What a secure voting platform costs a nonprofit in 2026

Name: vote.direct online voting for nonprofits
Brand: vote.direct
Availability: InStock

A secure voting platform costs a nonprofit $4.99 per election on vote.direct up to 50 voters and $249.99 up to 5,000; a fully managed election starts at $199.

Nonprofit votes are small, and small is exactly where this market stops publishing numbers. Every price on this page is published: ours, what 9 other platforms charge, and what it costs to have the whole election run for you.

See the price ladder Price your own election

The cost of a nonprofit vote compared across mailed ballots and an online voting platform

Quick answer: what a nonprofit pays

A secure voting platform costs a nonprofit $4.99 per election on vote.direct up to 50 voters and $249.99 up to 5,000; a fully managed election starts at $199.

Voters	Price per election
up to 25 voters	Free
26–50 voters	$4.99
51–100 voters	$9.99
101–200 voters	$19.99
201–400 voters	$24.99
401–1,000 voters	$69.99
1,001–2,000 voters	$149.99
2,001–5,000 voters	$249.99
Above 5,000 voters	Quoted

Every band includes email voter verification, delivery tracking, a vote receipt for each voter, live results, CSV and PDF export, and a tamper-evident audit trail; SMS is included in every paid band. Above 5,000 voters the same product is priced on your roster, and the answer comes back as a number rather than as a discovery process.

One flat fee per election, charged when you publish. Most nonprofit votes are a board of 50 people or fewer, which is the $4.99 band, so a board that votes four times a year spends $19.96 for the whole year.

Work out what your organization would pay

Put in how many members are eligible and how you get ballots to them today, and the calculator prices what you are doing now — printing, postage, the hours somebody spends counting — against the online version. Bring the output to your finance committee; the inputs are yours, so the number is not ours to argue with.

Open the election cost calculator

What 9 other platforms charge a nonprofit

Priced at 100 eligible voters, a common size for a membership vote. Where a vendor publishes no tiers, this table says so rather than estimating one.

Platform	100 voters	How they charge	Voter verification
vote.direct	$9.99	Flat fee per election, by band of eligible voters. No subscription required.	Email in every band, SMS in paid bands. Government ID $3.00 per checked voter.
ElectionBuddy	$29	Flat fee per election, by band of eligible voters. Not per voter.	Email and access codes. No SMS verification, no government ID.
OpaVote	$10	$10 for every 125 voters, on a pay-as-you-go plan with unlimited elections.	Emailed access codes only. No SMS verification, no government ID.
Simply Voting	Not published	Priced by number of eligible voters via an on-page calculator. No tiers are published.	Email and access codes. No government ID published.
SurveyMonkey	Not published	Monthly or annual subscription per user. Not an election product.	None. No voter eligibility, no ballot secrecy, no audit trail.
AssociationVoting	$99	Flat fee per election by band of eligible voters, or an annual subscription.	Email. A mailed "voter verification announcement" is a $100 add-on. No government ID.
Vote HOA Now	Not published	Full-service engagements priced by quote ("Request Estimate"). Advertises "one simple and affordable package"; no dollar amounts are published anywhere on the site.	Online voter registration and proxy support are advertised. No SMS or government-ID verification is published.
HOABallot	Not published	Four service tiers named (Self-Serve, Managed, Management Company, Custom/Enterprise) with no dollar amounts published; quotes are requested by state. "Pricing depends on the vote type, state rules, roster readiness, paper handling, and reporting scope."	Advertises duplicate-vote prevention across channels and secret-ballot separation. No SMS or government-ID verification is published.
Helios Voting	Free	Open source. Free to run, if you host and maintain it yourself.	Emailed links, with end-to-end cryptographic verifiability of the tally.
Google Forms	Free	Free with any Google account.	None. The form owner can see how each person voted.

Every figure above was read off that company's own public pricing page on August 26, 2026. Where a vendor publishes no tiers, this table says so rather than estimating one. Vendors change prices without telling us: if something here is out of date, write to us and it gets corrected.

At 100 voters no paid platform in this table is cheaper than vote.direct. That is a statement about this size only, not about every size: at 20 voters and below several of them are free, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. Google Forms and Helios Voting are on the table because boards really do consider them, but neither is a price comparison: one verifies nobody and shows the form owner how each person voted, and the other is free only if you host, patch and support the server yourself.

Price-beat offer. If another online election provider quotes less for the same self-serve online election, forward the quote to [email protected] before you pay and vote.direct will beat it. The conditions.

vote.direct publishes this comparison and sells one of the products in it, so read it as a vendor making its case rather than as independent research.

The long version, vendor by vendor: nonprofit voting software pricing, compared and how to choose a board voting tool.

