Donorbox publishes properly, which makes the gaps easier to spot
Credit where it is due. Donorbox’s pricing page is one of the more complete in this category: three tiers, a per-feature comparison, add-on pricing, hardware pricing and a fee explainer, all public and all without a sales call.
The verdict on whether the product justifies the number is a separate question, and it lives in our Donorbox review.
Captured 19 August 2026.
| Plan | Monthly | Platform fee | Team members |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | $0 | 2.95% to 3.95% | 5 |
| Pro | $150, discounted with yearly billing | 1.75% to 2% | 10 |
| Premium | Contact us | 1.6% to 2% | 30 |
Payment processing is charged separately by the processor in every case.
Note that the platform fees are ranges, not fixed rates. Donorbox’s own comparison table shows the range varying by feature, so the rate you actually pay depends on which parts of the product a given donation flows through. When modelling, use the top of the band rather than the bottom.
The add-ons
| Add-on | Price |
|---|---|
| Text-to-Give | $195 flat fee, plus $19/month standard keyword or $50/month custom keyword |
| Donorbox Live Kiosk, Standard and Pro | $80/month or $820/year first device, saving $140 a year |
| Donorbox Live Kiosk, Premium | $50/month first device |
| Additional kiosk devices, any plan | $15/month each, card reader sold separately |
Two details in that table are easy to skim past. The kiosk is cheaper on Premium than on Pro, which is unusual and means a heavy kiosk user should model the Premium upgrade against kiosk savings, not just against the platform fee. And the card reader hardware is sold separately from the kiosk subscription, so the first device costs more than $80 in month one.
The cost most comparisons miss
Buried in Donorbox’s own fee explanation is this:
By default, the conversion rate will be 2% higher than the most optimal rate, due to the constant fluctuation of the exchange rates.
That is a currency conversion markup on international donations, and it sits on top of the platform fee and the processing fee.
We checked the competitor comparison pages ranking for Donorbox pricing queries. None of them mention it. They compare platform percentages and stop.
For a domestic-only US nonprofit it is irrelevant. For anyone with a meaningful share of overseas donors it is not. On a Standard plan, an international donation can carry a 2.95% to 3.95% platform fee, plus card processing, plus a 2% FX markup. Stack those and the effective deduction on an overseas gift is materially different from the headline percentage.
Work an example. A UK donor gives the equivalent of $1,000 to a US nonprofit on Donorbox Standard. At the top of the platform band that is $39.50, plus roughly $29 in card processing at typical rates, plus $20 in FX markup. Roughly $88 on a $1,000 gift, against a headline platform fee of 3.95% that would suggest $39.50.
That is not Donorbox being dishonest. Every figure is on their site. It is a warning about reading only the headline number, and about comparison tables with a column for “platform fee” and no column for anything else.
The free plan is genuinely free, with a catch worth naming
Standard costs $0 a month and includes unlimited donation forms, donation pages, crowdfunding and peer-to-peer campaigns, event ticketing, QuickDonate, a branded donor portal and basic reporting, with five team members.
That is an unusually complete free tier. Several competitors gate peer-to-peer or ticketing behind a paid plan.
The catch is not hidden, it is structural: you pay for it in the take rate. At 2.95% to 3.95%, a nonprofit raising $100,000 a year gives up roughly $2,950 to $3,950 in platform fees before card processing.
Where the crossover sits
Pro costs $1,800 a year at list and cuts the platform fee to 1.75% to 2%.
On $100,000 raised, moving from roughly 3.45% to roughly 1.875% saves about $1,575, which does not yet cover the $1,800 subscription. You would be paying $225 a year for the privilege of the extra features.
On $200,000 raised, the same shift saves about $3,150 against an $1,800 subscription, a clear net gain of $1,350.
So the rough break-even for Standard versus Pro sits somewhere near $115,000 to $130,000 raised annually, depending where you land in each fee band.
Three things move that line, and all of them push it downward:
- The yearly billing discount on Pro. Donorbox states one exists without publishing the figure. Any discount lowers the break-even.
- Where you sit in each band. If your feature mix puts you at the top of Standard’s range and the bottom of Pro’s, the gap is wider and Pro pays back sooner.
