It's a fair question, and it usually gets a vague answer. Most donors picture their gift travelling intact from their account to the field, with the only deduction being whatever the charity spends on overhead. In reality, something is taken out before the charity ever sees the money — and how much depends almost entirely on which payment rail you chose.
This article is about that first deduction: the cost of moving the money. It's the part donors control and the part nobody itemises for them.
Where the money goes with a card
A card donation is the most familiar path and the most layered. When you enter your card details, the charge passes through the card networks, an acquiring bank and your issuing bank, and each takes a slice. The charity's payment processor bundles all of that into a single published rate.
That rate is commonly quoted as around 2.9% plus a fixed per-transaction fee — often something in the region of 30 cents in the US, with higher rates for international cards and sometimes additional currency conversion charges on top.
The structure matters more than the headline number. There are two components:
- A percentage, which scales with your gift.
- A flat fee, which does not.
The flat fee is what quietly punishes small donations.
| Gift | ~2.9% | Flat fee | Total cost | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $10 | $0.29 | $0.30 | $0.59 | 5.9% |
| $25 | $0.73 | $0.30 | $1.03 | 4.1% |
| $100 | $2.90 | $0.30 | $3.20 | 3.2% |
| $1,000 | $29.00 | $0.30 | $29.30 | 2.9% |
A $10 gift loses nearly six percent before it starts. And notice where the curve flattens: because the percentage component dominates at larger sizes, a card donation never gets meaningfully cheaper than about 2.9%, no matter how generous you are. There's a floor, and you hit it quickly.
Where the money goes with an international bank wire
Wires are what people reach for when the gift is large or the charity is abroad. They have the opposite problem to cards: almost all the cost is fixed, and it's fixed at a level that makes small transfers absurd.
Three things get taken:
- The sending fee. Your bank charges a flat amount to initiate an international wire — commonly somewhere in the tens of dollars.
- Intermediary bank fees. A cross-border wire frequently routes through one or more correspondent banks, each of which may deduct its own flat fee from the amount in transit. These are not disclosed to you in advance, and the recipient sometimes has no way to reconcile what's missing.
- The FX spread. If a currency conversion happens, the rate applied is not the mid-market rate. The margin is built into the exchange rate rather than shown as a fee, which makes it the least visible cost in the entire chain — and unlike the flat fees, it's a percentage, so it doesn't shrink as the gift grows.
The result is a cost profile that's punitive for small gifts, reasonable for large ones, and opaque at every size. A $100 international donation can plausibly lose a quarter of its value to fees. A $10,000 one might lose well under a percent in flat fees — but still carries whatever the FX spread was, which nobody ever tells you.
Wires are also slow. Days, sometimes longer across time zones and holidays, which matters when the money is meant to fund an emergency response.
Where the money goes with crypto
A crypto donation has two costs, and they work differently from both of the above.
The network fee is what you pay the blockchain to process the transfer. It's set by network demand, not by the size of your gift — sending $10 and sending $10,000 over the same network costs roughly the same. On low-fee networks like Solana or TON it's a fraction of a cent. On Polygon, BNB Chain or Arbitrum it's typically cents. On Ethereum mainnet it varies with congestion and can run to several dollars or more.
The processor fee is what the payment processor charges to handle the checkout, confirm the transaction and settle to the charity. For crypto processors this is typically a fraction of a percent — well under what card networks charge — but rates differ by provider and are worth checking rather than assuming. TraceGood uses a NOWPayments hosted checkout.
The structural difference is that a card's cost is mostly proportional and a crypto transfer's cost is mostly fixed and small. Proportional costs never amortise. Fixed costs do.
Why the size of the gift changes the answer
Put the three side by side and a pattern emerges.
| Gift size | Card | International wire | Crypto (low-fee network) |
|---|---|---|---|
| $10 | ~6% | Impractical — fees can exceed the gift | Cents of network fee plus a small processor fee |
| $100 | ~3.2% | Can approach 20–25% | A fraction of a percent |
| $1,000 | ~2.9% | A few percent, plus FX spread | A fraction of a percent |
| $10,000 | ~2.9% | Under 1% in flat fees, plus FX spread | A fraction of a percent |
For small gifts, the enemy is flat cost. Cards have a flat component; wires are almost entirely flat cost; a low-fee blockchain has a flat component measured in cents. This is exactly why network choice matters so much at the small end — a two-dollar network fee on a ten-dollar gift is a 20% loss, while the same gift on Solana or TON loses effectively nothing. If you're giving a small amount, pick a cheap network.
For large gifts, the enemy is percentage cost. Here cards stop improving at their floor of roughly 2.9%, and the wire's FX spread keeps taking its cut too. Crypto's fixed network fee, meanwhile, becomes a rounding error: the same fee that was 20% of a ten-dollar gift is 0.02% of a ten-thousand-dollar one. On a large donation, even Ethereum mainnet gas is immaterial.
That's the honest summary of the fee argument. Crypto isn't cheaper by magic — it's cheaper because most of its cost doesn't scale, and because there is no chain of intermediaries each entitled to a slice.
You can model your own numbers on our donation fee calculator, which compares methods at whatever amount you're actually considering rather than at the round numbers used here.
The fees aren't the whole story
Two caveats, in fairness.
First, fees are only the first deduction. After the money arrives, there's still the question of how the organisation spends it — program costs, staff, logistics. A low-fee rail gets more money in the door; it doesn't tell you what happens next. That's a separate accountability problem, and the reason we publish every confirmed donation on a public ledger with a link to the blockchain transaction.
Second, convenience has value. Cards are frictionless and universal, and a card donation that actually happens is worth more than a crypto donation someone abandoned halfway through. TraceGood raises funds only in cryptocurrency for reasons we've set out in full, but we're not going to pretend the tradeoff doesn't exist.
What to do with this
If you're giving a small amount, the single highest-leverage decision you make is which network you send over — see the full list of coins and networks we accept and pick a cheap one. If you're giving a large amount, the fee difference between networks stops mattering and what matters is that the gift arrives intact and verifiably.
Either way, you can check the arithmetic yourself rather than trusting a summary. Run the numbers on the fee calculator, read the fuller card-versus-crypto comparison, or make a donation and follow it onto the ledger.