Instant Websites for Nonprofits | Bellstrike

Hi, I'm the founder of Bellstrike. The actual fee is 9.5% with no minimum transaction. We include the credit card transaction fees (WePay charges 3.5%) in the 9.5% fee. We originally were going to separate the two fees out but decided to include everything in one fee. Thanks for pointing out the type - we thought that had been corrected. We'll make the change.

Well, to be honest, no we don't know if it'll be profitable yet. Mostly because we just launched and don't have enough data. We very well may introduce a monthly fee that allows nonprofits to only pay the percentag (3.5%) transaction costs that WePay charges. We're certainly not into taking advantage of nonprofits. Most nonprofits have under $25,000/year in revenue. If you make $12,000/year in revenue, it's hard to even justify paying $15 or $30 per month for something that you don't know if it works. We think with this model it will hopefully reduce the barriers to entry for small nonprofits so that they can get online quickly and easily and actually accept online donations. The majority of nonprofit websites don't even have an online giving option.

Also, if we do get a sizable number of nonprofits on the system, there are other services that we'd like to offer to them down the road for an affordable price (like $5 - $15/month). That may be a donor management database that's easy to use and stripped down for small nonprofits, a stripped down email marketing service, etc.

We looked into referral fees from WePay but they don't offer that for apps that use their API. That's really fine for us though. We kind of like the fact that we aren't telling nonprofits to use WePay with an ulterior motive of us making a little extra money. We use WePay because it is bar none the best marketplace payment processor that we know of... and that's with them having just released their marketplace API about a month ago.

We actually provide a full, branded website for nonprofits. Most everything is baked in for them - blog, automatic receipts for donations, etc. WePay is a great service but they don't provide websites - they handle transactions. We use do use WePay's API to handle the transactions on the nonprofits' websites.

First Giving is a great service as well but if I understand their model correctly, it is more of a fundraising page for an individual to raise money for a nonprofit.

Thanks! To answer your questions:

1) Rails 2) WePay handles our transactions so they're secure - we use their new API. We highly recommend them. You can learn more about their security here: https://www.wepay.com/about/security 3) We actually already use Postmark. That being said, we'll check out PostageApp too :)

Thanks so much.

Maybe we should reword that.

The thinking behind that is that the really small nonprofits that we work with are generally relieved to find out that they can still use their domain name on their business cards and brochures and email and just forward the domain to their Bellstrike subdomain.

As a general rule most small nonprofits aren't techies, don't know the difference between hosting and a domain name and don't know what a 301 redirect is or that it's even possible. That being said, we'll certainly talk about rewording that so that it's clearer for the tech oriented audience and doesn't seem misleading. That's a pretty easy change :)

We do plan on offering a domain masking service like Flavors.me, Carbonmade, etc. where they won't have the need to do a 301 redirect.

Thanks for the feedback. We just launched today so we're glad to hear your thoughts so we can make corrections.

We've thought about that. Didn't know if it'd be annoying.