- The Pro feature set itself. Reduced fees are only part of it. If you would otherwise pay for Zapier automation, crypto and stock donations, or receipt whitelabeling, those have their own value.
Below roughly $115,000 the free plan is usually cheaper on fees alone. Above it, Pro usually is. Treat this as a sizing guide and run your own numbers on your actual mix.
Donors covering fees
Donorbox states donors can be asked to cover over 90% of processing fees. This is common in the category and it does change the effective cost, but two cautions.
It is a donor-facing choice, not a discount. Take-up varies by audience, by gift size and by how the ask is presented. It is not something you can budget as guaranteed revenue.
It covers processing, not the platform fee. Read the wording carefully when you compare vendors on this point, because some marketing describes fee coverage as though it eliminates the entire deduction. On Donorbox’s own framing it is the processing component.
What to ask before you commit
Most of Donorbox’s pricing is public, so there is less to negotiate than with a quote-only vendor. These are the questions the page does not answer.
The exact yearly billing discount on Pro. Stated to exist, not quantified.
Whether the FX markup applies on all plans or varies by tier. The fee explainer does not break it out by plan.
What determines your position within each platform-fee band. The difference between 2.95% and 3.95% on $200,000 raised is $2,000 a year, and it is not clear from the page what moves you.
Which processor you will be on and at what rate, since processing is separate and varies.
Whether Premium’s lower kiosk pricing offsets its higher subscription for your device count.
Donorbox against the category
Six platforms captured on the same day. The comparison that matters for a fundraising platform is what it takes from each donation.
| Platform | Platform take on donations | Entry price |
|---|---|---|
| Little Green Light | 0% to LGL. Processor takes 2.2% + $0.30 | $45/month up to 2,500 constituents |
| Donorbox | 1.6% to 3.95% by plan | $0 Standard, $150/month Pro |
| OneCause | 5%, capped at an unpublished amount | $200 or $500, depending which page |
| Bizzabo | Not a donation platform | $499/user/month, from $17,999/year |
| Whova | Not published | Not published |
| Cvent platform | Not published | Not published |
Little Green Light and Donorbox represent the two honest shapes of this trade. LGL charges a subscription by database size and takes nothing from donations. Donorbox lets you start at zero and takes a percentage. Neither is a trick.
Which is cheaper depends entirely on how much you raise against how many records you hold. An organisation with 20,000 constituents raising $40,000 a year pays LGL $1,080 and Donorbox Standard roughly $1,380 in platform fees, so LGL wins. An organisation with 20,000 constituents raising $300,000 pays LGL the same $1,080 and Donorbox Standard roughly $10,350, so LGL wins by a mile. Flip it: an organisation with 45,000 constituents raising $25,000 pays LGL $1,440 and Donorbox roughly $860, so Donorbox wins.
The variable that decides it is dollars raised per constituent record. If that number is high, subscription pricing wins. If it is low, percentage pricing wins.
The cost of never revisiting your plan
The most expensive thing about freemium fundraising software is not the fee. It is that nobody ever goes back and checks.
An organisation signs up on Standard when it is raising $30,000 a year, which is exactly right. Five years later it is raising $250,000 and still on Standard, because nothing ever prompted a review.
| Annual raised | Standard platform fee, at 3.45% | Pro, at 1.875% plus $1,800 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| $50,000 | $1,725 | $2,738 | Standard wins by $1,013 |
| $100,000 | $3,450 | $3,675 | Standard wins by $225 |
| $150,000 | $5,175 | $4,613 | Pro wins by $562 |
| $250,000 | $8,625 | $6,488 | Pro wins by $2,137 |
| $500,000 | $17,250 | $11,175 | Pro wins by $6,075 |
Midpoints of each published band, list price, processing excluded because it applies equally.
At $500,000 raised, staying on the free plan costs roughly $6,000 a year more than paying $1,800 for Pro. Over three years that is $18,000 that never reached the mission, and it accrued entirely through inaction.
Set a calendar reminder to re-run this every time your annual revenue moves by 25%. It is the highest-return five minutes in nonprofit software administration and almost nobody does it.
The same logic runs the other way. An organisation that upgraded to Pro during a capital campaign and has since returned to $60,000 a year is now paying $1,800 for a fee reduction worth about $945. Downgrading is a real option and it is not the failure it feels like.
