Give Livelyvs
Givebutter
Givebutter: Also free at the base tier and open to a wider range of organisations, with a tip-driven model and stronger event tooling
Give Lively
Fundraising software given free to nonprofits, funded by its founders rather than by fees
As of 31 August 2026, Give Lively is free to use. A donation platform that charges nonprofits nothing at all: no subscription, no platform percentage, no setup fee. Softwr lists it under Nonprofits. Give Lively is available on Web.
Overview
What Give Lively does
Give Lively is a US donation and fundraising platform offering branded donation pages, embeddable donation widgets, peer-to-peer and team fundraising, event ticketing, text-to-donate, and a donor database with Salesforce sync. Nonprofits must hold US 501(c)(3) status to use it. The distinguishing fact is the commercial model. Almost every competitor either charges a monthly licence or clips a percentage off each gift. Give Lively charges neither. It is bankrolled by its founders, Kari and Jeff Wilner, as a philanthropic project, and supplements that with optional donor tips. The only money leaving a donation is the third party card processing fee, from 1.99% plus $0.25 depending on which processor you connect. That makes the effective cost of raising a dollar materially lower than on any percentage-taking platform, and on a large campaign the difference runs to five figures a year. Buyers are small and mid-sized US nonprofits who have priced Classy or a percentage platform and blanched. The trade-off is dependence: the platform exists because two people choose to fund it, there is no revenue line to defend it in a downturn, and there is no paid support tier to escalate to. Organisations that treat their donation platform as critical infrastructure should have a documented exit route and regular data exports.
What people use it for
- A US nonprofit currently paying a percentage platform fee on every gift and wanting that money back in programme budget
- Running a peer-to-peer campaign where thin margins make a per-donation platform cut painful
- A small organisation with no software budget that still needs branded, mobile-ready donation pages
- Adding donor advised fund giving at checkout without paying for a separate DAF integration
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Give Lively.
- Eligibility is limited to US 501(c)(3) organisations, so charities registered in the UK, Canada, Australia or the EU cannot use it at all regardless of fit.
- The platform is funded by its founders' personal philanthropy rather than by revenue, so there is no contractual commitment to a roadmap or a service level and no paying customer base to keep it alive if that funding stops.
- Support is email based with no paid escalation tier, so an organisation mid-campaign with a broken form has no way to buy faster attention.
- The donor database is adequate for gift tracking but thin compared with a real CRM, so most organisations still pay for Bloomerang, DonorPerfect or Salesforce alongside it and maintain a sync.
- Optional donor tips appear at checkout to fund the platform, which some boards object to because it puts a second ask in front of a donor who has already decided what to give.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Give Lively
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- Give LivelyvsDonorbox
Donorbox: Paid but low cost, with recurring giving and international reach that Give Lively cannot offer
- Give LivelyvsClassy
Classy: Where enterprise campaign management and reporting justify paying a real platform fee
Pricing
What Give Lively costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Give Lively
Free
- All fundraising products included
- No platform fee on donations
- No setup or subscription charge
- Card processing from 1.99% + $0.25 paid to the processor
- US 501(c)(3) organisations only
Capabilities
Features
Branded donation pages
Hosted and embeddable giving forms with custom fields and suggested amounts
Peer-to-peer fundraising
Supporter-run pages and teams rolled up to a parent campaign
Text-to-donate
Keyword based mobile giving for events and appeals
Event ticketing
Free ticketing with donation upsell at checkout
Donor database
Contact records, giving history and segmentation, syncable to Salesforce
DAFpay
Donor advised fund giving at checkout via Chariot
Multiple processors
Choice of Stripe, Shift4 or PayPal so you keep your own merchant relationship
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Is it genuinely free, or free with a percentage taken?
Genuinely free. Give Lively takes no cut of donations and charges no subscription. You pay only the card processing fee, which goes to Stripe, Shift4 or PayPal, starting around 1.99% plus $0.25.
How does the company make money?
It does not, in the ordinary sense. Operating costs are covered by its founders as a philanthropic commitment, plus voluntary tips donors can add at checkout.
Can a UK or Canadian charity use it?
No. Give Lively requires US 501(c)(3) status.
Does it replace a donor CRM?
Not for most organisations. It stores donors and gift history, but fundraisers running major gift or grant pipelines usually keep a dedicated CRM and sync to it.
Keep looking
Where to go from Give Lively
- Give Lively alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Give Lively pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Give Lively badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Nonprofits softwareThe full category
- Best Nonprofits softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Nonprofits software for
Compare Give Lively with
- Classy
- Donorbox
- Givebutter
- Zeffy
- Raisely
- Qgiv
- Charity Navigator
- Fundraise Up
- GiveSmart
- Instrumentl
- Keela
- CharityEngine
- OneCause
- SmartSimple Cloud
- Aplos
- Apptio Monetize
- Blackbaud Grantmaking
- Qgiv
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12 researched notesGrants management for foundations and corporate givers inside the Blackbaud ecosystem
Pricing on request12 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Give Lively, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Give Lively
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Give Lively pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Give Lively
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Give Lively badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
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