"I built Sembr on three pillars: price, ease-of-use, and transparency. Most membership platforms fail at least one of these. Sembr's job is to ensure the price stays honest, the experience stays seamless, and your data stays yours. Anything less is a disservice to your members."
Rob Kingsbury, Sembr Founder
Price
Membership software is overpriced. The industry has trained organizations to expect $6,000-$15,000 per year for what should be a $1,500-$3,000 product. Per-contact surcharges, captive payment processors, multi-year contracts, and price increases on renewal compound the problem.
Sembr's pricing is flat, public, and honest. Essential is $129 USD/month annual. Growth is $249 USD/month annual. No per-member fees. No platform fee on Stripe transactions. No multi-year lock-in. The price you sign up at is the price you renew at, indexed only to inflation. Every dollar in the price covers an actual cost we incur. The why-these-numbers page shows the cost basis.
If we can charge less and still operate sustainably, we will.
Ease-of-use
Software should feel like an assistant, not an obstacle. Most membership platforms feel like an obstacle. They were designed in 2008, bolted onto for fifteen years, and never re-thought from the ground up. Their members complain. Their staff complains. Boards keep paying because switching feels like a bigger problem than staying.
Sembr is designed for a real person doing a real job. Onboarding takes minutes, not weeks. The member portal works on a phone. The dashboard surfaces what needs attention, not every database table. The smart-drafting assistant works from real member history, not generic templates. Stripe Connect onboarding stays inside Sembr. Your tenants never bounce out to a Stripe-branded form mid-setup.
Ease-of-use is not a marketing claim. It is the constraint every feature decision is measured against.
Transparency
The membership software industry runs on opacity. Quotes are gated behind sales calls. Pricing is "contact us." Contracts are 10 pages of legalese. Data export costs extra. Cancellation is a phone call to a retention specialist.
Sembr does the opposite. Pricing is on the homepage. The cost basis is published on why-these-numbers. Data export is one click, in JSON, CSV, or SQL, at any time, free. Cancellation is a button in the dashboard. The roadmap is public. When we make a decision, we publish the rationale.
You should never have to chase information about a tool you depend on.
Who we are
Sembr is built by Rob Kingsbury through Kingsbury Creative, a Canadian software company. Independent. Not VC-funded. Not PE-owned. The roadmap is set by customers, not investors.
The team and the company are in Canada. Sembr is CASL-compliant and GDPR/PIPEDA-shaped from day one. Pricing is in USD for FX simplicity. The jurisdiction is Canadian; the billing currency is decoupled.
The plan is to stay independent. If that ever changes, organizations will have full data export on their timeline, the same as today. The lock-in mechanism does not exist anywhere in the architecture.