Processing is separate, and it is not small
Every figure above excludes card processing, which Donorbox charges through the processor rather than taking itself.
That is standard and honest, but it means the platform fee is never your whole deduction. Typical US card processing sits near 2.2% to 2.9% plus a fixed amount per transaction, varying by processor, card type and whether the card is present.
So a Standard-plan donation can carry roughly 2.95% to 3.95% platform plus roughly 2.2% to 2.9% processing, before any FX markup. On a $50 gift, the fixed per-transaction component matters disproportionately: small recurring gifts are the ones where combined percentage costs bite hardest.
If your donor base is built on small recurring gifts, model the per-transaction fixed fee, not just the percentages. A hundred $10 monthly donors generate 1,200 transactions a year, and the fixed component alone can exceed the percentage component at that gift size.
Who Donorbox suits
It suits small and growing nonprofits who want to start with no fixed cost, and organisations that value the breadth of the free tier, which is genuinely unusual. It suits organisations with a low ratio of dollars raised to records held, where a percentage beats a subscription. And it suits anyone who wants to be running today without a sales call.
It does not suit organisations raising well into six figures who have never recalculated whether Standard is still the right plan, which is the most common and most expensive mistake with freemium fundraising software. It does not suit organisations with a large share of international donors who have not accounted for the conversion markup on top of everything else.
What the rest of the giving platforms charge, and what they meter on
Every platform here takes a cut of donations, which means the bill grows with the thing you are trying to grow. What separates them is where the cut sits and who is asked to pay it. Here is each alternative to Donorbox, read from its own pricing page on 4 September 2026.
Donorbox, free to start, and the fee falls as you pay more
Donorbox publishes the clearest ladder in the category. Standard is free with a platform fee of 2.95% to 3.95%. Pro is $150 a month and drops the fee to 1.75% to 2%. Premium is quote only at 1.6% to 2%. Because the subscription buys a lower rate, there is a crossover volume below which paying is a loss: on $100,000 raised the fee saving is roughly $1,575 against an $1,800 subscription, so the free plan wins. On $200,000 the same shift is a clear gain. Work out your own crossover before upgrading, because the sales conversation will not.
Givebutter, 0% if your donors tip, 3% if they do not
Givebutter charges no platform fee at all when donor tips are enabled, and a flat 3% when they are switched off. Its paid tier, Plus, starts at $29 a month or $348 a year. The model is genuinely free to the organisation, but it is not free in the room: the form suggests a tip by default, so a supporter giving $100 can be charged noticeably more than $100. Whether that is a fair trade is a decision about your donors rather than your budget, and it is worth making deliberately rather than by leaving a default alone.
Fundraise Up, which has stopped publishing a rate
Fundraise Up published a single flat 4% per transaction when we read it on 14 July 2026. On 4 September 2026 the percentage is gone. We loaded the page, waited for it to render, opened every accordion and read the source: nine percentages remain and every one is a conversion rate or a case study result. The page now says “performance-based pricing” and asks for a demo. Treat any 4% you see quoted elsewhere, including our own dated figure, as the number a current quote should be checked against.
The processors underneath, which nobody escapes
Whatever the platform charges, a card processor charges too, and Donorbox publishes the nonprofit rates plainly: Stripe at 2.2% plus 30 cents and PayPal at 1.99% plus 49 cents for eligible organisations. The fixed component is the part that hurts small gifts. On a $20 donation, 30 cents is another 1.5 percentage points on top of whatever rate was quoted, so a platform that looks competitive on a $250 gift can be expensive on your actual median.
The line that is missing from almost every comparison
International giving. Donorbox states that its currency conversion defaults to 2% above the optimal rate. On a $1,000 gift from overseas that is $20, on top of the platform band and the card processing, and it appears in no comparison table we have seen. If any meaningful share of your donors give from abroad, ask every platform on your shortlist for its FX markup in writing and add it to the model.
Donor fee coverage, the single variable that decides the answer
Every percentage model in this category lives or dies on one number: the share of donors who choose to cover fees at checkout. It swings the effective cost by a factor of five, and it is the number vendors quote most confidently and evidence least.
