iWave Pricing (2026): What It Costs Now That iWave Is Kindsight
If you googled “iWave pricing” and landed on a page quoting $4,150 a year, you are reading a fossil. iWave does not exist as a standalone company anymore. In February 2024, iWave merged with UC Innovation, the maker of the Ascend CRM, to form a new company called Kindsight. Today iwave.com 301-redirects straight to kindsight.io, where iWave is pitched as “Kindsight’s award-winning prospect research software.”
That matters for your budget because the pricing moved with the brand. Kindsight publishes a live rate card, and it does not match the numbers still circulating on Capterra, G2, and half the nonprofit software roundups on page one. We pulled the current figures directly from kindsight.io/pricing on July 14, 2026, lined them up against the stale aggregator numbers, and added the one piece almost nobody covers: what the Engage AI add-on costs on top.
This page is fee math only. If you want the feature verdict on prospect research tools, start with our donor research tools guide and the donor intelligence roundup, then come back here to budget.
The current Kindsight rate card for iWave (July 2026)
Here is what Kindsight actually publishes, verified on kindsight.io/pricing on July 14, 2026.
| Tier | Published price | Users | Live profiles | Screens | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| iWave Starter | From $4,500/yr | 1 | 750 | 1,500 | Entry tier for a solo researcher |
| iWave Professional | From $5,800/yr | 3 | 2,500 | 5,000 | Small development teams |
| iWave Premium | Custom quote | 5 | 10,000 | 20,000 | Includes 7,000 append credits |
| Engage AI add-on (Starter) | $545/yr | 1 | n/a | n/a | Generative AI layer, sold separately |
| Engage AI add-on (Professional) | $1,095/yr | 3 | n/a | n/a | Sold separately |
| Engage AI add-on (Premium) | $3,295/yr | 10 | n/a | n/a | Sold separately |
| Ascend CRM / full Fundraising Platform | Custom quote only | – | – | – | Connect portal included with Ascend |
Two things jump out from that table. First, the “from” language: $4,500 and $5,800 are starting prices, and your actual quote can climb with add-ons, data volume, and contract terms. Second, the AI is not included. If you assumed the generative AI features ride along with the base subscription, budget again. More on Engage below.
What happened to iWave: the 90-second version
The short story: Kindsight is the company formed when iWave merged with UC Innovation, announced in February 2024 via PR Newswire. UC Innovation brought Ascend, a Salesforce-based CRM for advancement teams. iWave brought the prospect research engine most fundraisers know it for, plus a generative AI layer it had picked up by acquiring NonprofitOS in October 2023. Kindsight rebranded that AI layer as Engage.
So in 2026, “buying iWave” really means buying one module of a three-part Kindsight platform:
- iWave: the prospect research and wealth screening product. This is the piece with published pricing.
- Engage: the generative AI add-on, born from NonprofitOS. Also published, priced separately.
- Ascend CRM and the full Fundraising Platform: custom quote only. The Connect donor portal comes included with Ascend.
The practical consequence: the sales conversation has changed. You are no longer talking to a point-solution vendor. You are talking to a platform company that would love to expand your contract from prospect research into CRM territory. That is not sinister, it is just worth knowing before the demo, because the platform pitch is where quotes get bigger. If you are weighing the platform question against a standalone screening vendor, our iWave vs DonorSearch comparison covers exactly that fork, and it accounts for the merger, which most comparisons still do not.
Stale aggregator numbers vs the live Kindsight rate card
Here is the part that sent us down this rabbit hole. Search “iWave pricing” and the page-one review aggregators still quote pre-rebrand figures. They contradict the vendor’s own live page.
| Tier | Aggregator-reported (stale) | Kindsight live page (verified 2026-07-14) | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $4,150/yr | From $4,500/yr | +$350/yr |
| Professional | $5,350/yr | From $5,800/yr | +$450/yr |
| Premium | Varies by listing | Custom quote | n/a |
To be fair to the aggregators: those numbers were probably accurate once. They just never got updated when iWave became Kindsight and the rate card moved. But if you carried $4,150 into your board budget and the quote comes back at $4,500 plus an AI add-on you did not know existed, that is an awkward meeting. Budget from the live vendor page, treat every third-party number as reported rather than official, and expect the final contract to land at or above the published “from” price.
What you get at each iWave tier
A quick decode of the units in that rate card, because they drive which tier you actually need.
