Questions, answered plainly.

Hosting the widget, running the dashboard, reconciling Stripe webhooks, storing your donor data securely, and the engineering to keep it all online. CrowdCreate makes money from the subscription and nothing else — we take no cut of donations, so we have no reason to push your donors to give more.

Because a percentage charges you more the more you raise, forever. A 5% fee only crosses $20 once you're past about $400 in monthly pledges; below that, a free or percentage tool can genuinely cost you less, and we'd rather say so than have you feel misled later. Above it, every dollar past break-even is yours, not a platform's. The flat fee is the thing that stops scaling against you.

Yes. There is no platform fee and no percentage — the code has no fee parameter on the charge at all. Stripe still charges its own standard processing fee, 2.9% + 30¢ per pledge, and that goes to Stripe, not to us. We earn the same $20 whether you raise $100 or $100,000.

On your own Stripe payout schedule — typically 2 to 7 business days after a successful donation, depending on your country and Stripe's standard risk windows. The funds settle into your Stripe balance, never a CrowdCreate balance, and pay out to your bank. Your dashboard shows pending and available amounts separately so you can see exactly when funds clear.

Stripe handles card declines, 3D Secure checks, and retry logic before the visitor ever returns to your site. If a payment fails, the visitor sees Stripe's specific error message and can try again with another card. CrowdCreate stores nothing about failed attempts.

Stripe handles disputes exactly as it does for any payment you take directly. If a donor disputes a charge, Stripe debits the amount plus its standard dispute fee from your Stripe balance and gives you a window to respond with evidence in your Stripe dashboard. CrowdCreate isn't in the middle of it — we take no cut and add no dispute fee of our own. The resolution is between you, the donor's bank, and Stripe.

At low volume, honestly, a free option can cost you less — we won't pretend otherwise. What you get here that a tip-jar profile or a bare payment link doesn't: the donation happens on your own site under your own name, the money lands in your own Stripe account, and the donor relationship — names, emails, amounts — stays yours to keep and export. A flat $20 also stops scaling against you as you grow, where a percentage keeps taking more. If you're raising a little and don't mind sending supporters off-site, a free tool is a fine place to start.

Card details never touch CrowdCreate — Stripe handles all of that on its PCI-compliant infrastructure. The donor names and emails we do store sit behind row-level security, so each account can read only its own data, enforced by the database itself rather than by app code we have to remember to write. We've never shared donor data with third parties.

No. Your donor list, your pledges, and your Stripe connection are isolated at the database level by row-level security. A logged-in account can read a pledge only if it owns the site that pledge belongs to — the rule lives in Postgres, so one customer can't read another's list even by accident or by a bug in our app code.

Thirteen months. Each pledge is stamped with an expiry, and a job runs every night to erase the donor's name and email from any pledge past that mark. The donation record stays for your accounting; the personal details are gone. It's a database job that runs on its own, not a promise in a policy document. If you want a donor list for the long term, export it before the 13-month mark.

The widget shows a small "Powered by Stripe" line at the bottom of the donation card, the same as any Stripe checkout, and CrowdCreate is named subtly in the footer text. We don't email your donors, surface them to other customers, or use their data for anything beyond your own dashboard analytics.

Yes. Every pledge — donor name, email, and amount — appears in your dashboard, and the underlying payments live in your own Stripe account, which has its own export. So you can pull a copy whenever you want, and it stays yours if you ever leave. One caveat: donor names and emails auto-expire from our records after 13 months (a privacy measure), so export before then if you want a permanent copy.