Free event software. An artificial intelligence (AI) revenue engine, priced as a flat membership. A marketplace that only earns when it brings you money you didn't already have.
Development directors aren't asking for better bidding screens. Trade publications, practitioner forums, and sector surveys keep landing on the same finding: the event works. The math around it doesn't.
A Chronicle of Philanthropy survey of nonprofits with $10M–$200M budgets found 52% of leaders call their galas "productive." Only 25% call them "very effective" at raising money.
Chronicle of Philanthropy, cited in Convergent Nonprofit →Auction chairs report spending up to 1,000 hours, or six months of full-time work, producing a single event, much of it chasing donated items with no procurement system behind it.
Roger Devine, SchoolAuction.net →Greater Giving's own survey of nonprofits found 47% admit they "take what they can get" on auction-item donations rather than sourcing strategically.
Greater Giving procurement survey →"If I write you a bigger check, can I just skip the gala?" Some donors are already asking.
Reported in Town Hall Agency's nonprofit events analysis, 2024Every layer past the first is optional: a flat membership fee for the engine, or a percentage only on revenue the marketplace brings you.
Event production breaks down long before the doors open. Auction chairs report spending up to 1,000 hours, roughly six months of full-time work, producing a single event. The free rails carry the event page, tickets, seating, mobile bidding, the console, and the dashboard. Everything below that the engine does is the optional membership.
The engine builds a production calendar around your date, assigns tasks, sets internal milestones, and nudges the owner of each one through the months before the event. Your team keeps the parts that are judgement: the strategy, the budget, the sponsor package levels, who does what, board alignment, committee recruitment, honoree selection, and the executive sign-off. The engine holds the deadlines so the development director is not the calendar.
A Greater Giving survey found 47% of nonprofits admit they take what they can get on auction-item donations rather than sourcing strategically. This is where that changes. The membership drafts the sponsorship proposals and the item solicitations, and runs the outreach; the Sponsor Exchange puts your event in front of brands browsing by audience, city, and cause; the Inventory Marketplace supplies consignment items at fixed floors. You choose the targets, and nothing goes out without a person approving it.
The event page, the ticket tiers, the tables, and the seat assignments all live in the free rails, and card processing runs through Stripe at nonprofit rates with no markup on top. The membership drafts the promotional copy, the attendee updates, and the ticket appeals for a person to review and send. You set the prices, arrange the room, manage the sponsor guest lists, and approve every word that goes out under your organization's name.
Guests bid from their phones, the live console runs the auction and the fund-a-need, and the dashboard shows revenue by stream as it arrives. All three are free rails. For organizations on the membership, the engine coaches the fund-a-need in real time on ask levels and sequencing. Your team runs the room: check-in, the stage program, every auction call, and every decision on the floor.
The week after an event is where the value usually leaks away, because the people who ran it are exhausted. The membership drafts the thank-yous for attendees, sponsors, and donors, and prepares the reconciliation into the CRM system you already use. Your team reviews and approves every note before it sends, verifies the tax receipts, and signs off the final sync. The revenue dashboard stays available for the post-event read.
Four shapes of event, each with a different pressure and the layer that answers it, plus the season where you are running several of them at once.
Complex seating, several ticket tiers, a live paddle raise, and months of item procurement, all landing on one night. The free rails carry registration, table assignments, mobile bidding, and live auction tracking. The membership drafts the sponsor proposals and the procurement letters, and coaches the ask sequence during the room appeal.
Foursome registrations, hole sponsorships, contest add-ons, and a reception at the end, with corporate money attached to nearly every piece of it. The free rails process entries and track every player fee and sponsor commitment against the dashboard. The Inventory Marketplace can carry the reception's auction items at a fixed floor, so a high-value package costs nothing if it does not sell.
High registration volume and broad, shallow sponsorship from local businesses, which is a lot of small conversations for a small team. Registration and revenue tracking run on the free rails. Through the Sponsor Exchange, local businesses and regional brands browse vetted events by city and audience, and when a match closes the sponsor pays the fee rather than the nonprofit.
A large room, a fast arrival, and bidding that has to hold up while several hundred people are on their phones at once. The free rails run mobile bidding and show revenue by stream live as the night moves. Card processing runs through Stripe at nonprofit rates, passed through at cost, which matters more at volume than at any other event size.
A spring gala, a summer walk, and a fall tournament are not three projects; they are one team's year, with overlapping deadlines and donor records that fragment across three sets of software. The membership runs the production schedules together and drafts the campaign communications for each. After each event it reconciles tickets, auction results, and donor records into the CRM you already run, so the year ends with one record rather than three.
