Both of these are sign-up sheets, and that decides more of the question than any price does. SignUpGenius and SignUp.com both exist so an organizer can post a page with slots on it and let people claim them — potluck dishes, conference times, carnival stations, a meal train, a Saturday shift at the pantry. Neither one builds a schedule for you, and neither one is a reminder service first. Where they genuinely differ is what they meter, how ad removal is sold, and what happens when the same twenty people cover the same shifts every week.
SignUpGenius is the bigger and more general of the two, and its free plan is the most generous thing in this comparison: unlimited sign up pages, automatic confirmation and reminder emails, 400-plus themes, no expiration and no credit card. The meter is messages and ad removal. Their pricing page, fetched August 18, 2026, lists Silver at $8.99 a month billed annually — $107.89 charged up front — or $11.99 month to month; Gold at $22.49 billed annually ($269.89) or $29.99 monthly; and Platinum at $44.99 billed annually ($539.89) or $59.99 monthly. Text invites and group updates are capped at 150 a month on Silver, 500 on Gold, and 1,500 on Platinum, with none at all on the free plan. Email is metered too: 1,000 messages a month free, 2,500 on Silver, 10,000 on Gold, 20,000 on Platinum.
SignUp.com sells a similar sheet with the packaging inverted. Their premium pricing page lists Starter at $9.99, Plus at $24.99, and Max at $49.99 a month, and all three carry the line "Unlimited Text (SMS) Reminders," footnoted to the US, Canada, and Australia with standard carrier charges applying. That is their claim about their own product and we quote it as theirs — nothing they publish says how it is enforced, so it is a question to put to them in writing before a card goes in. Annual billing is 12 months for the price of 10, which puts Starter at $99.90 a year. Their free tier allows an unlimited number of SignUps, participants, and email notifications, which is a real advantage over SignUpGenius's metered free email.
Where each one hurts
On SignUpGenius, the sore spot is not the price of ad removal, it is the shape of it. Their pricing table's advertising row does not read yes or no. It reads No ads on 1 sign up at Silver and No ads on 10 sign ups at Gold; only Platinum, at $44.99 a month billed annually, clears ads off everything. Their own note on that row explains the mechanic plainly: the number of sign ups you can strip ads from "depends on your subscription level," and "as one sign up ends, you can re-apply the ad removal feature to a different sign up." For one weekly rotation living on one page, Silver's single allowance is honestly enough. For a church running nursery, greeters, and a food pantry shift on three separate pages, $8.99 a month covers one of the three, and the other two keep showing ads to volunteers.
The second sore spot is the text meter, and the number that matters is 150. Forty volunteers reminded twice a week is roughly 320 messages a month, which is past Silver's allowance before the month is half over and inside Gold's 500 with very little room left. One caution on that arithmetic, because we would rather be exact than dramatic: the metered row is labeled "text invites/group updates," and SignUpGenius does not publish whether a participant's own text reminders draw from the same pool. Get that answered before buying on the strength of the number.
Either way, a text only lands if the participant opted in. Their help center's route for reminders is that the volunteer logs into a SignUpGenius account, opens Settings, goes to the Notifications tab, and checks Text reminders, which then apply only "if enabled by the sign up creator." For organizer-sent messages the fallback is quiet rather than loud: "If a participant hasn't opted in to receive texts, the message will be emailed to them instead." Texts are one-way, STOP and HELP language is appended automatically, and a volunteer who replies gets an auto-response that begins "Do not reply."
SignUp.com's sore spot is the second line item. Ad removal is not in any plan — it is an add-on at $9.99 a month on top of whatever tier you are on, which makes the honest price of texts with no ads about $19.98 a month, roughly double the $9.99 headline. Credit where it is due, though, because the add-on is better designed than SignUpGenius's: it applies to every SignUp and group page in the account, strips ads out of email notifications, removes the sponsored offer checkboxes on the participant screen, and can be bought on a free Basic account with no premium plan underneath it. SignUpGenius has no equivalent — there, ads and features are welded together.
Their texting has an opt-in step too, just at a friendlier moment. Participants are offered text reminders as they sign up, and the default reminder goes out two days ahead, adjustable from one to seven days. Anyone already assigned when the feature is switched on has to go into My Info themselves and opt in, which their help center suggests handling with a broadcast message to everyone already on the sheet. And they are the better of the two at repetition: their help center says SignUp.com "supports Organizer-facilitated repeating schedules and participant assignments as recurring shifts," with the caveat that participants signing themselves up must still pick dates one at a time. SignUpGenius's answer to a recurring rotation is duplicating the sign up and editing the dates.
The matrix, and what 40 volunteers costs
Head to head, the two products as they are published today:
| SignUpGenius | SignUp.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Unlimited sign up pages, automatic confirmation and reminder emails, 1,000 email messages a month, 400+ themes; ads shown | Unlimited SignUps, participants, and email notifications; ads shown |
| Paid tiers, month to month | Silver $11.99, Gold $29.99, Platinum $59.99 | Starter $9.99, Plus $24.99, Max $49.99 |
| Paid tiers, billed annually | $8.99 / $22.49 / $44.99 a month ($107.89 / $269.89 / $539.89 a year) | 12 months for the price of 10 — $99.90 a year at Starter |
| Text messages | Metered: 150 / 500 / 1,500 a month by tier; none on free | "Unlimited Text (SMS) Reminders" on every paid tier, US, Canada, and Australia, standard carrier charges apply — their claim |
| Text opt-in | Participant enables text reminders in their own account settings; un-opted-in recipients get the message as email instead | Participant is offered text reminders while signing up; anyone already assigned opts in from My Info |
| Ad removal | Bundled by tier: 1 sign up on Silver, 10 on Gold, everything on Platinum; re-usable as sign ups end | Separate add-on, $9.99 a month, covers every SignUp, group page, and email notification in the account |
| Ad-free without a paid plan | Not available | Available — the add-on can be bought on a free account |
| Recurring weekly shifts | Duplicate the sign up and edit the dates | Repeating spots; an organizer can assign someone a recurring shift |
| Collecting money | 3.95% + $0.95 per card transaction, 1.95% (minimum $1.00) per eCheck | No platform fee; Stripe 2.9% + $0.30 or PayPal 2.99–3.49% + $0.30, from 2.2% + $0.30 for US 501(c)(3)s |
| Extra organizers | 10 administrators on Gold, 20 on Platinum, counted per account | 1 assistant organizer on Starter, 5 on Plus, 15 on Max, counted per SignUp |
Sources: SignUpGenius pricing, SignUp.com premium pricing, SignUp.com ad-free add-on, SignUp.com payments, all fetched August 18, 2026.
