Zeffy Review

Reviewed by Tom · Founder & lead reviewer

The problem it solves

Fundraising software has normalised a strange arrangement. A supporter decides to give a hundred dollars to a cause. The organisation banks something less, because a platform took a cut and a card processor took another, and the difference is treated as the cost of doing business.

For a large organisation that spread is a budget line. For a small one it is programme money. A volunteer-run food bank moving a few tens of thousands a year through donation forms is losing, in fees, something close to the cost of the thing it exists to do. The treasurer knows the number. There has historically been nothing to do about it except shop between platforms taking slightly different percentages.

Zeffy's answer is to change who pays for the software. The nonprofit pays nothing - not a subscription, not a platform cut, and, unusually, not the card processing fee either. The platform is funded by optional tips that donors can add on top of their gift at checkout. When a donor gives a hundred dollars, the organisation receives a hundred dollars.

Who it is built for

Registered nonprofits in the US and Canada, small to mid-sized, where the finance function is a treasurer with a day job and the current fundraising stack is two or three paid tools that do not talk to each other. That is the profile the product is shaped around, and the group for whom the arithmetic is least arguable.

It suits the organisation that runs a recognisable annual cycle: a donation page that ticks over quietly, one or two events with tickets to sell, a raffle, a membership list, and a December push. Zeffy covers all of those in one place, which for a small team matters almost as much as the fee saving - it is one login and one donor list instead of four.

The ceiling is real and the entry states it plainly. A large organisation with a major-gifts pipeline, grant reporting obligations, and a Salesforce instance at the centre of its operations will feel the limits of a free product quickly. For that organisation Zeffy is worth considering as a supplement for public-facing campaigns, not as the system of record.

Geography is the hard gate: US and Canadian registered nonprofits only. Organisations elsewhere cannot use it, regardless of fit.

How the money model actually works

The mechanism deserves a plain explanation, because it is the thing people assume must have a catch. At checkout, alongside their donation, the donor is shown a contribution to Zeffy itself. It arrives with a suggested amount already filled in. The donor can change it, including to zero, and the donation proceeds either way.

Those tips fund the platform and, importantly, the payment processing. That last part is what makes the model unusual rather than merely cheap. Plenty of platforms waive their own fee and pass the card processor's charge through to the organisation; the entry's claim here is that processing is covered too.

The caveat is the same fact stated from the donor's side. A pre-filled suggested amount is a nudge, and some donors do not notice they can set it to zero. The cons list names this directly: expect occasional confusion and the odd puzzled email to the treasurer. Organisations that add one clear sentence to their donation page explaining what the tip is and that it is optional mostly make the problem go away.

That sentence is not merely good manners. A nonprofit's donation page is a place where trust is the entire product, and a supporter who feels they were nudged into a charge they did not understand has been lost for a sum far smaller than their next gift.

Pricing structure explained

There is no pricing table to read, which makes this the shortest section in any review on this site: the entry lists the cost as free, with optional donor tips funding the platform, and no subscription or platform cut on the organisation's side.

Because free is the claim that most deserves verification, the useful thing is not a price comparison but a checklist. Run one campaign and check these against your bank statement rather than the marketing page.

• What landed in the bank. Compare gross donations recorded in the platform against the deposit. That single subtraction answers the question the marketing cannot.
• Whether processing was genuinely covered. This is the unusual part of the claim. Look for any card-processing deduction at all on a test transaction before you move a campaign across.
• What the donor saw. Complete a real donation on your own form, with your own card. Read the tip screen the way a seventy-year-old supporter would read it.
• Payout timing. Free software still has to move money on a schedule. Know how many days elapse between a gift and funds available, before an event weekend depends on it.
• What happens to refunds and chargebacks. Ask before you need to know. Every payment system has an answer and it is rarely on the front page.

Core features: donation forms and recurring giving

The donation form is the centre of the product: embeddable on your own site or hosted as a standalone page, with suggested amounts, one-off and recurring options, and cover-the-fee style prompts. For most small organisations this replaces a paid form tool and a chunk of website work.

