What ClickBid costs, and what a British gala still has to solve

In short

• ClickBid is a mobile bidding platform from Michigan: silent and live auctions, ticketing, text to give and the paddle raise, all from a phone. It has been at this since 2002.
• It publishes its prices, which most rivals will not: $895 a year for Essentials, $1,495 for Full Suite, both covering unlimited events, plus 3.5% on cards.
• Two currencies are on offer, US and Canadian dollars. Its support pages say transactions run in USD or CAD by account country. No page I opened in October 2026 names pounds.
• You cannot connect your own Stripe account, and payouts are weekly.
• Its receipting is built for the IRS. Gift Aid stays your job.

What is ClickBid, and who built it?

It is a fundraising event platform from Norton Shores, Michigan, and it has been at this longer than almost anyone. Its about page says it ran its first electronic auction in 2002, calls itself “the oldest and first in mobile bidding”, and puts its volume at over 2,400 events a year.

The capability list is wide: silent and online auctions, video-streamed live auctions, Raise the Paddle, ticketing, table management, text to give and venue screens. The mobile bidding does what you would want, including max bids, outbid texts and volunteers bidding for guests who need a hand. The four audiences its home page names are healthcare, schools and universities, faith-based organisations, and arts and culture. All four are American categories, which is the first clue about who this was built for.

How much does ClickBid cost, and in which currency?

$895 a year for Essentials and $1,495 a year for Full Suite, plus 3.5% on card transactions. That is the headline, straight off the pricing page in October 2026.

Essentials carries the bidding, auctions and reporting; Full Suite adds ticketing, table management, segmented messaging and video. Both cover unlimited events for the year: good arithmetic across ten campaigns, thin for one gala in November. A separate fees page is equally plain: “Processing fee for each transaction is 3.5% with no per transaction fee”, plus $15.00 per chargeback. Its title says in the US.

So does ClickBid serve UK charities? Its pages never say no, and never say yes. There is no third column on that table, and the note on international cards settles the currency: “Transactions are processed in USD or CAD based on your account’s country setting.” A British guest bidding on a British lot sees dollars, and their own bank handles the conversion and may add a fee. In a room where every lot was donated in pounds, that is not small.

Whose Stripe account does the money land in?

Not yours. The payments FAQ is blunt: “ClickBid uses its own Stripe integration. You cannot connect an outside Stripe account.”

Plenty of platforms work this way and it is not sinister. It does mean a supplier sits between the charity and its own card processing, better known now than discovered in March. I have written separately on the case for a charity holding its own Stripe keys.

When does the money reach your bank?

On a weekly run. The same FAQ puts payouts on ACH on Wednesdays, with a seven-day hold on a US organisation’s first payout and two days after that, and seven-day holds on every Canadian payout.

ACH is an American bank rail.

Will ClickBid help you claim Gift Aid?

No, and it has never pretended otherwise. Its receipting is built around the IRS. The guidance on fair market value says receipts need “A description and good faith estimate of the value of goods or services”, tells you to add your Tax ID to the statement footer, and explains that a donor may deduct only above that value.

Gift Aid runs on a different idea. HMRC’s detailed guidance states that “Payments to a charity in return for services, rights or goods are not gifts to charity”, which is why the pledge after the auction is usually where the 25% lives, not the bidding. If that split is new, start with Gift Aid and work backwards into your running order.

What does ClickBid do well?

It publishes a price. After weeks of pricing pages that end at a calendar booking, that is a kindness to a fundraiser with a budget meeting on Thursday.

The tip is the bigger one. Its capability page states there are no hidden per-event fees, no donor tip requests and no cuts of funds raised. A tip prompt shifts the platform’s cost onto the person who has already given, and I side with anyone who declines to build one.

And somebody picks up the phone: every licence includes 90 minutes of one-to-one onboarding and “critical live phone support on the night of the event itself, even after hours”. Anyone who has watched a check-in queue build at 7pm knows what that is worth.

The night itself, and the thing no bidding app does

Mobile bidding solves a genuine problem. Two hundred people can bid on everything from their seats instead of queueing at a trestle table with a biro. ClickBid does it well, and its live auction guide is honest that a human scribe still types in the winning bids.

The room is still the variable. I once announced a live auction while half of it was still talking, and did not stop to get them quiet. Only a fraction heard the lots. No platform would have rescued that.

What no platform changes is that every lot has one winner. Ten lots in a room of two hundred means ten winners, and a hundred and ninety guests who arrived willing and gave nothing, because there was nothing left to win. A pledge straight after the auction fixes that. Software does not.

The biggest night I have worked was at the Yacht Club de Monte Carlo for the Sheba Medical Center, over £1,000,000 raised in one evening. Every lot was given its own story before it sold. The software held the bids. The running order decided how much of the room got a turn.

Where the Generosity Works platform is different

It runs on the charity’s own Stripe keys, in pounds, with Gift Aid captured at the point of the gift and an offline server for when the venue wifi gives up. It never takes a percentage and never asks a guest for a tip.

It is also not a product you buy. 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. That fee is one fee agreed up front and does not move with the total. The auctioneer and host side of it sits on its own site.

Ask for the quote in pounds

If ClickBid is on your shortlist, that is reasonable: an experienced platform, a published price, a straight answer on fees. Ask it three things before the licence year starts. What currency will my guests see. Whose account holds the money until payout. Who claims the Gift Aid.

If you have a number to hit this year, and nobody has yet explained why last year raised what it raised, let’s talk about your number.