Veldun vs. Wild Apricot

Wild Apricot prices by contact count and gates features behind higher tiers. At 100 contacts, you pay $66/month. At 250 contacts, $160/month. Cross a tier boundary by adding ten members and your bill jumps overnight -and you still don’t get all the features.

Veldun uses transparent, contact-based pricing: Starter ($79/mo), Growth ($119/mo), Professional ($179/mo) -with every feature included at every tier. No feature walls, no payment surcharges. Pick your tier based on how many contacts you have; everything else is included.

Annual savings for a 250-contact org switching from Wild Apricot to Veldun: $492.

Then there are payment surcharges. Wild Apricot partners with AffiniPay (Personify Payments) as its preferred processor. If you use a third-party processor like Stripe, Wild Apricot adds a 20% surcharge on every transaction.

Veldun is built with AI in the platform - not bolted on, not announced with a chatbot greeting. You describe what you need and the system does the work.

Type a sentence describing your event. Title, description, pricing, confirmation email, reminder email - all populated in under three seconds. Edit anything, publish when ready.

Your newsletter assembles itself from the month’s activity: upcoming events, new members, renewal reminders. Add the board message and send.

Members at renewal risk are flagged 30 days before lapse. AI-drafted outreach is ready for the board president to review and send.

Wild Apricot has no AI features. Event creation requires filling 15+ fields across 5 tabs manually. Newsletters start from a blank page every time. Renewal reminders are basic countdown timers with no intelligence.

Veldun is a newer platform. Our feature set is narrower than Wild Apricot’s. We are honest about that.

But we respond to every support email within 24 hours - and the founder is often the one answering. When you report a bug, it gets fixed in days, not quarters.

Wild Apricot was acquired by Personify in 2017, then Personify was acquired by Community Brands. Support response times stretched to two weeks or more. The product roadmap slowed. The website builder hasn’t been meaningfully updated since 2019.

For a volunteer board that needs a responsive partner, not a ticket queue, smaller can be better.

Wild Apricot has 15 years of features: a donations module, an online store, a built-in website builder, multi-session event support, and integrations with Zapier and Make. If your org relies on integrations or modules not available in Veldun, Wild Apricot may still serve you.

But most volunteer boards use 20% of Wild Apricot’s features. The other 80% adds complexity - 50+ submenu pages, scattered settings, a 5-step email wizard for every message.

Veldun covers the features volunteer boards actually use - member directory, dues, events, email, and a public website - with a modern interface and AI assistance, at a fraction of the cost.