Givebutter is free thanks to the 100% optional tips we receive from donors. If you'd prefer to hide tips from donors, a small Platform Fee applies instead. No matter which option you choose, a standard Processing Fee always applies to each donation. The Processing Fee can be required or optionally covered by your donors. 95% of donors choose to cover the optional Processing Fee!

That's it! Read on for details and complete transparency about how our model works below.

Givebutter is free to you because we operate on completely Optional Tips from donors. These tips are given by donors as a thank you for providing our platform free to use for organizations. The Optional Tips are sent to Givebutter directly. They can be edited or removed by donors during the checkout process. If you’d prefer to disable the ability for donors to leave an optional tip for Givebutter, a small Platform Fee will apply instead.

If (and only if) you decide to disable Tips, a small Platform Fee will apply to each transaction based on the campaign type you’re using:

There are no platform fees involved if you leave optional Tips enabled. Here is a helpful article to help you compare the features of our different campaign types.

A standard Processing Fee is applied to all online transactions on Givebutter. This fee is charged by our payment processor and allows your funds to be securely deposited into your account, regardless of the payment method your donors choose! These fees are charged per transaction:

More than 95% of donors on Givebutter cover fees when asked, resulting in an average campaign fee of less than 1%.

✅ Pro Tip: You can also configure your campaign settings to require donors to cover these fees as part of their donation.

You may be seeing these percentages and wondering: how is all this actually calculated? Since credit card companies take their fees after Platform Fees are applied, it can be a little complicated. Here's the basic formula with Tips disabled:

((Transaction amount + 30¢ credit card fee) / (1 - processing fee)) + (Transaction amount x platform fee)

And here is an example from a $100 donation on a Form campaign with Tips disabled (1% Platform Fee):

((100 + 0.30) / (1 - 0.029)) + ( 100 x .01) = $104.30

The average fee to users across all campaigns on Givebutter is only 0.5%

That is incredibly low, so let's explain exactly how it works. Every time someone donates to a campaign, they are given the option to cover the entire fee on their donation:

Our 0.5% average fee to organizations is made possible because more than 95% of donors on Givebutter choose to cover fees.

If a donor chooses not to cover the Platform Fee and/or Processing Fee, this is deducted from the total amount they donated. The organization then receives the remaining donation amount without paying anything out of pocket.

Let's say you received 100 donations of $100 each ($10,000 total) with optional tips disabled. Based on our metrics, let's assume 90 of your 100 donors covered the fees associated with their donation. That means 10 donors chose not to cover the $4.33 Processing and Platform Fees for their donation. As a result, these 10 donors are actually donating $95.67 each instead of the full $100.

Therefore, when you withdraw your funds, you will receive $10,000 - $43.30 in fees not covered ($4.33 x 10 donors). The final amount is $9,956.70. What is this in percentage terms?

(1 - (9,956.70 ÷ 10,000)) x 100 = 0.43%

First of all, 0.43% is really low. Most of the other platforms that are similar to Givebutter take 3-10% and don't tell donors. This leads me to my second point:

Transparency! All online giving has a cost - credit card fees, hosting, support, maintenance, R&D, etc. are all costly expenses. Using a platform like Givebutter absorbs and consolidates these costs for you. By making donors aware of that, you are not only providing them with absolute transparency but also raising more funds in the process.

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