A website. A donation platform. A donor database. An email tool. Four bills, four logins, and somebody reconciling them by hand at the end of every month. We design and build one system that does all of it, shaped around how your charity actually runs and you own it outright. The site, the code, the donor list.
A rough guide before you read further: if you need a new website anyway, this usually costs about the same as buying one and renting a donation platform separately. If your website is fine and you only want the giving side, you are probably better off where you are. The calculator further down works it out on your numbers, and will say so either way.
A website. A donation platform. A donor database. An email tool. Four bills, four logins, and somebody reconciling them by hand at the end of every month. We design and build one system that does all of it, shaped around how your charity actually runs and you own it outright. The site, the code, the donor list.
The website
01
You still need somewhere a supporter can land, read what you actually do, and decide to trust you. You buy that separately: a charity website from a UK agency runs roughly £3,000–£8,000, plus £500–£1,500 a year to keep it alive. That cost never appears in a platform comparison, because the platform is not the one charging it.
Data
02
You can usually export a spreadsheet. What you cannot do is build on it — segment properly, trigger the right follow-up, join giving history to your own programme records — because the system it lives in isn't yours.
The website
03
JustGiving charges 5% of every pound of Gift Aid it processes for you — around £1,100 a year on £150,000 of giving, for as long as you use it. You can opt out and make the claim yourself, if you have someone who can. It is the one percentage still quietly running in the background.
Operations
04
Zakat that has to stay ring-fenced. Restricted funds your trustees ask about at every meeting. Sponsorship, seasonal programmes, offline donations, bank reconciliation, your Gift Aid claim. No hosted platform in this market does any of it. It lives in spreadsheets — and the spreadsheets are the actual job.
And the cost of leaving it. None of this gets easier by waiting. Every year there is more donor history sitting in someone else's system, so the move only gets bigger. The reconciliation grows with your income, not with your staff. And the one that costs real money: Gift Aid goes unclaimed, or gets claimed short, because the records needed to prove it are spread across four places that were never designed to agree with each other.
The same ten questions, answered both ways
The website itself
Your own platform
Designed and built for you as part of the price — every public page, with giving built in.
A hosted platform
You keep whatever site you have, and send donors off it to give.
Ongoing cost
Your own platform
Your payment processor's fee, and one fixed monthly fee for the work we do. Nothing taken from your Gift Aid.
A hosted platform
The processor's fee, a monthly subscription, and typically a percentage of the Gift Aid they process.
Donor data
Your own platform
Held in your own system. Yours to segment, message and report on.
A hosted platform
Held in theirs. Exportable, but not something you can build on.
Where traffic lands
Your own platform
Your domain. Every appeal and fundraiser builds your own audience and search presence.
A hosted platform
Their domain. The visit, and the credit for it, belongs to the platform.
Gift Aid
Your own platform
Declarations captured at checkout and exported in the format HMRC expects
A hosted platform
Handled for you, in the shape the platform has decided on.
Campaign types
Your own platform
Built to match how you actually operate — Zakat rules, seasonal programmes, sponsorship.
A hosted platform
Whatever the platform supports. Anything else lives in a spreadsheet.
Branding
Your own platform
Your logo and colors carried through the whole site, down to the checkout.
A hosted platform
Your logo inside their layout, alongside their branding.
Working with AI tools
Your own platform
Your data is yours to point Claude or ChatGPT at, and we set it up and train your team to do it
A hosted platform
Limited to the exports and reports the platform chooses to give you.
Changing provider
Your own platform
You already hold the code. Move it, or bring it in-house.
A hosted platform
A migration: rebuild elsewhere and hope the donor data survives.
Cost over three years
Your own platform
A fixed build, then a fixed monthly fee — with the website inside it.
A hosted platform
Subscription, plus a share of Gift Aid, plus the website you still have to buy and maintain separately.
The website itself
Designed and built for you as part of the price — every public page, with giving built in.
You keep whatever site you have, and send donors off it to give.
Ongoing cost
Your payment processor's fee, and one fixed monthly fee for the work we do. Nothing taken from your Gift Aid.
The processor's fee, a monthly subscription, and typically a percentage of the Gift Aid they process.
Donor data
Held in your own system. Yours to segment, message and report on.
Held in theirs. Exportable, but not something you can build on.
Where traffic lands
Your domain. Every appeal and fundraiser builds your own audience and search presence.
Their domain. The visit, and the credit for it, belongs to the platform.
Gift Aid
Declarations captured at checkout and exported in the format HMRC expects
Handled for you, in the shape the platform has decided on.
Campaign types
Built to match how you actually operate — Zakat rules, seasonal programmes, sponsorship.
Whatever the platform supports. Anything else lives in a spreadsheet.
Branding
Your logo and colors carried through the whole site, down to the checkout.
