A humanitarian charity. £4.8M annual income. 32,000 active supporters. Donations ran through JustGiving at a 5% platform fee plus 2.5% transaction. Salesforce NPSP didn’t sync. Gift Aid was a monthly spreadsheet to HMRC. Trustees had no dashboard, and safeguarding cases lived in a shared Excel file.
Industry Nonprofit software development · charity software · Gift Aid-ready · UK
Nonprofit software development, for the gift that lands. and the Gift Aid that gets claimed.
Nonprofit software development for UK trustees, fundraisers, and programme teams — donation flows with Gift Aid and HMRC R68, supporter CRM sync (Salesforce NPSP, Donorfy, Beacon), safeguarding-aware case management, recurring giving on Direct Debit, and the trustee dashboard that doesn’t need a developer to read.
24hreply, from a senior
200+projects shipped since 2019
Senioronly, on the spine
(Why UK charity founders sign)
Your trustees, your regulator, and your supporters ask the same thing. We build to the answer.
Charity software development isn’t a plug-in you bolt on before the annual return. Gift Aid, safeguarding, and supporter consent are decisions you make in week one, or pay months to retrofit after the Charity Commission writes. We make them in week one.
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The founder this page is for4× spike in 6 hours · £180K lost · £310K captured
Reverend Hassan runs a UK charity. The cause was clear. The donation page didn’t hold.
Then a media story broke. Donations spiked four times in six hours. The donation page collapsed under the load, supporters bounced, and the charity lost an estimated £180,000 in the window that mattered most. Hassan watched the cause’s biggest moment of the year drain away in real time.
We rebuilt it over ten weeks. Own donation flow on Stripe, Direct Debit via GoCardless, Salesforce NPSP sync, Gift Aid auto-claimed via HMRC R68, a trustee dashboard, and safeguarding moved to proper case management. Load-tested to twelve times baseline. Next media spike: zero downtime, £310K captured in four hours. This page is for the charity founder who’d rather build to the regulator’s question on day one.
CUSTOM CHARITY SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT · THE SIX PILLARS
Six regulatory pillars, designed in at architecture
The cost of designing for charity-specific obligations in week one is a fortnight of architecture work. The cost of retrofitting them after the first regulator or funder letter is months of senior engineering and an unhappy board.
Gift Aid + HMRC R68
Declaration capture at the gift. Eligibility check. Automated R68 submission via Charities Online. Audit-defendable. Typical lift: 22-28% on declared donations.
Charity Commission + trustee duties
Annual return data ready. Reserves policy reportable. Conflict-of-interest register. A trustee dashboard built for governance review, not for engineers.
Fundraising Regulator + Code
Fundraising Promise compliant. Vulnerable-persons safeguards. Cool-off period on recurring giving. Complaints workflow with a clear paper trail.
Safeguarding + DBS
Where children, young people, or adults at risk are in scope. Case management. DBS expiry tracking. Disclosure log. Built where applicable, never bolted on.
UK GDPR + supporter consent (PECR)
Marketing consent layer. Channel preference. Withdraw flow. ICO and Fundraising Regulator aligned. Right-to-erasure designed at the schema.
PCI DSS + Direct Debit (Bacs)
Stripe Elements and GoCardless keep card and bank data out of scope. SAQ-A. Bacs SUN handled. Indemnity claim disputes given a workflow, not a panic.
Process
How a charity build actually runs
Three steps from a five-line brief to a spike-ready donation platform. Gift Aid, safeguarding, and supporter consent are decided on day one, not retrofitted after the Charity Commission writes.
Step-01
Charity audit week
A brief mapping your build against Gift Aid, Charity Commission, Fundraising Regulator, and safeguarding obligations. You walk away with a signed scope, no commitment to build.
Step-02
Build the donation spine
Own donation flow on Stripe and GoCardless, Gift Aid auto-claimed via HMRC R68, supporter CRM sync, and safeguarding moved to proper case management. Load-tested to 12× baseline.
Step-03
Ship the trustee view
Reserves, restricted funds, income split, and programme spend in plain English, plus the grant tracker and the audit log your board reads without a developer in the room.
Three tiers, one donation flow that survives the spike.
Three UK charity platforms have stress-tested these picks. Tier 1 runs every build. Tier 2 is what we reach for when the brief needs it. Tier 3 scales the donation page to media-spike volume without a rebuild.
T1
What every charity build runs on
MERN + StripeMongoDBPostgreSQLNode.js + ExpressReact + Next.jsTypeScriptStripeGoCardless (Bacs)Salesforce NPSPDonorfy / BeaconHMRC Charities OnlineMixpanelTailwind
T2
When your charity brief calls for it
reach when neededPython (FastAPI)ThankQRaiser’s Edge NXTMicrosoft DynamicsStripe Connect (P2P)Worldpay
T3
The infrastructure that scales it
AWS + cloud-nativeAWSRDS / AuroraCloudFront (edge cache)AWS LambdaS3RedisSQS + EventBridgek6 (load testing)TerraformDatadog + SentryCloudflare WAFVanta / Drata
The pains we fix
The nonprofit pain. The architectural answer.
Every charity founder who emails us is fighting one of these. Each one is brutal to fix once donations are flowing. Each one is a single architectural decision made on day one.
£310K
Captured in the next 4-hour spike
27%
Lift on declared donations
“The next media spike captured £310K in four hours, with the page that used to fall over. Gift Aid claims itself now.”
001
Edge-cached page, load-tested to 12×
A story broke, traffic hit four times in six hours, and the donation page collapsed. An edge-cached page and an idempotent Stripe pipeline capture the gift instead of losing it.
