Standard platform — what's already included
The standard platform covers what the majority of UK and Ireland sailing and yacht clubs actually need. Most clubs that ask about custom work decide, once we walk through the standard package, that they do not need any of it. Out of the box every club gets:
- A fully branded public website — events, news, race results, gallery, training, dining, join-us form — built around your club rather than dropped onto a template.
- The members portal with noticeboard, forum, crew finder, document library, duty roster, invoices, and member directory.
- The admin console with role-based permissions for committee, treasurer, membership secretary, sailing secretary, and other roles your club uses.
- Membership management with unlimited categories, automated renewals, joining fees, and GDPR-compliant data export.
- Event management with online entry, NoR and SI uploads, and capacity controls.
- Race results with Sailwave file upload and HalSail integration.
- Invoicing and payments via Stripe Connect, with card, Klarna, and Stripe Link.
- Communications via AWS SES from your own branded domain, with delivery tracking.
- An online shop ledger for bar, chandlery, kit, and any other transactional revenue.
The monthly subscription covers hosting, support and website editing. If your club fits the standard package — and most do — there is no custom work to scope. The features page walks through each module in detail.
When you need custom work
A minority of clubs have requirements the standard platform does not cover. These usually fall into one of four categories, and we handle them through fixed-scope bespoke engagements rather than quiet feature creep on the main product.
Multi-club organisations. Sailing associations, training centre groups, and clubs with separate dinghy and keelboat divisions sometimes need a unified parent organisation with distinct child clubs underneath — shared member records, separate finances, separate event calendars, but a single login. We scope multi-site setups individually because the governance structure varies so much between organisations.
Bespoke integrations. Clubs migrating from a long-standing custom membership database, a legacy accounting tool that has to stay (Sage, Xero with bespoke workflows, an older on-premise system), or a specific sailing system that the standard Sailwave and HalSail integrations do not cover, can have the integration built as part of the engagement.
Custom dashboards. Some clubs — particularly those with charity status, grant reporting obligations, or larger boards — need reporting views that aggregate data in club-specific ways. We build these on top of the standard data model rather than as parallel spreadsheets.
Accessibility audits. Clubs operating training centres or working with public funding sometimes need a formal WCAG 2.1 audit and remediation. We carry this out against the live site with a documented report.
The process
Custom engagements follow a fixed four-stage process. We do not work on open-ended time-and-materials contracts, because that is not the right commercial model for a volunteer-run club making decisions at quarterly committee meetings.
Stage one: 30-minute scoping call. We walk through what you need, what the standard platform already covers, and where the bespoke work actually starts. About half the calls end with the conclusion that the standard platform fits and no custom work is needed, which is the honest answer and the one we lead with.
Stage two: fixed quote within five working days. If there is genuine custom scope, we send a written quote with a fixed price, a delivery timeline, and a clear definition of what is and is not in scope. The quote stays the quote — there are no change-order surprises later unless the committee explicitly adds new scope.
Stage three: build and deploy. We build against the agreed scope, deploy to a staging environment for the committee to review, iterate on feedback, and push to production on a date the committee chooses. Timeline is usually four to ten weeks depending on scope.
Stage four: ongoing maintenance. Once live, the custom work is maintained as part of the standard monthly subscription — no separate support contract for the bespoke pieces.
The kind of scope clubs ask about
Examples of the requirements that come up in discovery calls and have us reaching for the custom-engagement quote rather than pointing at a standard feature.
Live tracking overlays for offshore racing. Sailwave handles the scoring, but some clubs want a tracking display showing live boat positions during their annual offshore series alongside the standings. The overlay would ingest position data from the club's existing tracker provider and render on the public race page so spectators could follow the race without leaving the club's site.
CRM-style member analytics. A larger club with a longstanding engagement strategy might want a dashboard showing membership tenure, race-day participation, training-course attendance, and bar spend rolled together per member — so the membership secretary can spot quiet members before they lapse. Built on top of the standard data model, inside the GDPR-compliant boundary, rather than exported to a third-party tool.
Shared rosters across fleets. A combined dinghy and keelboat club might want unified duty rosters across both fleets — one committee, one rota, shared safety crew — but separate fleet views for race entries and results, so dinghy sailors do not see keelboat fixtures and vice versa. An extension of the standard fleet model that fits a specific organisational structure.
These are illustrative — the exact requirements vary club by club. If anything in this list sounds like the conversation you are about to have, the scoping call is the right place to start.