Why We Built GoodTally: Volunteer Management Shouldn't Cost $500/Month

If you run a small nonprofit, you've probably been here: you type "volunteer management software" into Google, click the top result, and the first price you see is $299 per month. You close the tab. You go back to your spreadsheet.

That spreadsheet grows. People get missed. Hours don't get tracked. Someone forgets who's on the food pantry committee this month. The annual report is a scramble.

We built GoodTally because that gap — between "a spreadsheet" and "enterprise software priced for the Red Cross" — is where most nonprofits actually live, and nobody was serving them.

The problem with existing tools

The volunteer management software market has two flavors:

• Cheap but shallow. Tools like SignUpGenius are great for "sign up to bring cookies on Saturday," but they aren't built to be the system of record for your volunteer program. They don't track hours well. They don't handle committees. They nickel-and-dime you with upsells.
• Powerful but expensive. Tools like VolunteerHub, Volgistics, and the enterprise CRMs charge hundreds per month and take weeks to set up. They're wonderful — if you have 500+ volunteers and a dedicated admin. If you have 30 volunteers and a harried executive director who also runs the board meetings, they're overkill.

There's a huge, underserved middle: nonprofits with 5 to 100 volunteers who deserve real software but can't justify $5,000 a year for it.

What we wanted instead

We wanted a tool that:

• You can set up in five minutes, not five days
• Costs what a small nonprofit can actually afford — not $500/month
• Tracks what matters: volunteers, hours, events, committees
• Doesn't try to sell you a CRM, a donor database, and a grant writing assistant when all you wanted was to log hours
• Is honest about what it does and what it doesn't

So we built it. GoodTally is free forever for up to 10 volunteers, $99/year for up to 50, and $199/year for unlimited. No monthly billing surprises. No "contact us for pricing." No feature held hostage behind an Enterprise tier that requires a sales call.

What's next

We're launching with the essentials: volunteer profiles, hours tracking, events, committees, roles, CSV exports, audit logs, team member invites. Coming soon: volunteer self-service signups, automated email reminders, calendar sync, and milestone/recognition tools.

We're going to build the rest of it in public, with input from the nonprofits actually using it. That's the point of the feedback board — vote on what you want, and we'll build it.

If you're tired of your spreadsheet, give GoodTally a try. We think you'll like not paying $500 a month.