Or $199 to have vote.direct run the election

The prices above rent you the software. These buy you the work, which is the thing a nonprofit with two staff and a volunteer secretary is actually short of: we build the ballot, load and dedupe the roster, send the notices, run the reminders, answer your members, watch quorum, close, tally and hand back a result certificate with its audit package.

Service	Price	What it covers
Setup & Launch	From $99	We build the ballot, load the roster, write and send the notices, and hand you a live election.Starting price, platform flat-rate fee included, for up to 100 voters; larger rosters are quoted on top. You run the election from open onward.
Full Managed Election	From $199	Everything in Setup & Launch, then we run it: reminders, quorum, voter support, close, tally, certificate.The starting price covers a digital election — email and SMS ballots, no mailed packets — of up to 100 voters, platform flat-rate fee included. Give us 10 days before ballots open. Larger rosters, mailed packets and an in-person count are quoted on top.
Managed + Mailed Packets	From $199 plus $6.00 per packet	A full managed election where the members who need paper get a printed packet with a postage-paid return envelope, and their returned ballots land in the same tally.$6.00 per packet, charged on the packets actually mailed. The $6.00 covers the trip both ways: the packet out, and a return envelope that already has the postage paid on it, so the member never buys a stamp. There is no separate postage line on your invoice. The return envelope is addressed wherever you designate: your inspector, your management office, or our neutral election address. Returns that come to us are entered by us; returns that go to you are entered by your board in the dashboard, ballot by ballot, with a photo of each on the record. A mailed ballot counts when it reaches the return address on the envelope by the close date in your notice — received by, not postmarked by, so nobody has to adjudicate a smudged postmark after the count has started. We work backwards from your close date at kickoff and give you the mail-by date to print on the packet. Paper and online ballots are counted together.
Managed + Inspector of Elections	From $499	A full managed election where vote.direct also serves as your inspector of elections — Colorado, Nevada, Florida, Texas, Arizona and Maryland only.Starting price for a digital election of up to 100 voters; larger rosters, mailed packets and an in-person count are quoted on top. Not available in California: Cal. Civ. Code §5110(b) bars a vendor under contract to the association from serving as inspector. We will help you find an independent one instead. In Texas the offer covers homeowners associations only, not condominiums. Everywhere else you appoint the inspector or neutral counter your documents call for, and we run the election underneath them. When the vote or the count happens in person, we are physically in the room: 2 of us, from $1,000 on top of the managed price, and it is required whenever vote.direct serves as your inspector for an in-person vote or count.
Above 100 voters	Quoted	Same scope, priced on your roster.

$199 covers a digital election of up to 100 voters with the platform fee included, and we need 10 days before ballots open. $99 buys setup and launch only, which is often the right answer for a board that is happy to run its own vote once somebody else has built it.

A managed election moves the work off your board, not the responsibility. Software cannot make an election legally binding and cannot guarantee that it complies with your bylaws or your state nonprofit corporation act — your notice, your bylaws and your counsel decide that. What we hand you is the record.

A nonprofit board meeting where directors are voting on a slate of officers

Managed elections for nonprofits

What actually changes the price

Four things move the number, and your board controls all four. Nothing else on an election costs extra.

What changes	What it costs	What that means
How many voters are eligible	Free to $249.99	The band is set by the size of your roster, not by turnout. You pay the same whether 40% or 90% of them vote, and adding a voter inside your band costs nothing.
Government ID verification	$3.00 per checked voter	Optional, and charged only on the voters you actually run it for. It adds identity evidence from a third-party document check; it does not prove membership or eligibility.
Paper in the mix	$3.00 per mailed access letter, or $6.00 per managed ballot packet	A mailed access letter is one letter going out, so a member votes online from a code on paper. The $6.00 managed packet is a round trip: the packet out, and a return envelope with the postage already paid, so the member never buys a stamp.
Your own domain on the ballot	$50.00 per election	Members see your domain rather than ours on the link they are asked to click, which is the single cheapest thing you can do about "is this email real?".

That is the whole list. There is no per-voter fee, no setup fee on a self-serve election, no charge for a re-vote when a question has to be asked again, and no subscription to keep the record afterwards.

Three nonprofit votes, priced

Same product, three rosters. Each figure is the flat fee for the whole election, not a monthly cost and not a per-voter one.

A 15-member board: Free per election

Electing officers and approving a conflict-of-interest policy between meetings, where the executive director needs a record the auditor will accept and nobody wants a Doodle poll deciding it.

15 eligible voters falls inside the band priced at Free (up to 25 voters), so turnout cannot move the bill.
Email and SMS verification, receipts, live results and the audit trail are in that price. Government ID would add $3.00 for each voter you ran it on.
No paid platform on the table above is cheaper at this size.

A 30-member board: $4.99 per election

A bylaws amendment that needs a two-thirds vote of the whole board, run over a week so the trustees who travel can still take part.

