Why we built platform fees that shrink as your church grows

The problem nobody talks about: fee structures that work backwards

Most giving platforms charge a flat percentage, usually 1.5 to 2%, no matter what you're using. You get the same cut whether you're collecting £500 a week on a free tier or £5,000 through a full-featured suite. It's simple. It's clean. It's also backwards.

The moment a church moves from basic giving collection to actually claiming Gift Aid, the economics change. The average UK church leaves £560,000 unclaimed in Gift Aid annually across the sector. When we started Givr, we realised that wasn't a feature problem. It was a price problem. If a church had to pay more to unlock Gift Aid recovery, they'd do the sums, see the admin burden disappear, and still feel like the platform was taking a bigger cut of what matters most: the money that actually reaches the church.

So we reversed it. The more of Givr's capabilities you use, the lower the platform fee becomes.

How it actually works: the maths that made us uncomfortable at first

Free tier sits at 1% platform fee. There's a volume cap (£5,000 monthly giving), and you get basic QR code collection, donor tracking, and a fund dashboard. It's intentionally simple. But here's the thing: 1% is higher than what you'll pay if you move to Gather.

Gather drops the platform fee to 0.5%. You unlock Gift Aid declaration capture, HMRC Charities Online submission, and GoCardless recurring giving. If you're a treasurer who's been manually filing Gift Aid claims, suddenly 0.5% is cheaper than your time.

Grow brings it down further to 0.35%. You add white-label custom domain and API access, meaning your tech team can build integrations or embed Givr into your own giving journey. The fee is lowest at scale because at that point you're not just giving: you're building something that lives in your digital infrastructure.

But here's what matters. The Gift Aid performance fee is the same across all tiers: 2% of what we actually claim from HMRC, invoiced after the money lands. We don't take money from the claim. We take a slice of the work we do. If we don't claim it, we don't charge it.

Why we didn't just make everything cheap from the start

I wanted to. The finance team pushed back, and they were right to.

A 0.35% platform fee means we're operating on thin margins. We can only afford to do that if we're actually serving churches at scale, or if they're using most of what we've built. Giving the lowest price to someone collecting a couple of hundred quid on the Free tier wouldn't make sense for us. It also wouldn't make sense for them. We'd have no resources to keep the lights on or fix bugs when they find them.

The tiered structure is honest. It says: if you want the absolute minimum, you pay the absolute standard. If you want Gift Aid automation and recurring giving, you pay less percentage-wise because we're solving a real problem. And if you're scaling, white-labelling, or integrating via API, you pay the least because you're the customer who makes this sustainable.

It also means a church treasurer who's managing dozens of donations a week but still doing Gift Aid manually can see the exact trade-off. Move to Gather. Pay 0.5% instead of 1%. Recover thousands in Gift Aid without filing a single form. The fee goes down. The capability goes up. The maths work.

The moment it clicked: when a church actually switched

That Surrey treasurer came back three weeks later. She'd moved to Gather. Her first HMRC submission, automated through Givr, recovered £1,800 in Gift Aid the church had already left on the table. She did the full maths: the 0.5% fee came to about £30 that month. The Gift Aid performance fee was about £36. Total cost to recover £1,800? Around £66. She wrote back: 'This feels different. You're not taking more for doing less. You're taking less because I'm using the bits that matter.'

That email is pinned in our Slack. Because that's exactly what we were trying to build.

The tiered fee structure works because it aligns incentives. We want churches to claim Gift Aid because that's what moves the needle on the £560M annual gap. Churches want to do it because we've made it automated and cheap. The platform fee shrinks as both of us commit more. It's not a discount. It's not clever pricing psychology. It's just honest.

What we learned about simplicity and fairness

Building Givr taught us that people notice when pricing matches reality. A flat fee sounds fair until you realise it penalises adoption of the thing you actually built for.

The tiered model isn't perfect. Some churches will sit on Free and never migrate, paying 1% when they could pay less by using Gift Aid. Others will feel like they've outgrown Gather before they need API access. But the structure itself says something true: the more value you extract from Givr, the less it costs you in percentage terms.

And that matters to treasurers, vestries, and finance teams doing the actual thinking about whether a giving platform saves them money or costs them money. They're not comparing Givr to a competitor's flat fee. They're comparing Givr to a spreadsheet and a postal application form. They're asking whether automating Gift Aid claims is worth £25 a year or £245 or £549. The tiered structure lets them see that the fee moves in the right direction.