Donation processing
Funraise
Some links on this page are affiliate links. Disclosure
Funraise publishes part of its rate card and quotes the rest. Essentials is free with a 5% platform fee. Premium starts at $99/month billed annually with a platform fee of 0–4%. Card processing is 2.9% + 60¢ on top, and the vendor says there are no setup fees.
One practical note before anything else: the live domain is funraise.org. funraise.io fails its TLS handshake.
Read the free tier carefully
Five percent is a high platform fee — higher than Donorbox’s ~2.95%, higher than Givebutter’s 3% with tips off. Free here means “no subscription,” not “no cost.”
Stack the processing on top and Essentials costs you roughly 7.9% + 60¢ per gift. On $50,000 of online giving that’s about $3,950 plus per-transaction fees. Premium at $1,188/year plus a lower platform percentage overtakes it quickly — which is presumably the design.
Funraise’s own blended estimates assume roughly 90% of donors opt to cover fees, which produces effective rates of 2.5% on Essentials and 0.8% on Premium. Those are real if your donors behave that way and optimistic if they don’t. Check your actual fee-cover rate before believing any blended number, yours or theirs.
Where the sources disagree
Third-party roundups describe a completely different structure — a “Spark” plan at $300/month with 3% fees and a “Movement” plan at $550/month with 2%. Those plan names appear nowhere on Funraise’s current pricing page and look like a superseded rate card.
Others quote “starts at $100/month” and estimate $500/month for ten users, but label those as estimates rather than reported prices. We’re showing the conflict rather than picking a side. The vendor’s current page is the only thing here we’d budget against.
No reviewer states a dollar figure they actually pay.
What costs extra
This is the recurring complaint, and it’s specific. Email is a paid add-on, and reviewers rate the editor poorly — one May 2026 review calls it “awful, very little ability.” Custom domains are charged per site. SMS is a Premium feature.
An April 2026 reviewer’s summary is the fairest: “Pricing transparency is another area that needs work. The fee structure can feel misleading.” Ask for a written all-in quote listing every add-on you saw in the demo.
The hard limit
You cannot add custom data fields. For a donation platform that’s defensible; for anyone hoping to use Funraise as a lightweight database it’s disqualifying. It’s a giving layer with a good donor experience, not a CRM, and the honest stack is Funraise for the forms with a donor database behind it.
Strengths
- The donor-facing experience is among the best in the category — branded, modern, and it converts
- Peer-to-peer, auctions and text-to-give included at Premium rather than bought separately
- A genuinely usable free tier with no subscription and no commitment
Other options
- Want the fee to stop scaling with your success? A flat subscription takes no percentage at all; past roughly $40,000 online that is straightforwardly cheaper. Read our 4aGoodCause write-up →
- Need custom data fields? Reviewers repeatedly name the inability to add custom fields as Funraise's hard limit; a CRM is the fix, not a different giving platform. Read our DonorDock write-up →
- Watching every dollar? Zeffy is free at any volume including processing fees, where Funraise's free tier still takes 5%. Read our Zeffy write-up →
Keep comparing
Funraise head to head