Your logo inside their layout, alongside their branding.
Working with AI tools
Your data is yours to point Claude or ChatGPT at, and we set it up and train your team to do it
Limited to the exports and reports the platform chooses to give you.
Changing provider
You already hold the code. Move it, or bring it in-house.
A migration: rebuild elsewhere and hope the donor data survives.
Cost over three years
A fixed build, then a fixed monthly fee — with the website inside it.
Subscription, plus a share of Gift Aid, plus the website you still have to buy and maintain separately.
If that table already reads like your charity, the next step is a conversation not the rest of this page.
Book A Discovery Call
This is not a prototype. Each capability below is in service at a UK charity we built for. When we scope your platform we start from working software and shape it to your operations — which is why the price is what it is.
One view of the whole charity. Money in, where it came from, what is waiting to be claimed on the screen your team opens first each morning.
Give in a few taps, on any device, without leaving your website.
Supporters set up a regular gift, then pause, restart, change the amount or cancel it themselves without emailing your office.
The declaration is collected as part of the donation, so you are not chasing it afterwards.
Donors are offered the chance to cover the cost of their own gift. See below for what this does to your income.
Give quietly, or in someone's name, with a message attached.
A proper PDF receipt is issued the moment a gift succeeds, and stays in the donor's account.
Gift Aid and cost-cover, asked once. A £50 gift becomes £62.50 to the appeal, and the donor is offered the chance to cover processing so nothing is taken out of it
A proper receipt the moment the gift succeeds. Gift Aid is shown on the confirmation, and the receipt is emailed to the donor automatically.
Create and change appeals — images, story, what a gift provides, suggested amounts, FAQs — without a developer.
Supporters browse by where the work happens, not just by cause.
Anyone can raise for you on your own site: their story, their photo, their target, their progress. You approve, monitor and close them.
Qurbani and similar programmes, with limits on how much can be sold and a tracker for fulfilling each one.
Publish what the money did, with photographs and locations, linked back to the appeal that funded it.
Supporter fundraising on your own domain. Their story and their target — but the traffic, the supporter records and the Gift Aid all come to you.
Seasonal programmes that know their own limits. Options close when they sell out, and fulfilment is tracked per share.
Produce your claim in the format HMRC expects, rather than assembling it by hand.
Zakat is recorded apart from Sadaqah and general giving, and never pooled with it.
Distributions record who was reached and the type of support. Appeals that Zakat may not fund are refused automatically.
Track what each fund holds, record spending against it, and see balances by country — so restricted money stays restricted.
Import your bank entries and match them against what the platform recorded
Donors see what was received and distributed, with no personal details of recipients.
Log bank transfers, cash and cheques with a reference, so your totals reflect everything you actually received.
Export the year's records when your auditors or trustees ask for them.
Your Gift Aid claim, assembled as you go. Declarations are captured at the point of giving, missing addresses are flagged, and the claim exports in the layout HMRC accepts.
Cash and bank transfers land in the same totals. Log it once with a reference, and it appears in your reports, your Gift Aid claim and the fund balance like any card payment.
Zakat that cannot be spent wrongly. Held apart from all other giving, recorded against who it reached, and blocked from ineligible appeals automatically.
Restricted funds, visibly restricted. What each fund holds, what has been committed, and how it reconciles to your bank.
Every gift, every regular donation, every Gift Aid declaration, in one place, searchable.
Contacts, segments, tags, templates, campaigns and automated sequences — with unsubscribes handled properly. No separate subscription.
See who started giving and stopped, so you can follow up.
Send supporters a report on the specific thing their money paid for.
Give each person the access their role needs, and no more.
Export or delete a supporter's data when they ask, as the law requires.
The whole relationship on one screen. Giving history, Gift Aid status and the segments they belong to.
Segments that keep themselves up to date. Everyone who gave Zakat but never declared Gift Aid is a list you can email today.
Individual sponsorships, sponsor-to-beneficiary relationships, and structured progress reports that go back to the sponsor.
Food packs, cash distributions and livelihood projects — recorded by location, with beneficiary records and an audit trail.
Overseas partners submit cases through a form in English or Arabic, right-to-left, with your approval step before anything is published.
The report a sponsor is promised, on time. Built around what your programme actually tracks — and it tells you what is due before the sponsor has to ask.
Overseas partners submit in their own language. English or Arabic, right-to-left, with your approval step before anything reaches a donor.
Most of the administrative work in a small charity is not entering data. It is reconciling it — what the bank says against what the platform says against what the spreadsheet says. It is slow, it is unrewarding, and it is where the errors live. Because your data sits in one system that you own, in a clean and consistent shape, your team can point Claude or ChatGPT at it and ask questions in plain English. We set that up as part of the build, and we train your staff to use it.