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Auto Gift Aid via HMRC R68
Gift Aid was a manual monthly spreadsheet and eligible donations slipped through. Claims fire automatically, R68 submits via Charities Online, and the typical lift is 22 to 28%.
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Own donation flow on Stripe
JustGiving took 5% platform plus 2.5% transaction. An owned flow on your domain at 1.4 to 2.4% saves 5 to 7% of donation income, back where it belongs.
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Safeguarding case management
Sensitive case data sat in a shared Excel. Role-scoped case management with an audit log per touch, DBS expiry tracking, and a disclosure workflow. ICO and Charity Commission defendable.
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Trustee dashboard and grant tracker
A reserves question at the AGM needed an engineer to run a query, and a grant report deadline slipped. Reserves and restricted funds live in plain English, with deadline alerts on every grant.
Recent client · UK humanitarian charity · 2024
£180K lost on a spike to
£180K lost on a spike to
£310K captured, Gift Aid auto-claimed
Hassan’s charity, in real numbers. Brief: leave JustGiving, own the donation flow on Stripe and GoCardless, auto-claim Gift Aid via R68, sync Salesforce NPSP, build the trustee dashboard, move safeguarding to proper case management, and load-test for the next media spike. A ten-week sprint behind a feature flag, zero downtime at cutover.
The sprint
10wk
Donation flow + Gift Aid shipped
12×
Baseline load tested
The outcome
£310K
Captured in next 4-hour spike
27%
Lift on declared donations
Track record
3
Charity platforms since 2019
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Pages collapsed on a spike
Three ways to start. Pricing in the email back.
We don’t publish prices on a page. Every charity scope carries different regulatory weight. Pick the shape that fits and Mohit will send your real number inside 24 hours.
Charity audit week
One week, fixed cost. A brief mapping your build against Gift Aid, Charity Commission, Fundraising Regulator, and safeguarding obligations.
- 5-day senior audit
- Regulatory mapping
- Architecture brief + ADRs
- No commitment to build
Charity build sprint
8 to 14 weeks. Full nonprofit surface end to end. Donation flow, Gift Aid, GoCardless Direct Debit, CRM sync, safeguarding, trustee dashboard, grant tracker.
- MERN + AWS
- Gift Aid + safeguarding designed in
- 30-day walk-away both ways
- IP assigns on every commit
Donation-flow rescue
7 to 12 weeks. Your existing platform bleeding fees, crashing on spikes, or missing Gift Aid. We rebuild the gaps and ship the audit log.
- Gap audit + remediation
- Migrate off JustGiving
- Gift Aid automation retrofit
- Load-test + edge cache
“The next media spike captured £310K in four hours, with the page that used to fall over. Gift Aid claims itself now.”
— Reverend Hassan, UK humanitarian charityWhat charity founders actually ask before signing
Pain-first, soft-second. The questions every trustee and fundraiser asks before they trust a studio with donor money and safeguarding data.
No. An owned donation flow on your own domain with Stripe matches or beats JustGiving conversion. You save 5-7% in fees, and the supporter is yours from gift one, so stewardship and Gift Aid both work better. This is the heart of nonprofit software development done our way: you own the donor relationship, not a platform.
The declaration is captured at the donation with an eligibility check. R68 is auto-submitted to HMRC Charities Online, with an audit log per claim. Typical lift is 22-28% on declared donations versus a manual monthly spreadsheet. It’s built in at week one of the charity software development sprint, not bolted on later.
Salesforce NPSP most often. Also Donorfy, ThankQ, Beacon, Raiser’s Edge NXT, and Microsoft Dynamics. The sync is idempotent and audit-logged within 60 seconds, with a failed-sync alert, so a donation never sits invisible for two days while stewardship breaks.
Yes. The donation page is edge-cached, the Stripe pipeline is idempotent, and webhooks have a dead-letter queue. We load-test to twelve times baseline before launch. Across the spikes our charity clients have seen, zero downtime and the gift captured. Hassan’s page above took £310K in four hours after the rebuild.
Role-scoped case management with an audit log per touch. DBS expiry tracking. A disclosure workflow. Children, young people, and adults at risk are separated by case type. It’s ICO, Charity Commission, and safeguarding-lead defendable, which is the opposite of a shared Excel file nobody wants to admit exists.
Three things make this hard to fake. The 30-day walk-away clause goes both ways and refunds the unused portion. Payments are milestoned 25/25/25/25, so you never pay more than 25% ahead of working software. And we’ve been shipping since 2019, UK VAT registered, listed on Companies House. You can check us before you sign a thing.
Yes, with 14 days’ notice. Engineers move to other projects, your repo stays where it is, your spend pauses. Resume with 14 days’ notice and we pick up at the same sprint board, same engineers. No cancellation fee, no restart fee. We did this six times in 2025.
Yes, signed inside 30 minutes via DocuSign. We keep a mutual NDA template ready. Safeguarding and supporter data are sensitive, and we treat the brief that way from the first email, before any nonprofit software development work begins.
In context
See it in context.
A look at the kind of nonprofit development surface we hand over — real screens, real data, documented and yours from day one.
One paragraph. That’s it.
Tell us your annual income, your supporter count, and the moment you’re most worried about: the next media spike, the Gift Aid you’re missing, or the safeguarding data in a spreadsheet. Mohit reads every first email and replies inside 24 hours: a clear yes, a clear no, or the one question that decides it.
What happens after the email lands
- < 24h
A personal reply.
Yes, no, or the deciding question. Straight to your inbox, not a team thread.
- Week 1
Audit week begins.
We map your build against Gift Aid and safeguarding, write the trade-offs, hand you a signed scope.
- Week 14
Spike-ready charity platform.
Donation flow, Gift Aid auto-claimed, CRM synced, and the trustee dashboard your board reads cold.