Recurring giving is the feature worth deliberate attention, because it is where a small organisation's fee savings compound. A monthly donor set up once generates twelve transactions a year, every one of which would have been shaved by a percentage on a conventional platform. If you are going to invest effort anywhere in the setup, invest it in making the monthly option the obvious choice on the form.

The design freedom is modest compared with a paid marketing platform - this is a form builder, not a landing-page designer. In practice that is the right trade for the audience. A clear form that works on a phone and does not lose people at the third field outperforms an elaborate one, and the most common cause of an abandoned donation is a checkout that asked for too much.

Core features: events, ticketing, raffles and memberships

This is the part of the toolkit that is broader than free software has any obligation to be. Event ticketing with QR check-in at the door, raffles and auctions, peer-to-peer campaigns where supporters fundraise on your behalf, and memberships with renewals - each of which a small nonprofit typically pays for separately or does on paper.

Event ticketing is where the fee model bites hardest in your favour. Ticketed events run real money through a platform in a short window, and a percentage on a four-hundred-seat gala is a meaningful sum. The QR check-in matters for a different reason: it removes the printed list and the volunteer with a highlighter at the door, which is a staffing saving, not a software one.

Peer-to-peer deserves realistic expectations. The feature works, but peer-to-peer fundraising succeeds or fails on whether your supporters actually ask their networks, which is a relationship problem rather than a software one. A platform that offers it for free is worth trying precisely because the experiment costs nothing but the effort.

Memberships and renewals are the least glamorous and often the most useful: a list of people who pay annually, a reminder when they lapse, and a record of who is current. Small organisations run that on spreadsheets for years longer than they should.

Core features: donor records and receipting

A donor database is included, which spares a small team a separate CRM subscription. Set expectations at the right level: this is a record of who gave what and when, with the ability to segment and export, not a fundraising CRM with pipeline management and relationship histories.

For an organisation whose donor management currently lives in a spreadsheet, that is a clear upgrade - the records are created by the act of donating rather than by somebody remembering to type them in, which is the failure mode of every spreadsheet.

Automatic tax receipting is the feature volunteer treasurers will notice most. Receipts issued at the point of donation, and the annual summaries that supporters ask for in the spring, are hours of work that simply stop existing. The entry singles this out, and it is the right thing to single out: it is the one feature that saves time every single campaign rather than at set-up.

One caution on records. Because the database is where donor history accumulates, it is the thing you would most miss if you ever left. Export it on a schedule - quarterly is ample - and keep the file somewhere the organisation controls. That is ordinary hygiene with any platform, free or paid.

Integrations and data export

Integration depth is the honest weak point, and the entry says so: feature depth is small-nonprofit grade, and organisations needing advanced workflows and deep third-party connections will feel the ceiling. If your operation is built around a Salesforce instance, assume Zeffy sits beside it rather than inside it.

For most small organisations the practical integration question is narrower: does the donation data get into the books without re-typing? Plan on export-and-import as the working assumption, and check whether the export format suits whoever does your bookkeeping. If that person uses QuickBooks Online or FreshBooks, a monthly export is a small enough chore to be sustainable.

Data export itself is the more important right, and the reason a free product is less risky than it sounds. Donor records and transaction history export to common formats, which means the organisation's asset - its list - is portable. Configuration is not: forms, campaigns and receipting settings are set-up work that would be rebuilt elsewhere. Since the set-up is measured in an afternoon, that is a low lock-in risk by the standards of this category.

Where you need to collect structured information that is not a donation - grant applications, volunteer intake, programme forms - Jotform handles that better and can run alongside.

Onboarding and support

Set-up is form-builder simple, and the eligibility check is the only real gate: you need to be a registered nonprofit in the US or Canada, and the verification takes as long as verification takes. Start it before the week of your campaign.

The recommended approach is the one the entry implies and the one that costs nothing: run a single campaign on Zeffy beside your existing platform rather than migrating everything. One donation form, one month, then compare deposits. A free product makes a parallel trial genuinely free, which is not true of any paid competitor, and it converts the whole question from a judgement into a measurement.

