KindLink: a free charity CRM, and what it leaves to the night

I built the Generosity Works platform myself. The two are different builds with different owners inside a charity. One belongs to the fundraising team all year. The other has to survive four hours in a function room with 200 people in it.

Every figure below is from KindLink’s own pages and filings, read in October 2026.

What is KindLink, and who is it actually built for?

KindLink is a charity CRM and fundraising platform, free for registered charities, built around supporter records rather than an event: donations, a donor CRM, peer-to-peer pages, volunteers and beneficiaries, project reporting. It says 4,500+ nonprofits use it. A second half sells corporate giving, grant management, payroll giving and ESG reporting to companies, priced on request.

Here is the detail that decides everything else: on the charity pricing page, the words auction and bidding do not appear once. That is a category, not a failing.

What does KindLink cost in October 2026?

Nothing from KindLink itself, plus a subscription if you want the paid features. The three charity plans are published in pounds, excluding VAT.

Both are cheaper annually, £240 and £432 a year. Card processing is Stripe’s nonprofit rate, quoted on the FAQ as 1.40% + 15p on UK cards, plus £1 for an active month and 10p a payout. KindLink takes no percentage of a donation and none of your Gift Aid.

One wrinkle before you sign: the contactless app page says the Expert plan it needs is £30 a month. The pricing page says £45. Ask which applies, in writing.

How is KindLink funded?

By companies and by donations, not by charges to the charities using it. Almost nobody checks.

The Foundation’s accounts to 31 December 2025 show income of £486,689, nearly all of it donations: £472,048, plus £3,181 of Gift Aid repayments from HMRC and £4,108 of management fees from corporate donors. Of the £325,371 spent, £320,261 went out as grants and aims expenditure. The charity employs no staff and its three trustees take nothing.

KindLink Ltd filed micro-entity accounts to 31 August 2025 showing capital and reserves of minus £35,607 and an average of one employee. Micro accounts tell you little, so that is no red flag.

The Foundation’s accounts are filed and examined, on time since 2024.

Does KindLink get Gift Aid and sterling right?

Yes, and after a run of American pricing pages I am glad to say so. Prices are in pounds, accounts are verified against your charity number, and Gift Aid is recorded on every plan and filed automatically on the paid ones. KindLink Ltd sits on HMRC’s list of suppliers for Charities Online, updated on 13 October 2026. The repayment goes from HMRC to you, never through KindLink’s.

Donations behave the same way. Card payments settle through the charity’s own Stripe keys rather than the platform’s, which is how card on file works on the platform I built. Corporate and payroll giving is the exception: it runs through the Foundation and reaches you as a grant.

Now the ceiling, which is the law and not the software. Gift Aid follows gifts: you cannot claim it on a payment for goods or services, or where the donor’s benefit goes over the limit. A winning bid and a table seat are purchases. A pledge is a gift, which is why £100 pledged reaches the charity as £125 while the lot beside it reaches £100. The Gift Aid rules have the detail.

What a CRM-first platform leaves to you on the night

It does not run the room. No lot catalogue, no mobile bidding, no auction screen, no paddle numbers, no card taken at registration and charged when the hammer falls. The contactless app needs a live signal for every tap, which anyone who has worked a hotel basement will read twice.

Pledge management appears on all three plans, which is more than most rivals offer. But a field to record a pledge is not a tiered ask built on a charity’s costed impact and delivered from a stage. Ten lots in a room of two hundred means ten winners, and no database fixes that.

Support is the other thing I would weigh: email only, 72 hours on Free and 24 on Premium, office hours Monday to Friday, and the FAQ says there is no UK telephone support.

Galas happen on Friday and Saturday nights.

What would I argue with in the KindLink model?

Not the organisation. The model, and it starts with the word free.

The trustees’ report for 2025 is unusually candid. It records more than 4,500 charities, over £2.5 million raised through the platform, a new contactless donation app, and a new subscription for the CRM, after which the Foundation “still keeps over 90%” of the features free of charge.

Over 90% free is a good deal, and also a boundary where there used to be none. A gala sits on the wrong side of it: events, ticketing and memberships are Premium, and so is automated Gift Aid submission, while the free plan gets recording and a report you file. That is how the FAQ can still say claiming Gift Aid is “completely free of charge” while the pricing page puts automated submission behind a subscription. Both are true.

A free platform is funded by somebody, and that somebody sets the roadmap. In 2025 the funding changed and the subscription appeared. Nothing improper happened. It is what happens when the people paying are not the people using it, and a charity with ten years of donor history in there should plan for that.

The protection is already in the product: a full data export, on every plan including Free, with no exit fee. Use it quarterly.

Where this leaves a charity with a gala to run

If you need a donor database, Gift Aid filed for you and online giving that costs nothing per pound, KindLink deserves a serious look, and the free plan is the place to start.

If it is the evening itself you need, you are in the wrong half of the market. The lots, the cards on file and the pledge that usually out-raises the auction live or die on decisions made months before anyone touches a microphone.

The Generosity Works platform is that second half. It is free when a charity books me as auctioneer and host, and my fee is the only money Generosity Works takes. The platform is not sold on its own; our pricing page explains why. One fee agreed up front, whatever the room gives, and the hire itself lives on my charity auctioneer site.

There is no reason you cannot run both.

If you have a number to hit this year, book a discovery call. Let’s talk about your number.