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Fees, and who pays them

A guide for anyone comparing fundraising platforms · 22 September 2026

Fundraising platforms are compared on a single percentage, and a single percentage cannot describe what any of them cost. There are three separate fees on a gift, two possible payers, and one marketing trick that makes the most expensive option look like the cheapest.

The three fees

1. Payment processing

What the card networks and the payment provider charge to move the money. It is always a percentage plus a fixed amount per transaction, and it varies by where the card was issued and what it is: a domestic consumer card is cheap, a foreign or commercial card is not, and bank debit schemes such as SEPA Direct Debit or ACH are usually cheaper than cards but slower and reversible for longer.

Nobody escapes this fee. A platform that says it does not charge you processing is telling you it has bundled it into something else. Look up your payment provider's published rates for your own country rather than accepting a number from a sales deck.

2. The platform fee

What the platform charges for existing: the pages, the recurring billing, the moderation tools, the support. Usually a percentage of each gift, sometimes a monthly subscription, occasionally both.

3. Payout and currency

The forgotten one. Paying out to a bank account in a different currency from the one the gift arrived in means a conversion spread, and sometimes a fixed fee per payout. For an organization whose members live in several countries this can quietly be the largest line of the three.

Deducted, or added on top?

The same fee feels completely different depending on who is asked to carry it, and this is a genuine decision you get to make, not a technical constraint.

Our platforms add the fee on top by default, because the person we least want to disappoint is the member who put their name on a page and asked their friends for help. A rowing club member who raises €2,000 and is told €1,860 arrived remembers that number for a year.

Whatever you choose, two rules:

• Show the breakdown before they pay. A supporter should see the gift, the fee and the total on the same screen, not discover it on a receipt.
• Never surprise the fundraiser. The page they set up should show them what a €50 gift will actually become.

What “free” means

Several well-known consumer platforms charge the organization nothing and ask the supporter for a voluntary “tip” at checkout, often with a default already selected. It is a legitimate model and for a one-off personal campaign it works. For an organization it has three properties worth understanding:

• The cost is real, it is just not yours. Your supporters pay it, at a rate chosen by the platform's default, which is frequently higher than a platform fee you would have negotiated.
• You cannot control it. The prompt, the default percentage and the wording belong to the platform. They can change tomorrow, on a page with your logo on it.
• It is invisible in your reporting. You will not be able to tell a board what your fundraising costs, because the cost never appears in any number you hold.

“Free” is a statement about your invoice, not about the money your community loses.

How to compare two quotes honestly

Take two gifts that represent your reality — say one €50 one-off and one €20 monthly — and ask each vendor to fill in the same table. Do not accept percentages; ask for amounts.

Then do the same sum for a year of the monthly gift, because that is where percentage fees really live. A 5% fee on a €20 monthly gift is €12 a year, every year, from one supporter. Multiply by the number of monthly supporters you hope to have in three years, and you have the real comparison — which is very often not the one with the lowest headline percentage.

Percentage, subscription, or both

A pure percentage feels fair and scales badly: the platform's revenue grows with your community's success without its costs growing much. A pure subscription is predictable and penalises the small: a federation with two active fundraisers pays the same as one with two hundred.

Most serious arrangements end up as a modest monthly fee that covers running and supporting the platform, plus a small percentage that scales with use. When you are quoted one, ask which part is which, and ask what happens to each if your volume triples or halves. A vendor who has thought about your three-year case will answer immediately.

What we charge

We price each platform to the community it serves, so we quote rather than publish a table, but the shape is always the same three parts and we will tell you all three in the first conversation:

• A one-off build, for the design, the rules and anything we build specifically for you.
• A monthly platform fee, covering hosting, updates, payment integration and support.
• A platform fee on each gift, set with you, added on top of the supporter's total by default so fundraisers receive the full amount.

Fundraisers never pay to create a page.