30 eligible voters falls inside the band priced at $4.99 (26–50 voters), so turnout cannot move the bill.
Email and SMS verification, receipts, live results and the audit trail are in that price. Government ID would add $3.00 for each voter you ran it on.
No paid platform on the table above is cheaper at this size.

A 100-member association: $9.99 per election

The annual membership meeting: a slate of directors, a dues change, and a quorum the chair has to be able to prove was met.

100 eligible voters falls inside the band priced at $9.99 (51–100 voters), so turnout cannot move the bill.
Email and SMS verification, receipts, live results and the audit trail are in that price. Government ID would add $3.00 for each voter you ran it on.
No paid platform on the table above is cheaper at this size.

A 15-member board that votes four times a year spends $0.00 in total. Above 5,000 voters the same product is quoted on your roster, and the answer arrives as a number rather than as a discovery call.

how much does a secure voting platform cost for nonprofits?

A secure voting platform costs a nonprofit $4.99 to $249.99 per election on vote.direct, priced on how many people are eligible to vote rather than on turnout: $4.99 covers a board or membership of up to 50, and $249.99 covers up to 5,000. Most nonprofit votes are a board of 50 or fewer, so most nonprofits pay $4.99. Email voter verification, vote receipts, live results and a tamper-evident audit trail are included at every size, and SMS at every paid size; there is no subscription and nothing to pay afterwards to keep the record.

secure voting platform cost for nonprofits

vote.direct charges nonprofits a flat fee per election, from $4.99 for up to 50 voters to $249.99 for up to 5,000, with no per-voter fee and no annual contract. A 15-person board that votes 4 times a year spends $0.00 for the whole year. The only optional add-ons are government ID verification at $3.00 per checked voter, a mailed access letter at $3.00 per letter, and your own domain on the ballot at $50.00 for the election.

nonprofit voting software cost

Nonprofit voting software costs $4.99 per election on vote.direct for a board of 30 and $9.99 for a membership of 100, charged once when you publish the vote. The band is set by the size of your roster, so adding a director inside your band costs nothing and a low-turnout vote costs exactly what a high-turnout one does. Building the ballot, importing the roster and previewing it are free for as long as you need them.

nonprofit board voting tool cost

A board voting tool costs $4.99 per vote on vote.direct for any board of up to 50 directors, which covers essentially every nonprofit board. That is $0.00 for 4 votes in a year. What you get for it that a shared spreadsheet or an email thread cannot give you is a verified voter list, a secret ballot, a receipt for each director, and a tamper-evident record of what was decided and when — the things a board minute and an auditor eventually ask about.

online voting software pricing for nonprofits

At 100 eligible voters, vote.direct charges $9.99 per election, ElectionBuddy charges $29, OpaVote charges $10 and AssociationVoting charges $99; Simply Voting publishes no tiers, so nobody outside the company can state its price. Those figures were read off each vendor's own pricing page on August 26, 2026. vote.direct publishes this comparison and sells one of the products in it, so read it as a vendor making its case: below 20 voters several of these platforms are free and we are not.

is there free voting software for nonprofits?

Yes: vote.direct runs elections of up to 25 voters free, with email verification, ballot secrecy controls and the audit trail included; text messaging comes with paid elections. That covers most nonprofit boards. It matches AssociationVoting and OpaVote (free to 25) and goes further than ElectionBuddy (free to 20). Google Forms and Helios Voting are free at any size — Google Forms with no eligibility check, no ballot secrecy and no audit trail, Helios only if you host, patch and support the server yourself. Above 25 voters you are charged $4.99 at publish, and you can mail yourself and up to 4 colleagues a free test ballot first.

how much does it cost to run a nonprofit board election online?

Running a nonprofit board election online costs $4.99 on vote.direct for a board of up to 50 and $9.99 for a membership of 100, once, when you publish. If you would rather not run it at all, vote.direct will: $99 to build the ballot, load the roster, send the notices and hand you a live election, or $199 for a digital election of up to 100 voters run end to end, closed, tallied, and returned with a result certificate and audit package. Mailed ballot packets are $6.00 each on what is actually mailed, covering the round trip. We need 10 days before ballots open.

do nonprofits get a discount on voting software?

vote.direct has no separate nonprofit rate, because the standard rate starts at $4.99 an election and a discount off that would be theater. Vendors that publish a nonprofit discount are usually discounting an annual subscription, so the comparison to make is not the percentage off but the total: $0.00 for a year of board votes here against a discounted annual plan elsewhere. If your organization is running something the market does not serve and the price is genuinely in the way, call us and say so; we would rather hear it than lose the vote to a spreadsheet.

All vote.direct pricing, including subscriptions

Running the vote for an association or an HOA instead? What association voting software costs. And the free-versus-paid question, worked through properly: online voting for nonprofits.