Donation processing

4aGoodCause

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4aGoodCause is donation and event software built around monthly giving: donation pages, event registration, peer-to-peer, and a built-in donor CRM, sold as a flat subscription from $99 a month billed annually. The CRM is simpler than a standalone database but it is real: donor profiles, giving history, notes, tagging, custom fields and acknowledgement letters. Email marketing runs through the Mailchimp integration instead of being built in. It takes no percentage of your donations, which is the whole argument for it. Past roughly $40,000 of online giving a year, that flat fee costs less than a percentage platform.

Who it fits

Shops raising somewhere between $100k and a few million where online giving is growing and the processing bill has started to sting. The pitch is simple: a percentage fee is a tax on getting better at fundraising, and a flat subscription is not. It also fits teams without a technical staffer, since the campaign builder is the part reviewers consistently single out.

What it costs

First month free on every plan. The revenue caps work in your favor: going over one simply triggers an upgrade at renewal, and donations never stop. Your payment processor still charges its own transaction fees, typically 2.2-2.9% plus a per-gift amount, exactly as it would on any other platform. Donors can optionally tip to cover those, and that tip goes to you, not to 4aGoodCause.

The break-even, in dollars

This is the only number that decides it. Compare the platform fee only, since processing costs the same either way.

Two crossovers matter. Grassroots beats a 2.95% fee from about $40,000 up to its $50,000 cap, and from about $100,000 the flat plan wins for good: Growing beats the percentage all the way to its $250,000 cap, and Scale beats it at any volume above that. In the $50,000-$100,000 band a percentage platform is usually a little cheaper, so run your own last-12-months total through the arithmetic; that one number settles the question faster than any feature comparison.

How it compares

Donorbox has deeper recurring-gift tooling and costs nothing to start, which makes it the better first move for a small shop. Its Pro plan drops the platform fee to roughly 1.75% for about $150 a month, which changes the crossover, so run both. Zeffy charges nothing at any volume and is the honest answer when the fee is the only thing you care about. Of the three, only 4aGoodCause brings a built-in donor CRM along with the giving pages, which is worth real money if it saves you a separate database subscription.

Bottom line

Add up what you raised online last year and multiply by your current platform’s percentage. If that number is over about $1,200, this is worth a call. See 4aGoodCause pricing, and use the first free month to move one recurring campaign across instead of the whole operation.

Strengths

• Flat subscription with no platform percentage, so the fee stops scaling with your success
• Built around monthly giving: recurring pages, donor records and a campaign builder in one tool
• Published pricing on every tier, and the first month is free

Other options

• Raising under about $40,000 a year online? Below that, a percentage fee costs less than any flat subscription; the break-even math is in the pricing section above. Read our Donorbox write-up →
• Want to pay nothing at all? Zeffy is free at any volume, funded by an optional donor tip at checkout. Read our Zeffy write-up →
• Need soft credits, household records and gift history? Giving platforms hold donors and gifts; a donor CRM holds the relationship history a major-gift program runs on. Read our DonorDock write-up →

See 4aGoodCause pricing & book a demo →