Published and reported pricing as of July 2026. Several vendors now gate exact figures behind a sales quote on their own current sites, and that gap is itself part of the comparison. Verify directly with each vendor before you decide.
| Platform | Software cost | Take rate | Pricing, in their own words |
|---|---|---|---|
| EventRaise | $0 mandatory$2,490–$7,490/yr optional membership, or $249–$749/mo | 10%, only on revenue we bringNever on money you already had; Stripe processing runs separately, at cost | Published above. No quote required → |
| OneCause | $2,995/yr reportedor pay-as-you-go | 5%, cappedon the pay-as-you-go tier | Current site: "Get Pricing" quote required for its Professional tier. |
| GiveSmart | ~$3,000/yr reportedflat annual license | 3.5% card processingreported; no separate platform take rate | Current site: "transparent, fixed pricing," figures behind a demo request. |
| Handbid | ~$1,396–$1,999/yr reported | 5% of winning bidsreported | Current site: "no one-size-fits-all tiers," custom quote only. |
| Zeffy | $0nonprofit pays nothing | $0 from the orgfunded by optional donor tips | "100% free forever." No auction console or Sponsor Exchange. |
Figures for OneCause, GiveSmart, and Handbid reflect public reporting and vendor materials gathered in July 2026 research; each vendor's current site gates exact figures behind a sales conversation, so treat these as directional, not quoted live prices. "Take rate" mixes different fee types across the category: GiveSmart's is a card-processing charge with no separate platform fee, while OneCause's and ours are platform or marketplace fees on top of processing, which for EventRaise runs separately through Stripe at cost with no markup. Zeffy genuinely beats our take rate: it charges the organization nothing at all, funded instead by optional donor tips, but it has no live auction console, mobile bidding, or Sponsor Exchange. EventRaise is not affiliated with OneCause, GiveSmart, Handbid, or Zeffy.
Seven limits, in the same words they appear in on the capabilities page.
EventRaise is in its pilot phase and is being delivered with a fall 2026 cohort. There is no sign-up button, and the way in is requesting a pilot.
We cannot point to a decade of peak nights, published results, or a customer count, because we do not have them yet. The cohort exists to build that record in public rather than to claim one now.
EventRaise reconciles event data into the CRM system your organization already runs. It does not replace year-round donor management, and it is not trying to.
Payments run on Stripe at nonprofit rates, passed through at cost. EventRaise never holds your funds.
The Sponsor Exchange and the Inventory Marketplace grow with the cohort. Inventory depth and sponsor coverage in any given city are not yet comparable to long-established consignment specialists.
The free layer is the event software itself. The production calendar, the drafting, the procurement, the coaching, and the reconciliation live in the membership. An organization can run its whole event on the free rails and never pay EventRaise anything; Stripe's nonprofit processing rate still applies to card transactions.
There is no public API and no assistant integration surface today. The capabilities page and the llms.txt file are the current machine-readable surfaces.
Nothing in software fees, no mandatory subscription, and no percentage on your event revenue. You pay Stripe's nonprofit card processing rates, passed through at cost. That gets you the event page, ticketing, seating, mobile bidding, the live auction console, and the real-time revenue dashboard.
Two ways. The AI revenue engine is a flat, optional membership: $2,490 to $7,490 a year billed annually, or $249 to $749 a month, whether or not it demonstrably raised money that year. Cancel any time and keep the free rails. When a sponsorship match closes through the Sponsor Exchange, the sponsor, not you, pays a 10% marketplace fee. The marketplace fee is the only charge tied to revenue we bring; the membership is a flat fee for the team's time it replaces.
The sponsor does. The nonprofit pays zero on a closed match. EventRaise never charges a percentage on a sponsorship or a donation it did not bring you.
You owe nothing. Inventory Marketplace items carry a fixed floor and no upfront cost, so an item that does not clear its floor costs the organization nothing at all. When it does sell, you keep 100% of everything above the floor.
No. Build the page, sell the tickets, seat the room, run mobile bidding and the live paddle raise, and read the dashboard, all on the free rails, for nothing. The membership is for teams that want the production calendar, the procurement outreach, the drafting, and the live coaching on top.
No, and it should not. EventRaise reconciles ticket sales, attendee records, winning bids, and fund-a-need gifts into the donor database you already run. Your CRM stays where it is; what goes away is the manual post-event data entry.
Not us. Payments run through Stripe at nonprofit rates and settle to your organization. EventRaise does not hold, clear, or manage your funds at any point.
Any time, and you keep the free rails. Cancelling stops the billing; it does not take your event page, your tickets, your bidding, or your dashboard away. That is the difference between a free layer and a trial.
Request a pilot below. We read what you send, and we come back to you personally to talk through the event. There is no sales team and no queue.
It starts with a conversation about your event: the date, the goal, and the software you run today. Then a walkthrough of the free rails, which is the event page, registration, ticketing and seating, mobile bidding, and the live auction console. There is no sales team here, so nobody is going to pitch you, and there is no demo gate in front of a price. Every number is already published on this page.
If you join the cohort, we configure the platform for your event: your event page, your ticket packages and seating, and Stripe connected so payments run at nonprofit rates straight through. If you take the membership, the engine then works alongside your team through the planning months and on the night itself.
Each event in the cohort gets direct attention from the people building the software. Taking the membership is not a condition of joining: an organization can run its entire event on the free rails and pay EventRaise nothing at all.
What we cannot show you is a decade of results, because we do not have one. The category incumbents can, and they charge for it: around $2,995 a year or a capped 5% pay-as-you-go at OneCause, around $3,000 a year at GiveSmart, and $1,396 to $1,999 a year plus 5% of winning bids at Handbid, all figures from public reporting and vendor materials gathered in July 2026. The cohort is how the record gets built, in the open, alongside the development directors running the events.
One fall gala season, so every event gets direct attention. Tell us about your event and we'll come back to you personally. No sales team, no queue.
Prefer to see your own numbers before you talk to anyone?
Run the True Cost calculator →The event software is free forever. Our marketplace fee only applies to revenue we demonstrably bring you, funded by the sponsor or the supplier, never by you.
See how a season runs