Our Pricing Philosophy
Ever since we invented Three Rings in 2002, our primary goal has been ensuring that every charitable organisation that could benefit from Three Rings can do so, without breaking the bank – in fact if you read our history, you’ll see that Three Rings was invented precisely because an early commercial rival wanted to charge more than the entire annual budget of Aberystwyth Nightline – so we’ve always fought to keep the costs down.
We do this in multiple ways:
First, we build Three Rings on a highly-scalable platform around a core of trusted and secure open-source technologies to ensure that there are no nasty hidden license fees.
Second, we’ve always run entirely on volunteer effort, with a team drawn primarily from the organisations we support: people who already know exactly how important your organisation’s work is.
And third, we use a tiered pricing structure so that larger organisations, with larger budgets and more income, pay a different rate to a small charity with only a dozen volunteers and a single donations tin: long experience has taught us that this is the fairest way to ensure that every organisation can get the fairest deal from their Three Rings Subscription.
What Your Subscription Covers (spoilers: it’s everything)
Whatever the size of your organisation, whichever pricing tier you’re in, your subscription to Three Rings covers everything. You get one invoice every 12 months, and paying that covers you, for everything, for the next year.
There are no hidden costs, no “optional” extras you have to pay for to be able to unlock key features, and no extra fees for upgrades or technical support: you pay what the pricing plan says you’ll pay, based on your organisation size, and that gives you everything Three Rings has to offer.
(Except for SMS credits, unfortunately! Legally, we cannot sell you credits for the SMS system that’s built into Three Rings‘s Comms functionality, or include them in the cost of your subscription – they have to be purchased through one of our supported licensed providers. Or, of course, just don’t use SMS at all – lots of our organisations don’t and Comms will work absolutely fine with just emails!
(It’s just that back in 2002, when we first built the Comms system, getting an SMS on your phone was easy and getting an email was pretty much impossible, so our users asked us to provide an SMS option!).
The Three Rings 1% Policy:
At the heart of Three Rings, and the reason we volunteer, is our belief that no charity or voluntary organisation should be “priced out” of access to high-quality software and systems like ours. To make sure that’s the case, we don’t just provide a full free calendar month’s access to Three Rings to enable you to judge whether our system is right for you (although we do!), and we don’t just offer a free “Band Zero” to help support the smallest organisations, or those in their very first year of operation (although we do that as well!) – we also have a 1% Pricing Policy, which acts as a cap on the cost of Three Rings:
No organisation will have to pay more than 1% of their annual income to cover the cost of their annual Three Rings subscription.
So, for example, if an organisation adopts Three Rings in the summer of 2025, and their annual income is £12,500 (which would put them in our Band One, paying £145+VAT), we’ll cap their invoice for the year at £125+VAT – that is, at 1% of their annual income.
Our Prices for 2025 / 6
As we said above, we charge slightly different rates based on each organisation’s annual income. We’ve learned over the years that this is the best way for us to ensure all charities and voluntary organisations using Three Rings can get a fair deal – after all, what might look like pocket change to a major national charity running it’s annual fundraising drive across multiple media channels could still seem like an impossible ask for a tiny little helpline whose volunteers go out to shake buckets at the supermarket once a month.
We always aim to announce any changes to our pricing well in advance – we want to make sure the hardworking volunteers who’ve put themselves forward (or, quite possibly, been put forward!) for Treasurer roles have notice before we change anything!) So, at the end of 2024, we announced that we’re not just changing our prices (down for nearly everyone!), we’re also working to simplify our pricing structure. We explain more about why here, on our Pricing 25 page.
The following prices apply from the 1st of April 2025:
| Band | Organisation Income | Number of Volunteers | Annual Subscription (Exl. VAT) | Annual Subscription (Inc. VAT) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zero1 | < £6,500pa or <85,000pa | Any or (< 20) | FREE | FREE |
| One | < £85,000 | Any | £145 | £174 |
| Two | > £85,000 | Any | £225 | £270 |
| Specific Charge for Dedicated Beta Servers2 | Priced according to organisational needs on request |
1 Band Zero – our free tier to support new and small organisations!
Note that for the very smallest charities, Three Rings is absolutely free – we started out specifically to support tiny charities that couldn’t afford more expensive software at the kind of unreasonable commercial rates multinational firms asked for, and we haven’t forgotten our roots! – so any organisation that is very small (either in terms of their annual income, or just very small in the number of volunteers they have) is eligible for our special “Band Zero” rate.
To be eligible for Band Zero, your organisation needs to either:
- Have an annual income below £6,500, irrespective of how many volunteers you have, or
- Have an annual income below £85,000, and fewer than 20 volunteers, or
- Be in the first 12 months of operation (i.e., have been created within the last 12 months, irrespective of when you join Three Rings)
2 Additional Charges for Dedicated Beta Servers
Some of our organisations run such large, complex charities that they need to maintain not just a Three Rings instance, but also an entirely separate test server where they can test out new ways to manage their volunteers and their integrations of Three Rings with other systems.
It’s absolutely not necessary for most organisations, but for those of our customers who find it really useful to have a dedicated Beta server, we’re happy to provide – but it does mean that we add we add an extra charge to cover the cost of that additional server to their subscription: if we didn’t, it would mean every organisation was paying a bit towards maintaining a server they didn’t need and couldn’t use, which seems a bit unfair!