Is Zeffy Really Free? The Donor-Tip Math Nobody Shows

Somewhere between the finance report and new business, a board member holds up a phone: a nonprofit across town moved its giving to Zeffy and pays nothing. Why are we paying fees? If you are the director who has to answer, "is Zeffy really free" is now your homework, and it deserves better than a defensive shrug. The short version: yes, Zeffy charges your organization nothing, and that part of the pitch holds up. The complete version is about who does pay, how much, and whether your donors realize it. Zeffy publishes some of those numbers itself. Here they are, with the math worked out.

Is Zeffy really free for your organization? Yes.

Start with the part your board member got right. Zeffy charges nonprofits no subscription and no platform fee, and it covers card processing out of its own pocket. Its published model is 0% platform fee, funded by donor tips (Zeffy, verified Jun 2026). When a supporter gives $100 through a Zeffy form, $100 lands in your account. There is no premium tier you secretly need, no processing line item on your statement, no clawback in the fine print.

Do not walk into the boardroom and argue otherwise. Thousands of organizations run on Zeffy and reconcile their books exactly as advertised. If the question stopped at your income statement, the answer would stop here.

It does not stop here, because engineers and support staff do not work for free, and Stripe does not process cards for free. The money comes from somewhere. It comes from your donors.

How does Zeffy make money with no fees?

At checkout, after a donor enters a gift amount, Zeffy asks for an optional contribution on top: a tip that goes to Zeffy, not to your organization. Those tips are the entire business model. They pay for the product, the support team, and the card processing Zeffy absorbs on your behalf.

There is nothing scandalous about this. Tip-funded pricing is an established pattern, and several fundraising platforms run a version of it. But notice what the model does structurally: it moves the cost of fundraising software off your income statement and into your donors' checkout flow. Your books say $0 because the expense never touches them. The cost did not disappear; it changed payers.

The floor on that cost is easy to estimate. Stripe's published online card rate is 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, so on a typical gift, tips have to cover roughly three percent before Zeffy earns its first cent of margin. Everything above that funds the company.

What do Zeffy's own tip numbers say?

Zeffy has published two data points worth bringing to your board, both from its own materials:

• In a June 2023 blog post, Zeffy reported that 60% of donors tip, with tips averaging 4%.
• In May 2026, Zeffy said two out of three donors tip.

Two things stand out. First, the share of donors tipping rose between the two statements, which tells you the checkout is getting better at asking. Second, these are the friendliest numbers available: they come from the company with the strongest incentive to present tipping as painless. Treat them as the floor of your estimate, not the ceiling.

A fairness note your board will appreciate: search results and competitor posts repeat much higher "average tip" figures, and most of them trace back to no live Zeffy source. Skip them. Use the dated, attributable numbers above; your answer should survive a follow-up question from the one trustee who checks citations.

What have third parties measured?

4aGoodCause, a fundraising platform that competes with Zeffy, ran Zeffy's checkout itself and measured an effective donor cost of 12.75%: for every $100 a donor set out to give, the donor actually paid $112.75. Weigh the source honestly. A competitor's measurement is not a neutral audit. It is, however, dated, attributed, and methodologically simple (run the checkout, record what it proposes), and it measures something Zeffy's averages do not show: what the flow suggests before a donor intervenes.

The gap between "tips average 4%" and "a measured 12.75% donor cost" is the gap between what donors settle on and what the checkout proposes. Both numbers can be true at the same time. Bring both to the meeting and let the board weigh them.

The donor-tip math, worked out

Here is a $100 gift under each sourced scenario:

Now scale it to a number that looks like your annual report. Suppose your supporters give $100,000 in card donations over a year:

• At Zeffy's own June 2023 figures (60% of donors tipping, tips averaging 4%), donors add roughly $2,400 on top of their gifts.
• At the 12.75% effective cost 4aGoodCause measured, donors pay an extra $12,750.

