If you coordinate a small sports club, your actual job on a Tuesday night looks like this: the field changed for Saturday, you need eleven parents to know it, you need to know who's actually coming, and at least three families will never install the app you asked them to install in August. The tools built for this job have quietly become part of the problem, and the way they charge is why.
TeamSnap is the name everyone knows, and its pricing model is the thing its own users complain about most: it charges per team, not per club. A paid team plan runs roughly $70 to $150 a year in 2026, and a small club isn't one team. It's four or six small ones, each needing its own subscription, coordinated by the same two volunteers. Knowing who's coming to the game (availability tracking) is locked behind the paid tiers, the free tier carries ads and a roster cap, and the review sites carry a steady stream of auto-renewal complaints. The club-level product is quote-only enterprise sales. SportsEngine, the other big name, is genuinely built for large organizations: it starts near $1,000 a year plus per-registration fees, and it changed owners again in May 2026. Neither is priced or shaped for a volunteer running a village club.
Then there are the free apps, and they deserve an honest accounting, because free tools are how most small clubs cope. Free always has a mechanism. For most of them it's ads in the app your parents use. For the others it's a cut of your club's money: around 2.5% plus a fixed fee on every membership payment and every fundraiser that moves through the platform. That can be a completely fair trade. But it means the product is built around the thing that pays: the app with the ad inventory, or the payment flow with the margin.
Spond deserves a specific fair mention: it's free, ad-free, very good, and huge in Europe. If Spond works for your club, use Spond. This page isn't going to pretend otherwise. Its model is the payments cut, and its world is the app: there is an email fallback for members who won't install it, but it's a fallback, documented in a help article, not the way the product wants to be used. Every tool in this market, including the good ones, leads with its app, and every club has parents who will not install it. That gap is where seasons quietly fall apart.
PlainTeam is being built links-first, as a design decision rather than a fallback. Parents get an email or a text with a link. The link opens the schedule, the change, or the "can you make it Saturday?" question, and they answer it right there. No account, no password, no install, no app badge nagging anyone. The coordinator gets the one thing they actually need, who has seen it and who's coming, without policing anyone's phone. No ads, because parents aren't the product. No cut of club money, because we don't touch club money; your fees stay in your bank and your existing payment habits. The business model is one flat price: €149 per year for the whole club, unlimited teams, unlimited parents. For comparison: a three-team club on TeamSnap's paid plans pays somewhere between €190 and €400 a year at 2026 prices.
Where this stands, plainly: PlainTeam is not released. This page exists to find out whether enough club coordinators want it to justify building it, which is why there's a waitlist instead of a signup, and why the price is already on the page. €149 flat is the launch price we're testing, not a teaser. Joining the waitlist sends you one confirmation email with a couple of short questions: what you use today, what it costs you, what still doesn't work. You can answer by simply replying to that email. Those answers decide what gets built first, and whether it gets built at all. If the answer from real clubs is "Spond is enough," that's a result too, and we'll say so.
Season start is when coordination pain peaks, and it's why this page is up now rather than in winter. If you're mid-season and drowning in "wait, where is the game?" messages, that's precisely the experience we want to hear about.