Our Pricing Philosophy: Fairness, Transparency, and Alignment with Impact
Gudsy’s pricing model is designed to align with nonprofit success — combining a low per-seat subscription and a flat $1 success fee to ensure accessibility, fairness, and transparency across organizations of all sizes.
Our Pricing Philosophy: Fairness, Transparency, and Alignment with Impact
At Gudsy, pricing isn’t just a business decision — it’s a reflection of our ethos.
We exist to make social good navigable and accessible, not gated behind costly software tiers or opaque percentage cuts.
Our pricing structure — a modest per-seat subscription combined with a flat $1 success fee — was carefully designed to balance fairness, accessibility, and sustainability.
Why We Have a Subscription Model
The Gudsy platform provides a significant “always-on” technology infrastructure — one that serves both the public and registered users, even before any nonprofit activates its account.
The base subscription helps sustain that infrastructure:
- It keeps nonprofit profiles visible and searchable at all times.
- It supports the content and tools available freely to the general public.
- It enables the continual maintenance of semantic search, AI-assisted discovery, and other high-availability services.
By using a per-seat model, we lower barriers for smaller nonprofits, while ensuring proportional fairness:
Smaller organizations pay only for what they need.
Larger organizations with bigger teams pay more — in proportion to their use and benefit.
This model ensures that access to Gudsy remains equitable, sustainable, and inclusive — even for grassroots nonprofits with limited budgets.
Why We Added a $1 Success Fee
Beyond the base infrastructure, a significant part of Gudsy’s technology cost is usage-driven — data storage, search indexing, analytics, and secure transaction handling.
We explored several ways to cover these variable costs, and each came with trade-offs:
- A flat monthly fee for everyone would unfairly penalize smaller nonprofits that use fewer resources.
- A usage-based model (charging for every click or view) would be cumbersome, unpredictable, and administratively heavy.
- A percentage-based donation fee (like many platforms use) would misrepresent our actual cost structure, since the technology cost of processing a $10 donation is virtually identical to a $1,000 one.
Instead, we chose a simple, outcome-based model — a $1 success fee on each successful donation or volunteer match.
This creates an alignment of incentives between Gudsy and the nonprofits we serve:
- We succeed only when you do.
- We don’t charge for attempts, interactions, or engagement that don’t lead to results.
- We don’t profit disproportionately from larger donations.
In essence, Gudsy’s model rewards impact, not activity — and outcomes, not overhead.
Why Not Percentage-Based Fees?
Percentage fees are easy to justify when costs scale with transaction size.
But in digital infrastructure, they don’t.
The cost of securely facilitating a $10 donation is roughly the same as a $1,000 donation — yet most fundraising platforms still take a percentage cut that grows with the donation amount.
We view that as fundamentally misaligned with the principles of transparency and fairness.
Yes, we acknowledge that on smaller donations, our $1 success fee can feel proportionally higher — but we encourage nonprofits to see it in context.
Unlike standalone donation processors or website integrations, Gudsy includes everything else — discovery, outreach, engagement, community-building, and analytics — all without additional overhead.
For most nonprofits, the true per-donation cost of maintaining similar capabilities independently would be far higher.
Why Nonprofits Connect Their Own Payment Processors
Another key design choice was letting nonprofits connect their own payment processors — starting with PayPal, and soon expanding to others.
This was shaped by consistent feedback from nonprofit communities: concerns over delayed fund access, high processing fees, and lack of transparency from intermediaries.
On Gudsy:
- Nonprofits receive donations directly into their connected account.
- Registered 501(c)(3) organizations may qualify for lower nonprofit processing rates through PayPal.
- Funds are available instantly, and nonprofits retain full control of their data and reporting.
- Integrations with tools like QuickBooks or other financial platforms continue seamlessly.
This approach gives nonprofits complete ownership — of their funds, their donor relationships, and their operations — which aligns perfectly with our philosophy of empowerment through transparency.
A Philosophy Rooted in Fairness and Empowerment
Our pricing model wasn’t designed to maximize revenue.
It was designed to minimize barriers and maximize impact.
These prices are the bare minimum to sustain and evolve Gudsy’s infrastructure while keeping the platform open and equitable for all.
They reflect our commitment to creating a model where technology amplifies mission, not margin.
Gudsy’s pricing exists for one reason: To keep the lights on — so every nonprofit can shine brighter.