Before you take it to the next meeting

Because those sell you a seat on their system, not a finished one of your own. You still do the branding, the spreadsheet import, the board-only permissions and the training yourself — and you stay on their domain, their design and their sign-in screen. Here your ensemble gets its own deployment at its own address, with its own branded sign-in and its own database. The setup fee is a one-time payment for that work done for you, and it sits below what any nonprofit web studio charges simply to build a website. After year one your only cost is the annual fee, which for a mid-sized band is $600 — in the same range as the per-user tools once you count every officer who needs an account.

No, and it's worth saying why rather than just no. Every ensemble gets its own deployment, its own branding and its own imported records — a trial would mean doing the entire job before anyone had decided to buy it, which is a bad trade for us and a slow one for you. Instead the setup fee is refundable: if your board decides within sixty days of go-live that this isn't what it wanted, we refund it in full and you keep the export. You carry no more risk than a trial would give you, and you get a finished system rather than a sandbox.

If you want to see it before committing anything, ask for a walkthrough. We'll show you a working deployment, and we can put your ensemble's name and colours on the demo so your board is looking at something that resembles what it would get.

The setup fee in full, plus the unused part of the annual fee, refunded within ten business days. The clock starts at go-live — the day we hand the portal to your board with your records in it — not the day you signed, because the sixty days are meant to cover real use rather than our build time. There's no usage requirement and no form. An email from any officer of the board is enough.

The only thing we don't refund is money paid to someone else on your behalf, such as a domain registration. If there is any such cost, it's itemised in the proposal before you agree to anything.

You get the full export first — roster, dues history, minutes, library, documents, in open formats — and you keep it. The deployment stays up for thirty days after the refund so nobody is scrambling, then it comes down and we confirm the deletion in writing. That's the same exit every ensemble has at any time, refund or not. A stated way out is worth more to a volunteer board than a discount.

Because it is the one number that tracks what the portal actually costs to run and what it is worth to you: more players means more accounts, more dues records, more notices going out, and more support questions. Pricing on the roster keeps a twenty-five-piece community band from subsidizing a hundred-and-forty-piece symphony. The band is fixed once a year at renewal, so mid-season growth never produces a surprise invoice, and the per-player cost falls as the ensemble grows.

You get a full export of everything — roster, dues, minutes, library, documents — in open formats, whenever you ask, including on the way out. A stated exit is worth more to a volunteer board than a discount, so it isn't buried in a contract.

No. A member's view is deliberately small: the calendar, the next rehearsal, the repertoire, their dues, and announcements. Everything administrative lives behind the board view, which most members never see.

Yes. Rehearsal Letter is the members' and board's side of the house. It typically lives at a subdomain — members.yourband.org — and links back to the public site you already have. If you also want the public join page, it can be matched to your existing site's look.

Only signed-in board members. Each ensemble runs on its own deployment with its own database, so nobody else's board is in the same system as your roster. Member contact details are not shared, sold, or used for anything but running your ensemble.

It works the same way — the vocabulary changes rather than the software. Sections become voice parts, players become singers, and the wording throughout follows what your ensemble already calls things.

Dues status is tracked per member per term, with a pay-online link pointing at whatever the ensemble already uses to take money. We don't sit between you and your players' payments.

It builds the whole booklet. You pick the concert and switch on the sections you want — cover, a note from the conductor, the program itself, the roster, biographies, sponsors, donors, acknowledgments — and each one is composed from the part of the portal that owns it. Choose the folded booklet format and the pages are imposed for saddle-stitching, so page one prints beside the last page and the stapled result reads in order. Then you print it from the browser. There is no design software to buy and nothing to re-key.

A folded booklet has to be a multiple of four, so it rounds up and tells you how many spare sides you have, then offers sections you could put in them. It also warns you about the things that are easy to miss: an intermission with no length on it, a photo credit naming cover art the program isn't carrying, a donor list whose fiscal year doesn't match the concert.

No. It's part of the portal, at no extra cost, at every roster band.

Usually about two weeks from the point where we have your logo, colors, domain and roster spreadsheet. Domain and email records are the part most likely to add a few days, since they depend on who holds the registrar login.