You might have seen that our prices changed in April 2025, along with our whole pricing structure.
If you haven’t seen that, then some frequently asked questions about the changes are available here, and of course you can always find our latest prices on our Pricing page.
But, at the same time, it’s been a long time since the last major change to our pricing structure in 2014, so we thought it might be worth a brief blog post to revisit the ways in which we make sure we’re always offering the best value that we can.
A little bit of history
Our core goal at Three Rings has always been to ensure every voluntary and charitable organisation that would benefit from having access to high-quality online volunteer management tools can do so, and do so at the lowest price possible – but more than that we’ve always wanted to make sure that every organisation has the best rota and volunteer management for them whether or not that system is Three Rings!
(Sometimes, this confuses people – it’s certainly not how most companies work! – but when you remember that everyone involved in creating, maintaining, and running Three Rings does as a volunteer, it’s pretty simple. We’ve built Three Rings to be an incredibly scalable system, so we don’t need to chase growth or worry about saturation, market penetration, or hounding people with adverts until they decide to give us a go: all we care about is that a voluntary organisation has the right volunteer and rota management tools for their needs.)
But for any organisation that uses Three Rings our core goal is to make sure they’re getting high-quality and low-cost volunteer management tools, so we review our prices to make sure that they’re still fair – we’re a not-for-profit company, we’re run entirely by volunteers, and we started way back in 2002 in response to the organisation our founders volunteered for at that time being asked to pay more than their entire annual budget just for a rota management system.
Our last major review of our pricing structure took place in 2014, and we’ve grown significantly as an organisation since then, supporting a wider and wider range of organisations. Because of that, we dedicated most of 2024 to reviewing our pricing model, experimenting with different alternatives, possibilities, and cost projection exercises, and what we discovered was pretty simple.
First, it was clear that our prices could be brought down – sometimes significantly – and second it was equally obvious that our pricing structure needed to be made a lot simpler, both so our users can understand it more clearly, and also to help save our own volunteers time working out who goes in which pricing band!
So why are we changing the structure?
What we’ve found over the years, is that using a tiered pricing system – charging organisations with higher income, and more money, a higher rate than organisations with a lower income and less money, is the best way to keep the prices fair for everyone. In fact, this was the driving goal behind that 2014 pricing restucture: making our prices fairer. However, over the past ten years, as we’ve begun supporting more and more organisations, and more and more diverse organisations, that decade-old pricing structure has got to be pretty complicated!!
Back in 2007, our pricing structure looked like this:
| Organisation Type | Band |
|---|---|
| Nightlines affiliated with the Nightline Association | N |
| Samaritans Branches (or anyone else) | S |
…but Three Rings kept growing, attracting a wider and wider range of organisations using and benefitting from the system, and that meant our pricing system had to be expanded to try and maintain the balance of fairness for all those organisations. So, after the 2014 review, our 2015 pricing structure looked like this:
| Organisation Income | Number of Volunteers | Band |
|---|---|---|
| < £50,000 | Up to 20 | A |
| < £50,000 | 21 – 60 | B |
| < £50,000 | 61 – 140 | C |
| < £50,000 | 141+ | D |
| > £50,000, <£200,000 | Any | E |
| > £200,000, <£400,000 | Any | F |
| > £400,000 | Any | G |
…and still Three Rings kept on growing. Particularly as the volunteering landscape evolved across the late 2010s and early 2020s we’ve found the range of organisations we support, and the economic models they operate on have become much more varied. While there was often some variation between the annual income of Samaritans branches, that variation is nothing compared to the range of models that we have to factor in now we’re also supporting foodbanks, volunteer-run libraries, blood bikes, community shops and theatres and museums!
As we tried our best to adapt what began as a very simple and clear pricing structure to fairly match the needs of an increasingly complicated and diverse range of users, the structure itself got messier, until by 2024 the once clear and transparent pricing model we’d devised a decade before looked like this:
| Organisation Income | Number of Volunteers | Band |
|---|---|---|
| < £6,500 | Any | 0 |
| < £55,000 | Up to 20 | A |
| < £55,000 | 21 – 60 | B |
| < £55,000 | 61 – 140 | C |
| < £55,000 | Over 140 | D |
| < £85,000 | Any | E |
| > £85,000, < £200,000 | Any | F |
| > £200,000, < £400,000 | Any | G |
| > £400,000 < £1,000,000 | Any | H |
| > £1,000,000 | Any | J |
Really, at that point it seemed pretty obvious we needed to plan for a fundamental reset.
