A class action lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania this year accuses Givebutter of adding two separate charges to every donation, a processing fee and a tip, without getting clear consent from the donor. The complaint claims both charges are added by default, that removing them requires digging through buried links and fine print, and that Givebutter’s own explanation of the fee, that it covers a third party payment processor, isn’t accurate because Givebutter processes the payments itself. None of this has been proven in court. It’s an allegation, not a finding, and it’s worth treating it that way.

I want to be upfront about something before going further. I have friends who use Givebutter and genuinely like it. I don’t know what actually happened inside that company, and I’m not going to pretend I do. My honest guess, and it is just a guess, is that this may be more of a messaging and disclosure problem than a deliberate attempt to deceive anyone. Explaining processing fees to donors is a genuinely awkward part of this business. Almost every platform in this space, us included, has to figure out how to tell someone “here’s what it actually costs to move your money” without making the moment feel transactional or ruining the emotional high of giving. That’s a hard needle to thread, and I’d rather assume a company got the threading wrong than assume bad faith I can’t actually verify.

But regardless of what’s true here, the allegations are specific enough, and familiar enough to anyone who has watched a donor’s face when they realize what they actually paid, that they’re worth sitting with.

What The Complaint Actually Alleges

Strip away the legal language and the claim is simple. A donor goes to give a gift, and by the time they reach checkout there are extra charges sitting on top of it that they never explicitly agreed to. The platform frames one of those charges as something that protects the nonprofit, a way to make sure the charity gets the full gift instead of losing a cut to payment processing. According to the lawsuit, that framing doesn’t hold up, because the platform itself is the one collecting that fee as revenue rather than passing it to a third party processor.

Whether or not the court ultimately agrees, the pattern described is one a lot of nonprofit staff will recognize from Reddit threads, Better Business Bureau complaints, and their own donors’ confused emails. Someone meant to give fifty dollars, got charged fifty four, and nobody explained why until after the fact.

Why This Isn’t Really About One Company

The more useful read here is structural rather than personal. Any platform that inserts itself between a donor and a nonprofit is making design decisions on your organization’s behalf, decisions about what’s disclosed, what’s opt out instead of opt in, and where the money actually goes. Most executive directors never see those decisions. They see a signed contract and a dashboard.

That gap is the actual risk. Not that a vendor might behave badly, but that a nonprofit has no visibility into how the vendor’s revenue model shapes the donor’s experience until something goes wrong publicly enough to make the news. We’ve written before about the psychology behind asking donors to cover fees, and the short version is that framing matters enormously. Donors are generally willing to help cover costs. They are far less willing to discover costs they didn’t agree to.

The Numbers, Clearly

Since this whole conversation is about fee transparency, it seems worth just showing ours rather than talking around it.

That’s the whole structure. Stripe handles the actual movement of money and takes its standard rate, the same rate it charges everyone, for anyone, on any platform built on Stripe Connect. Solafund takes 1.5% on top of that. Nothing is bundled, nothing is described as one thing while functioning as another, and there’s no ambiguity about who is actually processing the payment versus who is charging a platform fee.

At checkout, the donor sees a simple checkbox asking whether they’d like to cover that cost so the nonprofit receives the full gift. They can say yes or no. Either way, the nonprofit sees exactly what happened, and so does the donor.

A Simple Vendor Transparency Check

Rather than treating this as a Givebutter problem specifically, treat it as a prompt to run a quick check on whatever platform you’re using now, or whatever you’re evaluating next. Three questions do most of the work.

Who is actually processing the payment. If the answer is the platform itself rather than a named third party like Stripe, any fee framed as covering processing costs deserves a second look, since that fee is revenue for the platform rather than a pass through cost.

Is the fee opt in or opt out by default. A fee a donor has to actively choose to pay is a fundamentally different experience than a fee they have to actively find and remove. (In ours, you have to explicitly opt in, as a donor, to cover the fees.)

Can you see the checkout flow a donor sees, not just the dashboard you see. Plenty of platforms look completely reasonable from the admin side while the donor facing widget buries settings in places most people never scroll to. If your team hasn’t gone through your own donation flow as a donor recently, that’s worth doing this week regardless of what platform you’re on.

What To Look For Before You Sign Anything

If you’re evaluating a new platform, or renewing a contract with your current one, a few contract level details are worth pinning down explicitly rather than assuming. Ask for the fee structure in writing, including what happens with optional tips or covered fees, and where that money goes. Ask whether the default state of any fee toggle is on or off, and whether that default can be changed. Ask what the donor actually sees at checkout, and ask to see it yourself rather than relying on a sales deck.

This is the same instinct behind looking past the advertised price to what a platform actually costs you. The sticker price on a donation platform rarely tells you the whole story on its own.

Where This Leaves Nonprofits

The Givebutter lawsuit is still working its way through the courts, and I’d genuinely encourage anyone reading this not to treat the allegations as settled fact. I don’t know the full story, and I’m not interested in piling on a company that a lot of good organizations use and like. But nonprofits don’t need to wait for a verdict to do the useful thing, which is look honestly at their own donation flow and ask whether it would hold up to the same scrutiny.

Run the checkout yourself. Ask the fee questions in writing. Notice what’s opt in versus opt out. And if you want a point of comparison while you’re at it, ours is above. Nothing hidden in it.