By Dan Hubbard

In 2024, Zeffy raked in between $46,000,000.00 and $52,000,000.00 by bilking nonprofit's donors in the name of charity. Yes, that’s right! And their profit was a staggering 43% to 52%.

Let’s do some math.

Zeffy is currently claiming to have 50,000+ nonprofits in its claws, we think it’s actually about 16k; they started illegally inflating their installed base number of nonprofits in 2024 to create FOMO.

The images below are just two of hundreds of verified interactions between Zeffy’s staff and their nonprofit customers and donors; each within a three-month period in 2024. They didn’t go from 10k to 50k nonprofit users in three months; a bit of fibbing.

Zeffy claims two out of three donors pay the recommended tip/fee, and that nearly the other third pays 10%, and with only about 5% paying nothing.

Now, many nonprofits using Zeffy get $0 in donations, while others get tens or hundreds of thousands donations each year. In 2024, the average number of donations to 16,000 Zeffy users was 268 with the average amount being $136.00.

But the average donor tip to Zeffy was $12.36 across all donations.

16000 users times 268 donations each on average, times the average donor tip of $12.36 equals $47,066,880.00.

Now, Zeffy is sneaky, and donors often don’t understand the tip because of placement, so they do issue a lot of refunds.

But, they also make a ton on e-commerce, tickets sales, auctions, etc, and that’s how we end up at that range.

Can you even imagine if Zeffy were telling the truth and their installed base really was 50,000 nonprofits!?!

So why do they do it?

It’s actually pretty simple.

About a decade ago a couple college kids realized four things:

1 Nonprofit employees often run around with their hair on fire not able to complete basic tasks;

2 Nonprofit employees rarely understand business;

3 Nonprofit employees rarely understand technology;

4 Nonprofit employees will almost always step over a dollar to pick up a dime because they just can’t see the dollar; and,

5 Most nonprofits would not care about their donors bottom line.

Now, we’re not excusing Zeffy or their founder’s horrible greed, but they are doing darn good business and we have to hand them that.

So, is Zeffy really free? Is it actually helping charities? Moreover, wouldn’t that money have been better used by nonprofits instead of Zeffy’s owners and venture capital investors?

We think so, and that’s why we want you to be your own Zeffy — to put more money to work for your mission and keep more money in the hands of your donors to give to you later.

First, if you don’t have one, you’re going to sign-up for PayPal Giving Fund. We actually find PP to be a pain much of the time, but with PPGF there are no merchant fees. Within your account, you’re going to create a donation form, and on it — even though there are no fees — you’re going to add a tip section to cover your technology fees. Think of it as a way to pay for all your web and communication fees each year. You’ll use a free QR code for your form and include it in all your social media posts and email blasts (use sendgrid for free), and you’ll put the form on your website in the exact same way as Zeffy.

Want to sell tickets; same process. Want to sell products; same process.

Now, if you don’t like PPGF, you could be EXACTLY like Zeffy and use a free form SaaS and Stripe, and add a tip field, or simply use Stripe’s forms with a tip field. Simple, and you and your donors are in complete control.

If you don’t like Stripe, use Square; they all have their own forms and allow tip fields.

What about a donor database? Yeah, PayPal has that, and so does Stripe and Square, and so does every single form SaaS. Zeffy did not invent any of that; in-fact, if it weren’t for Stripe, Zeffy wouldn’t get any donor data.

What about time? Zeffy saves you zero hours and zero minutes! Is your form done for you? No, you do it. Is your Stripe account set up for you? No, you do it. Does your donation form magically appear on your website? No, you do it. You do everything, Zeffy just charges your donors a ton of money for all of your work.

Do you get your money faster with Zeffy? No, in-fact it’s not up to them, it’s up to Stripe.

Zeffy literally does nothing for you but tick off your donors.

If you’re a nonprofit, you have to get smart about business and tech, and you have to respect your donors. Zeffy hopes you don’t.

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