Roster vs Glue Up pricing: $4,500 vs $19 once

OneTimeSuite Blog · Published 2026-07-21

Membership platforms like Glue Up charge hundreds of dollars a month — around $1,500 a year — to host what is, at its core, a searchable list of your members. Roster is $19 once, runs on a $5 VPS or your own desktop, and your member data never leaves a machine you control.

This is the full pricing breakdown: what Glue Up actually costs over one, two and three years, what Roster gives you for $19 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.

What Glue Up actually costs you

At ~$125+/mo, one Glue Up subscription adds up to $1,500 every year — $4,500 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Roster is $19 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.

Three years in, the gap is $4,481 — and every year after that adds another $1,500 to the subscription side of the ledger.

Roster vs Glue Up, feature by feature

Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:

What you get for $19, once

Self-hosted searchable directory with custom fields, chapters, CSV round-trips, renewal tracking and magic-link editing. The highlights:

• 🪪 Member profiles — Photo, contact info, bio, status (active / pending / lapsed), and join and renewal dates.
• 🧩 Custom fields per organization — Text, select or URL fields that appear on cards, in the table, in search and in CSV round-trips.
• 🔎 Real search and filtering — Full-text search across names, emails, bios and every custom field, with filters by status, chapter or exact value.
• 🏛️ Chapters — Sub-listings for multi-chapter orgs with member counts, auto-created on CSV import.

One year of Glue Up runs past $1,500 — Roster pays for itself before lunch.

Switching is 3 steps

1. Buy once on Whop. One payment of $19 gets you the packaged Windows installer, or clone the MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/member-directory-mvp and run it yourself for free.
2. Deploy or run desktop. docker compose up onto a $5 VPS to go public, or npm run desktop for an Electron window auto-logged-in as admin.
3. Import your spreadsheet. Drop in a CSV — unknown columns become custom fields automatically and existing emails update instead of duplicating.

When paying Glue Up is still the right call

Being straight about it: the subscription earns its keep in three situations. If your team is large enough that Glue Up's collaboration features, permissions and admin controls are genuinely load-bearing; if your workflow is built on its integrations and leaving means rebuilding that plumbing; or if you have enterprise requirements — SSO, audit logs, SLAs, a vendor to call — that a pay-once app doesn't come with. Everyone else is paying ~$125+/mo for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.

If that's you, Roster is $19, once. For the deeper dive, read the Roster vs Glue Up head-to-head.

Frequently asked questions

Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — Roster is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/member-directory-mvp. The $19 buys the packaged installer and 1-click setup; building from source is free.

Where does my member data live?
In a SQLite file you can copy, on your own server or in your user profile in desktop mode. Zero telemetry, zero external auth providers.

Is this a subscription in disguise?
No. $19 once, unlimited members and custom fields, no renewal.

More on Glue Up pricing

Roster — product page, demo & full feature list · All OneTimeSuite pricing breakdowns