Ask
01
An answer from live data, without anyone building a report or exporting a spreadsheet first.
Reconcile
02
The job that takes a finance volunteer a weekend. We do exactly this on the charities we run — matching a payment processor against a fees spreadsheet against a register, and finding where they disagree.
Tidy
03
Pulling several years of donor records into one clean Gift Aid claim, catching the duplicates and the missing addresses before HMRC does.
Draft
04
Thank-yous and impact reports written against what actually happened, not a template with the numbers typed in by hand.
Plain questions, answered from live data. No report to build, no export to open first — and the follow-up is the one that finds money.
To be clear about what this is not: it is not a chatbot on your website. It is your own data, held in a shape an assistant can actually work with, plus the training to use it — which is only possible because the system belongs to you.
At checkout, the donor is asked whether they would like to add a small amount to cover the cost of processing their gift. Most say yes — because the money is going to the charity they have just chosen to support.
+3%
The increase in donation income we measured after moving to a voluntary contribution model on the charity platforms we run.
We should be straight about this one: it is not a trick only we know. It is how JustGiving replaced its platform fee, and LaunchGood reports that most supporters leave a tip. The model is now standard across the sector.
What the number shows is narrower, and more useful: we have run it, measured it, and know how to word it so it lifts income rather than irritating people. On your own platform you also keep all of it, and you decide the wording, the default, and whether it appears at all.
There is no account to create, no plan to choose, no set of features you have to fit your charity around. We start by understanding how your charity actually runs, and build to that. Two charities on our platform can look and behave completely differently, because they are different charities.
Every route in — website, cash, bank transfer, standing orders, mosque collections, community fundraisers. We map the lot, including the parts that currently live in someone's spreadsheet.
Zakat policy, restricted funds, Gift Aid, your reporting duties to trustees, funders and the Charity Commission.
Sponsorship, distributions, seasonal appeals, overseas partners. This is where hosted platforms fail charities, and where most of the custom build goes.
The pages you actually need, what a first-time visitor has to understand in ten seconds, and how your logo and colours should carry across the site.
Your finance lead sees reconciliation. Your comms person sees donors and campaigns. Trustees get the summary they need. No one sees more than their role requires.
You see exactly what is being built before anything is built. Nothing starts until you have signed it off.
You review working software as it comes together, not a slide deck at the end.
We have built and tested this across three UK charities. What that bought us is the awkward half of the job — the parts that only surface once real money and real donors are involved.
Gift Aid claims that have to satisfy HMRC. Zakat that has to stay ring-fenced. Seasonal appeals that sell out mid-campaign. Restricted funds that trustees ask about. Bank transfers that have to land in the same totals as card payments. Two examples of what that meant in practice:
Seasonal programme
01
One charity runs a sacrifice programme across six countries. Each animal is sold in shares, and selling has to stop the moment the shares are gone — you cannot take money for an animal that does not exist. That was a spreadsheet, checked by hand against donations as they arrived. Now the option closes itself at the cap, and the fulfilment list — every donor, every name, every share — comes out of the system instead of being rebuilt each season.
Gift Aid
02
Another had its giving history split across a finance spreadsheet, an old platform's export and a bank statement. Turning that into one claim HMRC will accept is the sort of job that gets postponed until it is nearly out of time, and it is where charities quietly lose money. It is now one export, with the missing addresses flagged before they reach HMRC rather than after.
We have not named them on this page — a charity's fundraising operation is its own business, and we would not put yours on a sales page either. On a call we will walk you through a live system in detail, and introduce you to a client if that would help you decide.
We have built and tested this across three UK charities. What that bought us is the awkward half of the job — the parts that only surface once real money and real donors are involved.
£21,657
You would be £21,657 better off with us And you would own the website, the platform and the donor data at the end of it.
The platform is your charity's asset, not ours. If you decide in a year that you would rather employ your own developer, or move to another agency, you tell us and we hand over every file. No exit fee, no negotiation, no period where your donation pages stop working while it is sorted out.
Yours
01
All of it, handed over in full whenever you ask.
Yours
02
In your own system throughout, and exportable in full.
Yours
04
Registered to the charity, not to us.
Yours
03
The monthly fee buys ongoing work. It is not a lock, and it is not what keeps your site online.
However, we recommend reaching out to us if you have any questions.
No, and the difference is what happens if you stop paying. Rent buys access — stop, and your donation pages go with it. This buys ongoing work: hosting, changes, new pages, fixes, compliance updates. The platform and the code are already yours from day one, and a fixed fee does not grow as your income does.
Bring how you currently take donations and what your trustees keep asking for. We will tell you honestly whether owning your own platform is worth it for a charity your size — including when it is not.
£2,999 launch price · limited to the first 10 charities
