For decades, small charities got the same answer to almost every question.
A proper website? That’s a five-figure quote. A fundraising strategist or a grant writer? That’s a salary you can’t carry. Software built around how you really work? Not for organizations your size. Buy something off the shelf and bend your work to fit it.
That was arithmetic, and it was right. It’s now out of date, and most of the sector hasn’t noticed.
What changed
Not the price of software or advice. The price of the routine work inside them.
Most professional work has two parts: routine work and judgement. In software, the routine part is the same in every system: logging in, forms, permissions, reports, backups. It’s about three-quarters of a build, and AI is very good at it. Six weeks of developer time can now take days, with a person checking the work instead of doing all of it.
Writing works the same way: the first draft of a policy, a grant application, a summary of a long funder report. These were never expensive because they were hard. They were expensive because they took hours.
What’s left is judgement: what your organization needs, what a funder wants to hear, what the numbers mean. That was always the valuable part. It’s now most of the project.
What’s now within reach
- A website designed around your programs. Your own staff update it by describing the change they want. A campaign page takes an afternoon, not a change request.
- A good first draft. Board reports, policy reviews, grant applications, a budget explained in plain language. Your team can often start with tools you already pay for, like Microsoft 365.
- Answers from your own records. Which donors gave for three years and then stopped? Which program’s attendance dropped? That’s now an afternoon, not a project. Lapsed donors is usually the most valuable question.
- A small custom system. One that does the four things you need, instead of a $300-a-month platform where you use a fifth of the features. Think volunteer coordination, client tracking, intake and reporting.
- The protections that used to be cut from quotes. Accessibility, backups, proper access controls and real reporting are no longer a big share of the cost. Stop accepting quotes that leave them out.
What hasn’t changed
- Deciding what’s worth doing. AI will build the wrong thing very efficiently.
- Saying what “done” means. Vague requests still lead to disappointing results, only faster.
- Ownership. Someone has to run, back up and answer for whatever gets built. A busy board member isn’t an answer.
- Adoption. A system nobody uses is wasted money at any price.
Is this you?
If two or more are true, it’s worth a conversation:
- A spreadsheet three people edit, and someone reconciles it every month
- A quote for a platform you’d use about a fifth of
- An important process that lives in one person’s head or inbox
- Tools that don’t talk to each other, with a person in between
- A web page that’s been wrong for a year because fixing it means emailing someone
- Something you stopped asking for because you assumed the answer was no
The last one is the most common, and the most expensive.
What it costs
Our software is $50 CAD a month for a small organization or $150 CAD a month for a large one, with every feature and unlimited users. Websites are a fixed fee quoted before work starts. Custom systems are quoted per project, because they differ.
The fair comparison is against what you pay now, plus the hours your staff spend working around it.
The honest counterpoint
Cheaper to build isn’t free to own. Before you sign, ask who owns the code, what happens if the vendor closes, and what a copy of your data looks like. If you don’t like the answers, the price doesn’t matter.
Plenty of organizations should still buy off the shelf. If a common product fits and you’d use most of it, buy it.
And a first draft isn’t expertise. AI is confidently wrong often enough that anything going to a funder, a regulator or the public needs someone who knows the subject to read it.
The old answer, that you can only afford a compromise, is no longer true. A sector that spent two decades bending itself to fit what it could afford should probably stop.