Glue Up costs ~$125+/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $4,500 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
~$125+/mo is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Roster: the pay-once alternative
Roster does the same core job for $19, once. Self-hosted searchable directory with custom fields, chapters, CSV round-trips, renewal tracking and magic-link editing.
| Roster | Glue Up | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 once | ~$125+/mo |
| Member data | Your SQLite file | Their cloud |
| Custom fields | Unlimited, free | Plan-gated |
| Members | Unlimited | Priced per contact tier |
| Self-serve profile edits | Yes | Yes |
| CSV import/export | Yes | Yes |
| Works offline / desktop | Yes | No |
| Source code | MIT, yours | Proprietary |
One year of Glue Up runs past $1,500 — Roster pays for itself before lunch.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Glue Up's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Roster is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Roster — $19, once
Self-hosted searchable directory with custom fields, chapters, CSV round-trips, renewal tracking and magic-link editing.