobody yet refers someone whose trade they cannot describe precisely.
A club that ignores this asymmetry lets it work against it. One that knows about it does two things: it states the curve to the candidate, saying plainly that the first months cost and do not pay, and it shortens the phase by organising the room's knowledge of the newcomer instead of waiting for it. That is one of the functions of sponsorship, provided the sponsor accompanies rather than introduces, a distinction we develop in sponsoring a new member in a business club.
What the member sets against it, and why the comparison is biased
Against these four items the member sets a return of an entirely different nature: business won, but also information obtained ahead of everyone else, access to someone they would not have reached, the credibility a referral carries, sometimes simply no longer deciding alone.
The bias is structural. The cost is precise, monthly, and it presents itself: an invoice, a diary, a tank of petrol. The return is vague, annual, and has to be gone looking for. A member whose referral closed eighteen months earlier no longer connects it to the club. On that playing field, an honest and useful club loses the comparison against a mediocre club that keeps its records.
The only solid answer is to keep a trace of what the club produces, through to the outcome and not merely the intention: who referred whom, and what became of it. That is the material consolidated by the president's dashboard, and it cannot be reconstructed on the day a member announces their departure. A member who never refers anyone may in fact be running this calculation rather than making a choice of character, a hypothesis examined in a member who never refers anyone: what to do.
Stating the full cost at the door, and why it protects the club
Commercial instinct says talk only about the dues, since that is the most presentable item. Experience points the other way: a candidate who discovers after joining how many half days are expected, which meals are at their expense and what role they will be offered does not conclude that they read carelessly, they conclude that they were sold something else. The club gains a member and loses its word.
Stating the four items has three useful effects. The candidate decides on the right basis, so memberships hold better. The sponsor no longer has to play things down in order to persuade, which restores their credibility for next time. And the club gives itself one more selection criterion, since a candidate who balks at the time required would have been an absent member anyway: the logic meets that of recruiting on a written criterion, described in recruiting into a business club without diluting the standard.
One point calls for caution. As soon as the discussion shifts to financial consideration for a referral, it changes nature and becomes legal. The framework for paid business introductions and the status of the structure depend on your own rules and on applicable law: we set out the markers in business introductions in a club: the legal framework and in the legal status of a business club, without standing in for your own adviser.
Building the full cost sheet of a membership in six steps
- Write down the dues as they are actually called in. Amount, frequency, call date, whether instalments are possible. A clear schedule settles part of the price objection without touching the amount.
- Count the half days expected over a quarter. Meetings, travel, preparation, follow-up appointments. Give an ordinary member's number, not an exemplary member's.
- List the expenses genuinely borne by the member. Meals, parking, the journey to the usual venue, event fees. Separate what the dues cover from what is added to them.
- Describe the expected role and its load. What the club will ask for after a year, and how often. A bounded role gets held, a vague one gets avoided.
- Date the curve of the first months. Say from when, in your club, a member starts receiving, and what you do to shorten that phase.
- Have the sheet reviewed by a member who joined this year. They are the only one who can say what was missing, because they still remember. Then hand that sheet to every candidate, without trimming it.
When the simple answer is still the right one
Nothing above requires a tool. In a club of fifteen members who all know each other, the full cost sheet fits on one page, attendance is recorded in a notebook, and the president remembers who held which role. Adding a platform would improve nothing and would add an administrative task to a committee that already has enough. The spreadsheet even keeps one advantage: it bends to your way of counting, where a standard form imposes its own.
Three situations tip the reasoning. The first is reaching a size where nobody knows everybody any more: the president's memory stops being a reliable source. The second is having several meeting venues, because the real cost becomes specific to each subgroup and a notebook no longer shows it. The third is a change of committee, which makes everything unwritten disappear in a single general meeting. As long as none of the three applies, the simple answer is the right one.
What the tool changes, and what it does not
Start with what no software does. It does not reduce the time the club asks for, does not move the venue closer, and does not decide for you what the dues cover. The full cost of a membership is a matter of organisation, and a tool that arrives before the decision only produces a more precise record of the same problem.
What a tool changes is what stays written down. Calling in dues and collecting them stop depending on manual chasing. Attendance is recorded as members arrive, so drifting away shows up before the resignation letter. Roles are attached to people, which makes the concentration of contribution work visible. And referrals tracked through to their outcome finally give you a return to set against the cost, the only argument that holds in front of a hesitating member. The same material then feeds the meeting minutes, reused from one session to the next.
On which features are available, precision matters, because the mistake is expensive at the point of subscribing. The member directory searchable by sector and company, the activity feed and messaging are in every plan, from the Starter plan, at 69 € per month. Membership and dues management, running club meetings with attendance, events, discussion groups and business referral tracking belong to modules available from the Pro plan, at 149 € per month, and included in the Business Club plan, at 199 € per month. Two points deserve a mention, because they disappoint if discovered after signing: mentoring belongs to the Pro and Premium plans, at 299 € per month, and is not part of the Business Club plan; graduate outcome surveys belong to the Premium plan and are not part of it either. Custom domain, Google and LinkedIn sign in, Network Radar and message attachments belong to the Premium and Business plans.
In brief
Should the full cost of membership be stated to a candidate?
That is our recommendation, and it protects the club more than the candidate. A member who discovers afterwards how many half days are expected, which expenses they bear and what role they will be offered does not conclude that they read carelessly: they conclude that they were sold something else, and they will say so. Stating the four items also gives you a selection criterion, since a candidate who balks at the time required would have been an absent member anyway.
Should the dues cover all of the club's costs?
That is a decision for your committee, not a rule, and it is taken item by item. What matters is that the boundary be written: what the dues cover, what the member bears, what is paid at the event. A club that leaves that boundary implicit produces a small negotiation at every meeting, and it is the negotiation that wears people out, more than the amount. Questions of budget, accounts and approval in general meeting depend on your own rules and on applicable law.
How do you honestly compare two clubs on cost?
Not on the dues, which do not cover the same scope from one club to the next. The useful comparison covers the four items together, and above all the half days per quarter and the distance to the usual venue, the two heaviest and most personal variables. We publish no market range for dues and no real club's pricing: nothing of the kind is verified here, and any figure put forward would be an opinion in disguise.
Is a member who finds the membership too expensive right?
Often they are talking about something else. “Too expensive” is the shortest way of saying that the return is not visible, that the journey has become a chore, or that the role accepted out of politeness weighs too much. The useful question is therefore not how to defend the amount, but which of the four items has changed since last year. The answer is usually precise, and it rarely concerns the dues.
Method and sources. This is a method article: it relies on no external source and puts forward no market figure. What it describes comes from field observation with business clubs and alumni networks, not from measurement. We deliberately publish no amount or market range for dues, no real club's pricing, no number of half days presented as a norm, no renewal rate and no typical time to settle into a club: nothing of the kind has been measured or verified. The four cost items, the curve of the first months and the six step sheet are proposed organising frameworks, not standards. The only figures in this article are Terrilink's public prices, and feature availability follows the plan matrix set out in the previous section. Questions of association budget, approval of accounts, remuneration for a business introduction and the status of the structure depend on your own rules and on applicable law: they call for your own analysis, with your adviser where appropriate.