Airauctioneer: the platform that charges you by the lot

Twenty years in front of these rooms taught me to read a price list for what it encourages, not only for what it costs. Everything below comes from Airauctioneer’s own pages, opened in October 2026.

What is Airauctioneer, and who runs auctions on it?

Airauctioneer is an online silent auction platform, and it calls itself “the simple, affordable auction platform for fundraisers and business” on its home page. Schools, clubs, businesses, charities and individuals raising for a cause are the stated audience.

Search the brand name in the UK and you mostly get its customers rather than its marketing: a school auction here, a bauble auction there. It is low-profile in the British charity sector too. Charity Digital’s roundup of the best platforms, from January 2025, lists ten and Airauctioneer is not among them.

What does Airauctioneer cost in October 2026?

You buy item credits, one per lot you list, and nothing else. From the pricing page in October 2026, with the cost per lot worked out:

Credits never expire, a credit comes back if you delete a lot before it takes a bid, and there is no account fee and no commission. Over two hundred lots, you ring them.

Every feature is on every account: no tiers, nothing held back.

Why does paying by the lot matter at a gala?

Because the catalogue is the cheapest thing to lengthen and the hardest thing to lengthen well.

Look again at that bottom row. Going from fifty lots to two hundred costs another £40, so the two hundredth lot costs 60p. Nothing underhand is happening there: a bigger auction genuinely costs the company little more to host, and passing that on is honest. This is a criticism of the model, not of the company.

But a price list is also a nudge, and this one nudges towards volume at the point in planning where volume is the wrong answer. Sixty lots in a room of two hundred still leaves a hundred and forty people watching other people give. The constraint on a silent auction is never the hosting cost of lot sixty-one. It is whether anyone in that room wants it, and whether it was donated or bought in.

The generosity is already in the room when the doors open. A longer catalogue does not reach more of it. It spreads the same bidders thinner.

Does Airauctioneer serve UK charities, and in which currency?

Yes, and the currency answer is the cleanest part of the whole offer. The British English version of the site quotes bundles in pounds, states “Prices in British Pounds”, and offers a switcher covering 33 currencies. An auction can run in any currency and any time zone.

The company behind it is Australian. AirAuctioneer Pty Ltd has been registered in New South Wales since December 2018, and its user agreement puts the arrangement under New South Wales law. Its privacy policy, version 8, effective 1 August 2026, names Australia’s Privacy Act 1988 and the EU GDPR, and makes no commitment about where bidder data is stored.

One figure to correct in your own sums: the pricing page quotes Stripe’s UK rate as 1.4% plus 20p, where Stripe’s published UK pricing is 1.5% plus 20p on standard UK cards, plus 2% where conversion is needed.

Where do the auction proceeds go?

To the charity, directly. Buyer payments go “to the Stripe account of the Seller”, card processing is deducted before the money lands, and Airauctioneer takes no ownership of items or donations. The contract of sale sits between buyer and seller, with the charity as auctioneer of record.

That architecture is the right way round, and it matters more than the price: nothing of yours sits in somebody else’s balance. Two consequences, though. Refunds to winning bidders are yours to handle, and item credits are generally non-refundable.

Can a UK charity claim Gift Aid through Airauctioneer?

No. Gift Aid appears nowhere in the pricing, features or policy pages, which is what you would expect from software written in Sydney.

On the auction itself that costs you less than people assume. HMRC treats a winning bid as a purchase, and allows a split payment only where the item is commercially available and the bidder knew its separate price at the moment they won.

On gifts it costs you a great deal. Gift Aid adds 25p per £1 from a UK taxpayer, and each claim needs a declaration carrying that donor’s name, address and intent. Airauctioneer will “collect donations through your auction page”, but a donation form is not a declaration. More on the pledges page.

What Airauctioneer gets right

A lot, and I would rather a charity used this than several better-known options.

There is no donor tip prompt, no percentage of the hammer price, no per-bidder charge and no surcharge on the processor’s rate. The Fundraising Regulator’s code, effective from November 2025, wants a donor to see how any fee is calculated before handing over card details. A model where nothing comes out of the donation clears that without trying, which is more than most tip-funded platforms in this market can say.

The feature list is deeper than the price suggests. Staggered end times, automatic extensions against sniping and stock-controlled buy-now items are things I have wanted and not found on paid plans elsewhere. For a school running a standalone silent auction with no live element, it is a serious and genuinely cheap option.

What no catalogue can do

How it works ends where a gala begins. You can freeze online bidding and take the last bids in the room with a live auctioneer, which is a thoughtful touch, but there is no pledge, no fund-a-need, no tiers and no ticketing. The part of the evening that most often raises the most money is not in the software, because it was never meant to be.

That is the layer Generosity Works was built for. The platform is a component of a designed evening, not the thing being sold. 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. There is one fee agreed up front and it does not move with the total.

Count the right thing

If Airauctioneer is on your shortlist, buy the smallest bundle and see. It is cheap enough to test and honest enough to trust.

Then do the harder arithmetic, the one no price list helps with. Not what a lot costs to list, but how many of your guests the evening gives a way to give at all. I compare the UK options on that basis rather than on fees.

If there is a number on next year’s evening, let’s talk about it.