About

Give-Kit is made by STACHOLD GROUP LLC, a small software shop in Texas. It is a sibling of Letter Kit and Submit Kit, and like both of those it exists because somebody we know was doing a reasonable thing in an unreasonable way.

Why it exists

United Way of East Central Texas packs meals. In June 2026 they packed 35,000 of them and decided the next event should be 70,000. The way they fund it is to ask local businesses to raise money at the counter, which works — and which was being run in a spreadsheet, with twenty signs updated by hand.

Tools for this exist. They are priced for organisations with a development department, a database manager and a budget line called “fundraising software”. An organisation with a part-time executive director and a board that meets monthly is not a small version of that organisation; it is a different organisation, and it needs one job done well rather than forty features it will never open.

Businesses were only where it started. The thing being built is not a business-giving tool: it is a way of running a campaign where a lot of people each raise toward a figure of their own and every gift finds its way back to the right one. Scout troops, ball teams, classrooms, church groups and the popcorn-and-coupon-book sales they all run are the same campaign with different nouns in it, and keeping the software ignorant of which is the whole discipline of the project.

How it is built

Deliberately boring. Ruby on Rails and Postgres on one machine at DigitalOcean; this marketing site is hand-written HTML on Cloudflare Pages with no JavaScript on it at all. Few dependencies, nothing clever, and nothing that needs babysitting on a Saturday in December.

That is not nostalgia, it is arithmetic. One person maintains this, and a campaign has to keep running through a week when its author is busy. Every dependency is a thing that can break while nobody is looking, so there are as few as we could manage.

Payments are the clearest case. Give-Kit will never process a donation. The money goes through Zeffy, which is free for nonprofits and is good at the part we have no business being near. Card details never reach us, and there is no version of this where they do.

How it gets paid for

Today it does not. It is free for the organisations helping build it, which is the fair trade for using software that is still being finished.

A plan that never charges is a hobby rather than a product, and a hobby can be abandoned, so there will be a price eventually. Two things about it, committed to now while it is still cheap to commit: it will not be a percentage of what you raise, and it will not be priced per donor record. A flat figure a board can approve once a year is the only shape that makes sense for the organisations this is for.

What it will not become

• A donor database. No pledge reminders, no recurring giving management, no email blasts.
• A shop. Where a campaign sells something, the catalogue, the stock levels, the shipping and the fulfilment are Zeffy's, and we have no intention of building a worse version of them.
• A payment processor, an event ticketing system, a grant tracker or a volunteer scheduler.
• A replacement for Zeffy. It is a layer on top of it, permanently.

The list matters because the usual way a tool like this stops being usable is that it grows until the simple thing is four clicks deep.

The honest risks

Worth saying before you ask rather than after. It is early: the first campaign it runs end to end will be in 2027. It is maintained by one shop, not a company with an on-call rota. And it has one customer so far, which means the second organisation to use it will find things the first one never hit.

What offsets that: your money is in Zeffy, not here, and your gift records export as a CSV whenever you want them. If this disappeared tomorrow you would be back to the spreadsheet, not locked out of your own campaign.

Early also means unfinished in particular places rather than in general. How it works marks the parts that are not built yet where they come up, so you can see which of them you would actually miss.

Talking to us

There is no sales team and no demo booking link. You write, a person reads it, and you get an honest answer about whether this suits what you are planning. Get in touch.