Funraise: a 0% platform fee, and where the cost went instead

With Funraise it is unusually easy to find. It went into the processing line.

I built the Generosity Works platform myself, so I read other people’s rate cards for sport. Everything below is from Funraise’s own pages in October 2026. I am not here to knock anybody, only to turn the lights on.

What is Funraise?

Funraise is a US fundraising platform for nonprofits, built around donation forms, recurring giving and a donor database. Its own about page says the company began while its three co-founders worked together at a nonprofit, and names no founding year, headquarters or owner.

The product list is wide: peer-to-peer, events and ticketing, auctions, SMS and wealth screening. All of it orbits the donation form.

How much does Funraise cost in October 2026?

Nothing, if you are small. Nobody knows, if you need an auction. The pricing page showed two plans: free at $0 a month for organisations raising under $1 million a year, and Premium with no figure against it and a “Talk with Sales” button. Free plans, it says, “are standard and cannot be customized”. The grid underneath uses four names, Essentials, Standard, Premium and Enterprise, which do not map onto those two. Then a fee table:

Neither column names a plan, and a footnote says those totals exclude the 60¢ per transaction. An estimate that leaves out that charge describes the wrong evening: a gala is hundreds of transactions inside ninety minutes.

A 2022 post on its blog says flatly that you will not be charged a platform transaction fee even if donors decline to cover fees. The 2026 table shows 0-3%. Get your rate in writing.

If the platform fee is 0%, where did Funraise’s price go?

Into processing. The help centre article on Funraise Payments, last updated 1 April 2026, publishes a card rate of 2.9% plus 60¢ and says most organisations are on the Donors Cover Fees plan, with its effective platform fee of 0%. It also says Funraise Payments is powered by Stripe, whose published UK rate for a standard UK card is 1.5% plus 20p.

Take an ordinary gala: £40,000 across 200 transactions, tickets, bids and gifts together. At 1.5% plus 20p, processing is £640. At 2.9%, the percentage alone is £1,160, plus 200 lots of 60¢, charged in US cents.

Then come the lines that begin with “an additional”: 1% more on American Express, 1.5% more on payments made from outside your country, 1% to convert a payment in any currency other than your organisation’s platform currency, and 3% of the amount for an instant payout.

Read that last one twice. The morning after a gala is when a charity wants its money, and speed costs 3%: £1,200 on that night.

None of this is concealed, and a platform may fairly earn on payments. My objection is where the number sits. A fee in the platform line gets compared between suppliers; a fee in the processing line reads like weather, so it never gets compared at all. Worth knowing before you compare platforms.

Which Funraise plan runs an auction?

Premium, the one with no price. The free plan carries events and ticketing; auctions sit on Premium with peer-to-peer, SMS and text to give.

The auction itself is a silent auction tool: bidding from a phone, fair market value on each item, custom closing times, a payment method captured before anyone bids, and text alerts when somebody is outbid. Live auctions and the paddle raise are not mentioned. Neither is a pledge moment.

So a charity whose year turns on one gala cannot read its number off the price list. The published tier leaves the auction out, and the tier with it in is a conversation.

Does Funraise serve UK charities, and in which currency?

It will take you, and it is built in dollars. The pricing page says organisations around the globe can use it, given “a national organization identification number”, which a UK charity number satisfies.

Every published figure is in dollars, and the 60¢ is charged in US dollars, so the flat part of every transaction moves with the exchange rate. The help centre’s currency routing article, from May 2023, opens by saying it “may only apply to some international organizations”, which tells you who the product was drawn for. The integrations page lists ACH, Venmo and DonateStock, all US rails.

Gift Aid appears on none of those pages. HMRC is clear that payments for goods or admission are not gifts anyway, so the part of the night it would touch is the pledge, and a declaration taken in the seat beats one chased in November.

What does Funraise do well?

Quite a lot, and its fee coverage is the honest version. It says about 90% of donors choose to cover fees, and its documentation states plainly that the covered amount pays its platform fee and part of processing. That is close to what the Fundraising Regulator’s platform guidance, updated on 4 November 2025, asks for: fees shown before a donor hands over card details, and a free option given equal prominence.

The free tier is a real product rather than a trial, with no cap on admin users, and the events suite launched in 2026 does ticketing, drag and drop table plans, check in and tap to pay in the room. More than most donation platforms attempt.

Where the Generosity Works platform sits

Outside that model on purpose. Payments run through the charity’s own Stripe account, at Stripe’s own rate, nothing added by me, no tip prompt in front of a donor. No percentage, no per guest fee, no charge for being paid quickly.

It is built for the four hours, because whoever holds the room holds the total: bidding, ticketing, the gala screen, the table plan, an offline event server for when the venue wifi gives up, and Gift Aid capture on the pledge itself. Lots are donated, so the charity keeps all they raise, and the live pledge comes first in the design, the auction second.

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. The hire lives on my charity auctioneer site.

Ask for the number in pounds

Not the headline rate. The whole thing, in sterling, for your own night: the percentage, the per transaction charge, the foreign card surcharge, the cost of being paid next week, and the tier with the auction in it. If a supplier answers in one sentence, you have learned something. If it takes three pages and a call, you have learned that too.

The generosity is already in the room. If you have a number to hit this year, book a discovery call. Let’s talk about your number.