Pricing Changes From April 2025

The change to the new pricing structure will happen on 1st April 2025. Any invoices issued on or after that date will be issued according to the new pricing structure, covering usual 12 months subscription

The changes apply to every organisation using Three Rings. They’ll take effect at your next invoice date after April 1st. That means they’ll take effect for you immediately if you usually get invoiced in April, after a couple of months if you usually pay in June, and so on.

A couple of reasons! First, April is the start of our financial year, so for us it keeps things really tidy! Second, our terms and conditions ask us to give 3 month’s notice of pricing changes so that people can plan their expenditure more easily. (And third, we also need to make a couple of tweaks to Three Rings itself to make sure it handles migration to the new invoicing system properly!)

After considerable planning throughout 2024, we’re confident that April is the right time for us to make the change.

You’re fine! If that’s the case, you’ll still be invoiced on our old rate this time, because your renewal date will be within our 2024/5 financial year, so the rates we set for 2024/5 will still apply – but don’t worry, because when you’re invoiced in 2026 (that is, during our 2025/6 year), it will be on the new pricing structure!

Rolling out the changes to each organisation we invoice, in turn, from the start of our financial year means that every organisation is treated fairly, and nobody loses out: every organisation whose subscription renews during our 2024/5 financial year pays (or already paid) at the 2024/5 rates, and then the newer simpler pricing structure kicks in from the start of our 2025/6 financial year, on April 1st.

That means, even if your next invoice date isn’t until March 2025, your organisation isn’t losing out compared to an organisation with an invoice date in May (the organisations that will be invoiced in May 2025 already paid at the 2024/5 rates, the same as you, last May, so they’ll get the new 2025/6 rates first, but once you’ve paid at the 2024/5 rates and “caught up” with the organisation invoiced in May, your next invoice will be at the same rate as them.

This keeps everything fair for everyone, but we know it can look a bit odd at first glance – it’s a quirk of the fact that, because our financial year follows the tax year instead of the calendar year, organisations invoiced in the first few months of 2025 are actually further back in the invoice “queue” than they look on paper!

No, not at all! Although we’re moving to a simpler and more transparent model for our prices, the actual subscription you pay still covers you for everything it always has: twelve months of full access to the whole of the Three Rings system, twelve months of full access to our technical support, and twelve months of full access to any and all system upgrades and improvements we make.

Just as before, we’ll invoice you once a year, on your normal invoice date, and payment of that invoice will cover your organisation’s full access to Three Rings for the next year – the only change is that the model against which we calculate the invoice value is changing, to bring the cost of Three Rings down for as many users as possible.

Put simply, by taking advantage of the combination of factors that have always made Three Rings so incredibly scalable and resilient: we are, and always have been, run entirely by volunteers, so our costs are minimal. We’ve built the system on trusted open-source platforms, which helps to keep our overheads down. And, right from the start Three Rings has been designed to allow us to scale up the system to serve more and more users without compromising on stability or security, giving us the power to match the resource demands on the servers powering the system to our actual expansion rate.

As costs increased over the past few years, more and more charities and community organisations sought out Three Rings because they knew we offered the best value for their volunteer management needs: with each organisation that joined, our highly scalable model ensured that Three Rings CIC was in a stronger position.

To begin with, and especially as energy prices shot up during 2021-2023, that stronger position simply meant we were better-insulated against some of the inflationary pressures that impacted other suppliers. Now, as those pressures ease up and we identify more efficient ways of working, that increase in our user base has meant we’re in an incredibly strong position from which to review our costs and deliver savings back to our users. That’s what we’ve always been about, so that’s what we’re doing!

Because we’re not like other companies. Plenty of other organisations would be happy to say that if people are willing to pay £x for their services, then £x must be a fair price. But at Three Rings, we don’t think like that, and we don’t want to.

Of course, we’d agree that if delivering a service and avoiding any compromise on quality means the service must cost £x, then £x is a fair price… but if we can maintain the same high standards that we’ve maintained for the last 23 years, reduce the cost, and save our users money they can then focus on their own charitable objectives, then as far as we’re concerned, that’s the fair thing to do.

After all – we’re all volunteers, and Three Rings CIC is a not-for-profit organisation! We’re not getting any money out of this, we don’t want to get any money out of this, and our reason for volunteering with Three Rings isn’t to see how much money we can make – it’s because we believe it’s important to support volunteering and to empower others to make a difference.

Almost certainly! As much as possible, we’ve tried to ensure that organisations will save money as a result of these changes, although (thanks to complicated maths in our modelling!) there are probably just over 100 organisations using Three Rings who instead get a price freeze rather than a price cut: we tried our best to make sure that everyone got a price cut, but because the old model scaled organisations’ subscription fees against their annual income there were some organisations who were already getting such a good deal we couldn’t cut their costs any more – although we’re pretty sure you’ll agree that’s still a nice thing to be told!

What we can say categorically is that no organisation is going to pay more as a result of these changes – almost everyone is going to pay less, and those who don’t pay less, will pay the same as before. (Although, of course, if your organisation’s income suddenly goes up massively, then congratulations, and that might move you into the higher band).