Live profiles are the full wealth-and-philanthropy profiles you can pull on individual prospects. Starter’s 750 sounds like a lot until you are prepping a major gift portfolio review and burning 20 profiles per meeting. Screens are batch wealth screening credits, the bulk operation where you run a chunk of your donor file through the engine at once. Starter’s 1,500 covers a small file or a segment of a bigger one, not a full-database screening for a mid-sized shop.
Starter, from $4,500/yr. One user, 750 live profiles, 1,500 screens. This fits a one-person research shop or a small development office where a single gift officer doubles as the researcher. The single seat is the real constraint: no sharing logins across a team without violating terms.
Professional, from $5,800/yr. Three users, 2,500 profiles, 5,000 screens. The jump from Starter is $1,300 for triple the seats and roughly triple the volume, which makes it the obvious tier for any team where more than one person touches prospect research. On per-user math, Professional is meaningfully cheaper than Starter.
Premium, custom quote. Five users, 10,000 profiles, 20,000 screens, and 7,000 append credits (data appends to enrich your existing records). No published price, which usually signals negotiable territory. If your file size justifies Premium, everything below is your anchor: you know Professional starts at $5,800, so price the incremental volume accordingly.
For a sense of where this spend sits in a broader stack, our guide to what donor intelligence actually is breaks down the categories, and the major gift fundraising with AI guide shows where screening output feeds the pipeline.
Engage add-on pricing: the AI line item nobody covers
This is the piece missing from nearly every iWave pricing writeup we found. Kindsight’s generative AI, Engage, is not part of the iWave subscription. It is a separately priced add-on with its own three tiers:
- Engage Starter: $545/yr for 1 user
- Engage Professional: $1,095/yr for 3 users
- Engage Premium: $3,295/yr for 10 users
Engage traces back to NonprofitOS, the generative AI company iWave acquired in October 2023, a few months before the Kindsight merger. Kindsight folded it in as the AI writing and intelligence layer across the platform.
The budgeting takeaway: a solo researcher who wants iWave Starter plus the AI is really looking at $5,045/yr minimum ($4,500 + $545), not $4,500. A three-person team on Professional with Engage is at $6,895/yr minimum ($5,800 + $1,095). Those are the honest all-in floors, and they are the numbers to put in front of your finance committee.
One caution: we have verified the prices, not the value. Whether Engage’s AI output justifies its line item for your team is a feature question, and this page deliberately stays out of feature verdicts. Test it in the demo with your own donor scenarios before you sign for it.
What to negotiate before you sign
Kindsight publishes floors, not ceilings, so there is room to work. Going into the sales call:
- Anchor on the published “from” price. The rep knows you can see $4,500 and $5,800 on their own site. Any quote above that needs an itemized justification: which add-on, which volume bump, which service tier.
- Ask what happens when you exhaust profiles or screens mid-contract. Overage pricing and mid-term top-ups are exactly the kind of terms that never appear on pricing pages. Get the per-unit cost in writing.
- Price Engage separately, and ask for it bundled. Since Engage is a distinct line item, it is natural discount material. A rep trying to close an iWave deal has an obvious lever: throw in Engage Starter for year one.
- If they pitch Ascend or the full platform, slow down. Platform pricing is custom quote only, which means the number is whatever the conversation supports. Do not let a prospect research purchase quietly become a CRM migration decision. Those are different projects with different stakeholders.
- Ask about multi-year terms. Vendors coming off a rebrand tend to value logo retention. We have no verified figures on Kindsight’s multi-year discounting, so treat this purely as a question to ask, not a promise.
How this compares to the alternatives, briefly
The obvious head-to-head is DonorSearch, which takes the opposite pricing posture: it publishes nothing at all. Its pricing page is a demo-request form, and every dollar figure you see for it online is third-party reported. That makes iWave the more transparent option of the two on price alone, whatever you conclude on features. Our full iWave vs DonorSearch breakdown covers the feature and data comparison post-merger, our DonorSearch review has the hands-on verdict, and our DonorSearch pricing guide consolidates the reported quote ranges if you want the budgeting view from that side.
Verdict: budget $4,500 to $7,000 for most teams, and ignore the aggregators
iWave pricing in 2026 is Kindsight pricing, full stop. The published floors are $4,500/yr for a solo seat and $5,800/yr for a three-seat team, with the Engage AI add-on stacking $545 to $3,295/yr on top. For most small-to-mid development shops, an honest all-in budget lands between $4,500 and $7,000 per year depending on seats and whether you take the AI.
The stale $4,150 figure still ranking on review sites is the cautionary tale here: it is off by $350 on the entry tier and silent on the AI add-on entirely. Verify on kindsight.io, walk into the demo with the published floors as your anchor, and make the rep earn every dollar above them.
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