Comparison
A shared Drive is free and works fine for a small board. The cost isn't the subscription you're not paying — it's the staff hours spent assembling packets and drafting minutes by hand, plus the audit trail, version control and searchable record you don't have. Below roughly 8–9 members with no committees, Drive is defensible. Above about a dozen, or once you add committees, the math has usually already flipped.
Google Drive is free (or bundled with Google Workspace). Nonprofit Liaison is $99/mo flat on annual ACH — $1,188/yr, no per-seat charge. Verified 12 September 2026.
| Nonprofit Liaison | Google Drive | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $1,188/yr, flat | Free / bundled with Workspace |
| Packet assembly | Auto-assembled, versioned, with a table of contents | By hand: chase, convert, order, upload, email |
| Minutes | Drafted from the meeting, full-text searchable | Typed from notes; search is by filename |
| Version control | One current version, enforced | Whoever opened the right file |
| Audit trail | Who accessed what, and when | None |
| Continuity | Owned by the organization | Often owned by one person's account |
Take a 15-member board that meets 6 times a year plus 3 committees quarterly — about 18 meetings. Assembling a packet by hand runs 3–5 hours; drafting minutes another 2–3. Call it 6 hours a meeting, 108 hours a year. At a loaded $35/hr that's roughly $3,780 a year in staff time — more than three times the cost of the cheapest paid plan, before you count the risks below.
A shared Drive has no audit trail, so you can't show when a policy was acknowledged or a disclosure signed. It has no reliable version control, so boards vote on last month's budget more often than anyone admits. Minutes aren't searchable, so a question about a 2023 decision becomes an afternoon of archaeology. And it leaves with people: when a secretary's personal account owns the folder and they rotate off, institutional memory goes with them.
Below roughly 8–9 members, 4 meetings a year and no committees, a well-organized Drive is defensible — don't feel bad about it. Above about a dozen members, or once you have committees, or once anyone asks a question you can't answer from the record, you're already paying for it in staff hours instead of software.
Any serious board tool imports an existing Drive or Dropbox archive. Ask whether import is included and how historical minutes are indexed for search — an imported PDF that isn't text-searchable isn't really imported.
Pick Google Drive if…
A small, all-volunteer board that meets quarterly, has no committees, and whose records are current and findable.
Pick Nonprofit Liaison if…
A board of a dozen or more, or one with committees, or one where governance currently depends on one person remembering where things are.