Either way, the money is real, it came out of the wallets of people giving to your mission, and none of it reaches your programs. Whether that beats paying visible fees yourself is a legitimate question, and the answer depends on your volume, your average gift size, and your donors. Run your actual numbers through the donor tip calculator and the nonprofit fee calculator, and put both totals side by side in the board packet. That single page usually settles the discussion faster than any vendor argument.

Will your donors notice, and will they mind?

Some will, most will not, and you cannot control which. The risks worth naming out loud:

• A donor who believes the tip supported your mission later learns it went to a software company. The disappointment lands on you, because your name is on the receipt.
• A donor who spots $112.75 on a card statement for what they remember as a $100 gift emails your office, not Zeffy's. Fielding those messages is the operational cost of "free."
• Major donors and foundation staff read checkout flows professionally. They will recognize the model instantly and form a view about an organization that routes its software costs to supporters.

None of this is fatal. Plenty of organizations accept the trade with open eyes, and plenty of donors tip cheerfully because they like the idea of the charity keeping every dollar. The mistake is not the trade itself; it is making the trade without showing the board the donor side of the ledger.

When is Zeffy the right choice?

Be fair in the board packet, because someone will notice if you are not. Zeffy is a defensible pick when three things are true at once: your giving is entirely online, your budget genuinely cannot absorb any software line item, and your board is comfortable asking donors to fund the platform once it understands the model. A small all-volunteer animal rescue running two online campaigns a year fits that description. So does a PTA collecting field-trip payments from families who already know the treasurer by name.

The fit weakens as gifts get larger and donor relationships get longer. A tip scales with the gift: 4% of a $25 gift is a dollar nobody thinks twice about, while the same suggestion on a $5,000 year-end gift sends $200 of donor money to a software company in your organization's name. It weakens further the moment in-person giving enters the picture, because the phone-only limitation stops being a footnote and becomes the whole conversation.

Does Zeffy work for in-person giving?

Here the answer narrows. Zeffy sells no hardware. Its in-person option is tap to pay on a phone running the Zeffy app: a volunteer enters the amount, the donor taps a card or phone against the device, done. For a staffed table at a gala or a 5K registration desk, that genuinely works, and the phone is hardware you already own.

What it cannot cover is everything unattended: a giving station in the lobby, a donation kiosk by the door during services, a fixed giving point that keeps working while your whole team is in the program room. A phone needs a person holding it, and the person's phone goes home at night. If walk-up giving is part of how your organization collects (and for most community organizations it is the difference between catching an impulse gift and losing it), then "free" also means "phone-only," and the gap is measured in the gifts that happen when nobody is standing there.

The transparent version of the same model

Full disclosure before this section: Givebear publishes this blog and competes with Zeffy, so judge what follows accordingly.

Givebear runs on the same underlying insight (donors are often willing to cover the platform's cost) with one structural difference: the fallback is published. The whole price is one sentence: $0/month with a 0% platform fee when donors tip (4.9% when a donor declines, one flat rate online, at kiosks, and on memberships), plus Stripe card processing at cost. When a donor tips, your organization pays no platform fee. When a donor declines, a published rate applies (4.9% on the free plan) instead of the cost silently shifting to whoever tips next. Your finance committee can model the worst case from the pricing page before signing anything, which is exactly the test a tip-funded model without a published fallback cannot pass.

The kiosk line deserves one more sentence, because it is the part phone-only platforms cannot answer: the hardware is a one-time purchase running Stripe Terminal, gifts sync to the same donor records as your online giving, and there is no per-device monthly bill. The full feature-by-feature breakdown lives on the Zeffy comparison page.

How to answer your board

You do not need to win an argument; you need to give an answer that survives follow-up questions. Something like this:

Every number in that paragraph is dated and attributable, which is the standard worth holding any vendor to, this one included: every cost named, every figure dated, the donor's experience priced in alongside yours. "Free" that cannot pass those tests is not free. It is a fee you have not located yet.