Support is rated moderately. Documentation and email support exist; a dedicated account manager does not, and should not be expected at this price. For a volunteer treasurer the practical implication is to do the set-up work in a quiet week rather than the night before an event, so that a slow support reply is an inconvenience rather than a crisis.

Limits and dealbreakers

Three limits are firm, and one is a matter of conduct rather than capability.

• Geography. US and Canadian registered nonprofits only. There is no workaround and no partial version for organisations elsewhere.
• Feature ceiling. Major-gift pipelines, grant management, complex CRM workflows and deep integrations are outside what the entry claims. A large organisation should evaluate it as a supplement, not a replacement.
• The tip prompt. Pre-selected by default and a source of occasional donor confusion. Manageable with one explaining line on your page, but it is your donors who meet it, so the responsibility for clarity sits with you.
• Dependence on a model, not a price. The commercial question with any free platform is whether the funding model holds. Export your donor records regularly so that the answer never becomes your problem.

Alternatives and adjacent tools

There is no second nonprofit platform in this catalogue, so the honest comparison set is the one you already pay for - and the comparison is a subtraction, not a feature matrix. Take last year's gross donations, take what actually reached the bank, and ask what that difference bought you. Sometimes the answer is a genuine CRM and a support line, and the fee is fair. Often it is a form.

The adjacent tools in this catalogue address the parts Zeffy does not. Jotform covers structured intake that is not fundraising: volunteer sign-ups, grant applications, programme registrations, all of which small organisations otherwise run on email. QuickBooks Online or FreshBooks remain the accounting side - Zeffy records what came in, but the books, the restricted-fund tracking and the annual report are a separate job.

And for paying money out rather than taking it in, Melio covers the vendor side that every organisation running events discovers it has: caterers, printers, venue deposits, all currently being paid by cheque by the same volunteer who is trying to reconcile the donations.

Frequently asked questions

Is it genuinely free, including card fees? That is the claim in the entry - no subscription, no platform cut, and processing costs covered, funded by optional donor tips. It is also exactly the claim to verify yourself on a single test transaction before moving a campaign across. Compare the deposit to the gross.

Who can use it? Registered nonprofits in the US and Canada. Organisations outside those two countries are not eligible.

What is the tip, and can donors decline it? It is an optional contribution to Zeffy shown at checkout with a suggested amount pre-filled. Donors can set it to zero and their donation still goes through in full. Because it is pre-filled, some donors miss that - one clear line on your donation page is the recommended fix.

Will it replace our donor CRM? For a small organisation currently using a spreadsheet, yes, comfortably. For one running a major-gifts programme with pipelines and grant reporting, no - treat it as a public-facing fundraising layer beside your existing system.

Does it handle events and memberships, or only donations? Both, along with raffles, peer-to-peer campaigns and automatic tax receipting. The breadth is one of the main reasons to consider it, since it collapses several separate subscriptions for a small team.

What is the catch? The three real ones are geography, feature depth, and the donor-facing tip prompt. The one that is not a catch but deserves attention anyway is ordinary prudence with any free platform: export your donor list on a schedule so the organisation always holds its own data.

Bottom line

For a small or mid-sized registered nonprofit in the US or Canada, the case for testing Zeffy is unusually simple, because a parallel trial costs nothing and produces a number rather than an opinion. Run one campaign beside your current platform and compare what reaches the bank account. If the difference is what the entry describes, the decision has been made for you.

The ceiling is real. Major gifts, grant workflows and deep integrations are not what this product claims to do, and a larger organisation should size it as a supplement rather than a system of record. The feature breadth at the small end - forms, ticketing, raffles, memberships, receipting, donor records - is nonetheless wider than most paid tools a small team can afford.

The obligation that comes with it is the tip prompt. It is the fair price of free, but only if no supporter feels they were nudged into something they did not understand. Explain it in one sentence on your page and the model is an honest trade. Leave it unexplained and you have saved fees at the expense of the only asset a nonprofit really has.

Best for

Small and mid-sized nonprofits in the US or Canada tired of watching 3-5% of every donation disappear into platform and processing fees.