Neither product prices by volunteer count, so a roster-size comparison has to be built from what each one actually charges to text forty people every week with no ads in front of them:
| Tool | Monthly cost at 40 volunteers | What that buys |
|---|---|---|
| VolunteerReminder Deluxe | $9 | Up to 60 volunteers; scheduled shift reminders by text and email, two per shift; no ads at any price |
| SignUpGenius Silver | $8.99 billed annually ($107.89 up front), or $11.99 monthly | 150 text invites/updates a month, ads removed from one sign up at a time |
| SignUp.com Starter + ad-free | ~$19.98 | $9.99 plan plus the $9.99 add-on; texts advertised as uncapped in the US, Canada, and Australia |
| SignUpGenius Gold | $22.49 billed annually ($269.89 up front), or $29.99 monthly | 500 text invites/updates a month, ads removed from up to 10 sign ups |
| WhenToHelp | $54 | The 31–60 helper band; a real scheduler with AutoFill, email and text notifications inside the band price, no published per-message rate or cap |
| Deputy Lite | ~$200 (40 × $5) | Employee scheduling, not volunteer software; $30 a month minimum, SMS charged at 1¢ per 160 characters on top |
Three footnotes so that table is not read as more than it is. Our $9 is scheduled shift reminders — two texts per shift for a rotation somebody already built — which is the right comparison for a weekly rotation and the wrong one for mass texting. SignUpGenius appears twice on purpose: Silver is the cheapest row on the table and the one most likely to run out of texts, and Gold is what the same rotation costs once it does. WhenToHelp is on the list because it is the honest answer for anyone who needs the schedule built rather than remembered.
Who should stay where, and where we fit
Stay on SignUpGenius if the sheets are one-off and there are a lot of them. A school carnival with fourteen stations, a Thanksgiving basket drive where sixty families each claim a dish, an auction, a meal train — sheet-style sign-ups with many kinds of slots are its home turf, and the free plan handles them with no expiration, no card, and no page limit. Stay if several staff members need their own logins and you would rather count them once: Gold carries ten administrators and Platinum twenty, and SignUpGenius counts them per account, where SignUp.com's one, five, and fifteen assistant organizers are counted per SignUp. Stay if $0 is the budget and ads on volunteers' screens are an acceptable trade, because $0 is a legitimate budget and their free tier is the strongest one here.
Stay on SignUp.com if ads are the thing that actually bothers you. Nowhere else in this comparison can a free account pay $9.99 and have ads gone from every page, every group page, and every notification email. Stay if the group texts heavily and their uncapped claim holds up through a trial — that is worth testing rather than assuming, but if it holds, no metered plan will beat it. Stay if money is changing hands, since no platform fee plus Stripe at 2.9% + $0.30, or 2.2% + $0.30 for a US 501(c)(3), is materially cheaper than 3.95% + $0.95 per card transaction. And stay if the schedule genuinely repeats and you want it to live inside the sign-up sheet, because repeating spots and organizer-assigned recurring shifts are a real feature and the closest either product comes to a rotation.
VolunteerReminder is the third option, and it is a narrower one. Deluxe is $9 a month: up to 60 volunteers, scheduled shift reminders, two texts per shift. It is not a bulk-text plan and not a per-message credit pack, and it reminds people about shifts that are already on the schedule. That is the whole product. Pro is $19 for up to 150 volunteers, a third reminder per shift, and a substitute finder that texts a bench batch when someone drops — default 8 to 10 people, first YES takes the shift, then the next batch rather than the whole roster. Basic is $3 for email and calendar reminders to 40 volunteers. Annual billing is $33, $90, and $190, and every plan starts with a 30-day trial and no card. Volunteers install nothing, log into nothing, and see no ads on any plan at any price.
Here is where we are the wrong answer, stated as plainly as the two above. We do not do one-off sheets — no potluck dish list, no carnival with fourteen stations, no meal train. We do not collect payments at all, so anything involving dues, tickets, or a fundraiser belongs on one of the other two. We do not build the schedule; we assume a coordinator already did. And we have no sign-up-sheet themes, no waivers, no participant check-in, and no hours reporting. If the job is getting names onto a page, both products above are better than we are.
The rotation is the case where we are the right answer: the same thirty people, the same Tuesday and Saturday, a roster that has not changed in two years, and the only broken part is that somebody forgets. Most organizations do not have to pick — keep a sheet tool for the carnival, and let the weekly rotation live somewhere whose only job is getting the reminder to land. If you want a number for the no-shows you already have, our volunteer no-show cost calculator prices them with no email required.
Start a free trial — 30 days, no card — or email info@volunteerreminder.com and we will say plainly whether this fits.