While you can see how we’ve tried to respond to the ever-increasing diversity of organisations relying on Three Rings by adding new layers and conditions to the pricing structure, it’s probably also pretty obvious that after 17 years of steady evolution and tweaks, the pricing structure had become a bit of a mess. Even though the reason it got so messy was to try and ensure the best deal for absolutely everyone, the end result was something that often seemed confusing and arbitrary – and in particular an organisation that suddenly got an influx of volunteers could suddenly jump up several bands, which sometimes left people feeling they were penalised for having more volunteers (pretty much the opposite of what we want to encourage!)
Simplifying Our Pricing Structure
But, if one of the reasons the old pricing structure became so complicated was because of the sheer breadth of organisations that now use Three Rings, that very growth also gave us an incredible opportunity to make some radical improvements. Together with the fact the system has always been built using extremely scalable, trusted open-source technologies, we could harness that growth to not only make things much simpler, but also to ensure that Three Rings offered even better value.
We’ve wanted to do this for some time (in addition to doing a lot of modelling during 2024, we’ve been working on pricing policies and improvements for some years, although parts of our ambition had tobe pushed back until after the 2022/3 energy crisis had settled down a bit!). After all that modelling and planning, though, we’ve come up with a new pricing structure that meets the key tests we set ourselves for evaluating whether the new model is fair enough to meet our standards:
First – it’s much simpler than the old pricing model, with fewer bands
Second – it preserves (and expands!) our Band Zero for very small or very new organisations
Third – it provides us with a strong foundation to keep developing and improving Three Rings as we’ve always done
Fourth – it rewards our users: your growth, passion, and support for Three Rings brought us to this point, so it’s important that our success is reflected back to the users: under the new model organisation using Three Rings either a) benefits from a price freeze, paying no more than they do now, or b) saves money compared to what they paid under the old pricing model
And Fifth – it eliminates the use of volunteer numbers as a factor in pricing1, so that our organisations don’t get hit with a cost increase just because they’ve grown in size.
You can see the full details of the pricing plan (together with any updates if you’re reading this in some future year that isn’t 2025!) on our Pricing Page, but for the purposes of this explainer page, all invoices issued after the new pricing model came into effect on April 1st 2025 and is set at the following rates:
| Band | Organisation Income | Number of Volunteers | Annual Subscription (Exl. VAT) | Annual Subscription (Inc. VAT) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zero | < £6,500pa or <85,000pa | Any or (< 20) | FREE | FREE |
| One | < £85,000 | Any | £145 | £174 |
| Two | > £85,000 | Any | £225 | £270 |
1 The pricing model doesn’t completely eliminate the use of volunteer numbers to calculate prices, of course: an organisation with an annual income under £85,000 and with fewer than 20 volunteers is eligible for Band Zero, but their income moves them up into Band Two if they then expand to have 21 or more volunteers. We’ve done some pretty careful modelling around this and we’re confident this is still the fairest model, because it allows us to expand Band Zero to cover more of our users, including everyone who used to be in Band A.
(Plus, based on the sizes of organisations we currently support and their evolution over time, that there’s very few organisations likely to cross that line on a regular basis!).
In Conclusion
On paper, this is a bit of a pretty big change – but so was our change in 2014! And the driving philosophy is exactly the same: to ensure that the volunteers who give their time and skills to making Three Rings happen are helping you and your voluntary organisation to get the best possible deal for your volunteer and rota management system.
That, at least, isn’t changing, and it hasn’t changed in the last ten years – and neither has it changed in the 23 that Three Rings has been going.
We can’t promise that there won’t be another change to our pricing structure in 2034, and there may even be a change sooner than that – but we are confident that we can promise our focus and philosophy will always be the same: to make sure we’re doing the best we can for all the organisations using Three Rings, and supporting them in making a difference in the world.