What the vendors claim
Fundraise Up publishes that 80% of donors cover transaction costs, having previously claimed 87%. Givebutter states that 92% of donors leave a tip. Donorbox says donors can be asked to cover over 90% of processing fees. Those are averages across every customer the vendor has, weighted towards the large and sophisticated ones, and none of them is a commitment to you.
Why your number will be different
Coverage depends on things the vendor cannot control and you can: how the option is worded, whether it is pre-ticked, where it sits in the flow, your median gift size, and above all who your donors are. A digitally engaged urban donor base behaves nothing like a rural mail-acquired file. Two organisations on the same platform can sit thirty points apart, which is the difference between a 1.3% effective cost and a 6.5% one.
Model both ends, not the vendor average
Take a percentage model and run it twice: once at zero coverage and once at the vendor’s claimed rate. If the decision holds at both ends, buy with confidence. If it only works at the claimed rate, you are betting your budget on a number you have never observed. Then run the subscription alternative alongside, because a fixed fee is the option that does not care how your donors behave.
The ethical question nobody puts in the table
Fee coverage and tipping both work by moving your cost onto the person giving you money. That may be entirely reasonable, and many donors genuinely prefer that the full gift reaches the cause. It becomes a problem when the default does the deciding, when the amount is not obvious, or when a $100 gift quietly becomes a $115 charge. Look at your own checkout as a donor would, on a phone, and decide whether you are comfortable with what you see. That is a board level question, not a finance one.
What you are actually signing, beyond the monthly figure
A published rate card tells you the list price. The contract decides what you pay, and four terms do most of the work.
Term length and the annual-billing discount
Nearly every figure quoted in this market, Donorbox included, assumes annual billing. Monthly billing is routinely 20 to 30% higher, so the headline you compare against a rival may be a different commitment entirely. Check which basis each number is on before putting two of them in the same sentence, because vendors do not always label it.
Mid-term expansion, priced now or priced later
The band you cross, the seat you add, the module you switch on: agree what each costs before you sign, and specifically whether the discount you negotiated applies to anything added mid-term. It very often does not. Discovering that at the moment you need to grow is how a good first-year deal becomes an expensive second year.
The renewal cap is the term worth most and asked for least
At renewal the vendor knows your usage, your dependency and your switching cost, and in a market where most rivals publish nothing you have no rate card to anchor against. Blackbaud publishes no figures at all, and Virtuous publishes none while banding its tiers at $5 million in fundraising revenue. Against that, a capped uplift stated as a percentage is worth more than a larger first-year discount, and it is only negotiable while you still have a choice.
What happens to your data at the end
Ask what a full export contains, in what format, how long after termination you can request one, and whether live recurring gift schedules and their payment tokens transfer. Tokens are the ones that usually do not, and if they cannot move, every monthly donor has to re-enter card details and a share will not. Get the answer in writing during procurement, not during the exit.
Published does not mean fixed
Keela raised every band between late August and early September 2026, entry moving from $134 to $164, a rise of roughly 15 to 22% across the range in under two weeks. Neon retired an entire tier structure. A published price is a snapshot with a date on it, and if the figure you are comparing does not carry one, you do not know what you are looking at.
Method and limits
Donorbox’s pricing page was loaded on 19 August 2026 and every collapsed control was expanded before reading, which is how the add-on, hardware and fee detail was captured.
The capture ran from an Indian IP. Donorbox served USD with no locale redirect.
The break-even and comparison calculations are our own arithmetic on Donorbox’s published fee bands and on Little Green Light’s published tiers. They are sizing guides, not quotes. Where a fee is a range we have used a midpoint or the top of the band and said which. Card processing is excluded from the crossover calculation because it applies on both plans equally.
We have not used Donorbox. This is document research.
Worth pricing alongside: Little Green Light, which charges by record and takes nothing from donations, Givebutter pricing and Fundraise Up pricing. There is also a direct comparison in Fundraise Up vs Donorbox.
Written by
FazFaz is the founder of AIToolsBakery. Some tools here are tested hands on. Others are assessed from vendor documentation and pricing verified on the live page, and every review says which one it is. Sponsors can buy a position in a guide. They cannot buy the score, the criticism, or silence about a better option.
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