Kingsbury Creative is a web agency. That has not changed. But for the last several months, a second project has been growing in parallel: a SaaS platform called Sembr, built for chambers of commerce and small membership organizations.
This post is not a pitch. The product is still in build. It is an explanation of what I am working on, why, and what it means for clients on the agency side.
Why Sembr exists
Most chambers of commerce, trade associations, and service clubs in Canada run their operations on one of a handful of legacy platforms: Membee, ChamberMaster, GrowthZone, MemberClicks, Wild Apricot, Glue Up. Some of these have been around for twenty years. Several have been acquired by private equity in the last decade. The pattern after acquisition is consistent: pricing goes up, contracts get longer, support gets thinner, the product stops improving.
I started hearing the same complaints from different organizations. Annual contracts that auto-renew. Surprise per-seat or per-contact fees. Migration paths that are intentionally painful so leaving is expensive. Reports that have not been updated since 2015. Member portals that look like they were built for IE 8.
The smaller organizations get hit hardest. A chamber with 200 members and one part-time executive director cannot absorb a 30% price hike. A service club with 80 members cannot afford a $499 setup fee plus annual contract. They stay, frustrated, because the alternative is migrating thousands of records to something else.
What Sembr does differently
The product itself is a multi-tenant SaaS platform built on Laravel, PostgreSQL, and Stripe Connect. Member CRM, dues and renewals, events with payments, email broadcasts, an embeddable member directory widget, a member-facing portal, and a documented REST API. The technology is not the interesting part. The economics are.
Pricing is flat and listed publicly. $129 CAD per month annual or $169 monthly for Essential (up to 300 members, 3 admin seats). $249 annual or $299 monthly for Professional (unlimited members and seats). No contracts. No per-seat or per-contact surcharges. No setup fees. Migration from your current platform is free for annual prepay customers.
Your data is yours. Export everything to JSON, CSV, or a SQL dump, any time, no questions asked. If Sembr stops working for you, you can leave with everything intact. That is written into the architecture, not just the marketing.
The AI features are practical rather than performative. Email templates with tone-shift and subject-line variants. An engagement score that flags at-risk members. CSV cleanup during migration. An in-app help bot that knows your organization's actual data. No autonomous agents transacting on members' behalf. No image generation gimmicks. The platform works fully with AI turned off.
Where this fits with Kingsbury Creative
KC clients in the chamber or association space have a clear path: Sembr handles the membership operations, KC builds the public website that integrates with it. Embeddable widgets drop a directory or event calendar into any site. The two products work together. For organizations that need both, the combination is straightforward to scope.
For organizations not in the membership space, nothing changes. KC still builds custom websites, handles SEO, and serves local clients across the Valley. The agency work continues at its current pace.
The reason I am writing this now, before launch, is that several of you asked. Two of the chambers I have been talking to in the Ottawa Valley already know about it. The UOVCC proposal includes both website redesign and Sembr migration as a two-phase scope. If your organization is on a legacy platform and frustrated, I would rather you knew this was coming than learn about it after you sign another annual renewal.
What is built so far
Phase 0 closed at version 0.4.1: foundation, audit logging, role separation, Stripe Connect billing, member CRM, dues, events, email templates with AI assist, renewal automation, DSAR self-service for members, full audit log with hash chain. Compliance scope covers PIPEDA, Quebec Law 25, GDPR, CASL, and the EU AI Act's limited-risk obligations.
Phase 1 (in active build) adds the member-facing portal as a PWA, the embeddable widgets, the public REST API, full EN/FR internationalization, and the marketing site. Beta opens to a small group of friendly chambers later this year.
How to follow along
The marketing site at sembr.co goes live during Phase 1. Until then, the easiest way to track this is to send me a note through KC. If you run a chamber, association, or service club in Canada and you are interested in the beta cohort, say so. I am keeping a short list.
For everyone else, this is context. KC has not pivoted. The agency is still doing what it has always done. There is just a second thing happening at the same time, built for a different problem, by the same person.