Question one: whose account does the money land in?

When a guest pays for a lot, that money goes somewhere before it reaches you. Where it goes is the single most consequential thing about a fundraising platform, and it is almost never on the marketing page.

There are broadly two models.

The platform holds it. Payments run through the supplier’s own merchant account, and are passed on to the charity later, usually with a fee taken on the way past. That fee sits on top of whatever the payment processor already charges. It is often quoted as a small percentage, which sounds like nothing until you apply it to the total of a gala.

You hold it. You enter your own payment keys, and every payment settles directly into the charity’s own account. The platform never touches the money, which means it cannot take anything out of it.

Our platform uses the second model. You plug in your own Stripe keys, and we add nothing — you pay Stripe’s standard rate and nothing else. It is the same argument this whole business is built on: every middleman between a donor’s intention and a charity’s bank account costs the charity something.

Question two: who owns the supporter data?

An event generates something more valuable than the night’s total: a list of people who have proved they will give to you, and how much.

Some platforms treat that list as theirs. You can see it while you are a customer; getting it out in a usable form when you leave is another matter. Others treat it as yours, exportable to your CRM whenever you want, in a format that does not need a week of cleaning.

Ask what happens to the data if you do not renew. The answer matters more in year three than it does in year one.

Question three: does it understand Gift Aid?

This is where generic auction software — the kind built for commercial auctions and pointed at charities — falls over completely.

To a shopping cart, every transaction is identical. To a UK charity they are not. An auction purchase almost never qualifies for Gift Aid, because the winner receives goods. A pledge is a genuine gift, so it can carry Gift Aid and be worth 25% more to you.

Where a lot has a clearly declared retail value and the bidder knowingly pays above it, the excess may qualify — and calculating that split by hand, per bidder, is not a job for a volunteer at eleven o’clock at night.

Software that was built for charities captures the declaration at the point of giving and does the split automatically. Software that was not, cannot. The HMRC rules in full →

What “nonprofit pricing” usually means

Be careful with a headline price of nothing. A platform costs money to build and run, so if the licence is nothing, the revenue is coming from somewhere — most often a percentage of what your guests give, a fee added to every card payment, or an optional donation prompt added to your guests’ checkout in the platform’s own interest rather than yours.

None of those are scandalous. They are just costs, and they are worth converting into pounds before you compare anything.

Take a realistic evening — say £60,000 raised across 200 guests — and ask each supplier what the charity actually banks. That single calculation is more useful than any feature comparison.

What we charge, plainly

£497 per event. One event, one licence, nothing recurring, and the site is built around your charity rather than templated.

No commission at any level. No per-guest or per-bidder fee. No cut of donations. No transaction fee added to your guests’ payments. And it is included at no further cost in every full engagement.

See pricing→ The buyer’s checklist