You can see all the pricing information on our Pricing Page, if you want to check.

We don’t think so! We do advise that all Admins check that your organisation’s annual income is recorded correctly within Three Rings once a year (and, ideally, that we have the right address for you; it really helps when we’re sending you Christmas cards!) – but our volunteers can check your org’s income ourselves if we need to: everything should “just work”

This is an excellent question! If you’re one of the organisations using Three Rings who also requests that we run a dedicated beta test server specifically for your organisation, we’ll now be charging you based on two things – one, a cost-per-instance, which covers each branch or section of your organisation (just like we always have), and two, the cost of that dedicated beta server.

In the old days, the cost of that server was effectively shared out among everyone using Three Rings, but as we were going through the models, that felt a bit wonky to us: even if it’s only a few pounds on a subscription cost, it didn’t quite feel right that every organisation should bear part of the cost of a dedicated beta server for one organisation, however important your work! We hope you’ll agree that it’s much fairer to bring the costs down for every organisation (including yours!), but also to make sure the cost of your organisation’s private beta server falls only on your organisation.

No – but the new pricing structure is designed to give everyone a better deal than they were getting even if they previously had a discount (and with the added benefit, that’s a saving that everyone gets to enjoy, not just people with a specific discount).

Plus, the reasons behind the discounts we used to offer don’t really make sense any more – we used to provide one of two types of discount:

Regional discounts, which we offered until 2017, were intended to help minimise our overheads by reducing the amount of volunteer time needed to manually generate and post individual invoices (which made quite the difference even with the price of stamps back in 2012!).

Today, though, we have Three Rings itself generate our invoices, and we’re increasingly using a paperless billing model where invoices are just emailed out. While we stopped offering new Regional discounts in 2017, and continued to honour those already in place for the last seven years, we will cease to provide Regional discounts under the new pricing scheme. Taking this step means we can lower the prices for all our users, including those previously receiving Regional discounts.

We’re still very happy to invoice organisations that choose to pay regionally if it helps cut down your admin, but the financial justification for us giving the discount has faded with time, so rather than provide blanket discounts only to those parts of an umbrella organisation that can group together to pay regionally, we’re lowering prices for absolutely everyone, across the board.

Membership discounts were offers we made in a bid to try and “tweak” some fundamental imbalances in the way the old pricing model worked: in particular, we used to give a discount to community shops who were members of the Plunkett Foundation, because all community shops tend to have a much higher turnover, and so show a much higher annual income, compared to most of the other types of voluntary organisation we support – which used to put them in the higher bands of the old pricing model.

Now we are moving to a new, simpler, and in particular cheaper model, that old imbalance doesn’t exist any more (and it means that community shops or other organisations who aren’t part of a wider membership organisation can benefit too).

Yes! For a long time now we’ve believed that if an organisation’s annual income is so small that the cost of their annual Three Rings subscription would be more than 1% of their income for that year, then that cost is too high: as far as we’re concerned, it doesn’t matter how fantastic the software is (and we’d like to think Three Rings is pretty fantastic!), no organisation running on volunteer effort should be spending more than 1% of their annual income just on software.

So, if your annual income is so low that the cost of your Three Rings subscription would exceed 1% of that income, we’ll issue you with a lower invoice, for a maximum of 1% of your income+VAT.

It’s possible – it isn’t normal practice for us (we usually just invoice every organisation for their next 12 months’ usage), but we have occasionally agreed to invoice organisations for multiple years in one go – if so, it’s probably because you had a specifically ringfenced donation or business requirement which meant you asked if we could make a special arrangement for your organisation.

If that happened, it will have been done on the basis of the old invoicing model, but we won’t let you lose out: please get in touch and we’ll work out how much extra coverage any pre-payment might entitle you to under the new pricing model and work out the best solution for you based on that.

We’d love to! (Or at least it’s second-best to finding a way to get our prices lower still!)

In reality, we can’t predict exactly what will happen – while everyone here’s a volunteer giving our time for free to support the goal of enabling volunteering, we do still have some costs (mainly the servers that power Three Rings!): if we face rising costs of our own that we can’t absorb without increasing our prices, we’ll probably need to respond accordingly.

Equally, if prices drop or even more organisations join us, and our modelling shows we can deliver even better value, we’ll be sure to pass those savings on.

Almost certainly! This page and the FAQs are written with the assumption that the people most-likely to be reading them are already volunteering with organisations that do use Three Rings, but if you’re reading this and instead thinking “Wow, this is a rota management system that really does put voluntary organisations first!” then you wouldn’t be the first to be pleasantly surprised!

We’ve always believed that all of the organisations who use Three Rings have better things to spend their money on than the software that streamlines their administration (even if that software is as great as Three Rings is), so the lower pricing model we’re talking about here isn’t just for existing customers, it’s for all our customers. That could be you too!

We should note, we only work with charities, non-profits, community groups, and so on – we’re all volunteers ourselves, and we don’t want to give our time and skills to fill up someone else’s bank account: if you’re running the kind of voluntary organisation that’s ultimately out to make shareholders a pile of money rather than to give back to a community, then we’re afraid Three Rings isn’t for you. But otherwise, please get in touch!