- Full transparency of both where money comes from and where it goes.
- Completely open source.
- Designed for ongoing collaborative communities, not individual creators or one-off campaigns.
- Offers Fiscal Hosting as a service, so projects don't need to legally incorporate or figure out taxes.
Our product overlaps in some ways with crowdfunding sites, fiscal sponsorship service providers, and accounting software. But we're the only platform that combines all three.
While crowdfunding is based on time limited campaigns, Open Collective is designed for longer term support of ongoing projects and initiatives. Instead of throwing your money in a black box and hoping for the best, Open Collective has full transparency, so everyone can see where the money comes from and where it goes.
Fiscal sponsorship has been a pretty niche service limited mainly to the charity sector, where existing nonprofits will hold grants for unincorporated projects. Open Collective brings this concept to every other sector, and supercharges it with a tech platform that radically lowers overhead for fiscal sponsors (no more messy spreadsheets!), so they can support more projects, and empowers sponsees to see and manage their money directly, alongside features for fiscal management best practice.
Open Collective is not a fully featured accounting platform, but it offers key features for budget tracking and expense management and payment. One feature we offer that most accounting software doesn't is integrated payments for expenses, via Paypal or bank transfer. It means projects don't have to step into the complexity of a full fledged accounting tool in order to do basic budget tracking and good money management.
| name | one time donations | recurring donations | fees | transparency (incoming funds) | transparency (spending funds) | Open Source | Designed for... | Offers fiscal hosting |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenCollective | yes | yes | 5% + credit card fees (+ host fees if any*) | yes | yes | yes | Communities | yes |
| Patreon | no | yes | 5% + credit card fees | yes | no | no | Individual creators | no |
| KickStarter | yes | no | 5% + credit card fees | yes | no | no | One-off campaigns | no |
| GoFundMe | yes | no | 5% + credit card fees | yes | no | no | One-off campaigns | no |