FAQ
Questions, answered
Setup, what the four plans cost and what they charge for, how the money reaches you, what your donors see, what happens to a requester's details, and how to leave. If yours isn't here, ask us — we answer these ourselves.
Getting started
What the first afternoon looks like, and what is genuinely out of our hands.
An afternoon. Create an account, add a few needs, connect a payment processor, and paste one line of embed code onto your website. No developer required. The slowest part is your processor's own identity verification, which is out of our hands and can take a day or two.
A specific, real item or service tied to a real person or program — a winter coat, a week of groceries, a monthly bus pass — with a title, a short story, a photo and a price. A need can be one-time or recurring, and a donor sees the thing rather than an empty amount box.
It helps, because the widget is designed to be embedded in a page you already have. If you don't have one, every widget also has a hosted page of its own that you can link to from social posts, an email footer or a printed QR poster.
Yes, as many as you want. Each one can target a different initiative and sit on a different page of your site, and they are all fed by the same list of needs.
Yes. Each widget carries its own accent colour, light or dark appearance, corner style and font, so it reads as part of your site rather than as a bolt-on.
Pricing and payouts
Aurora charges for the writing, not for the donation. The full arithmetic lives on the pricing page; these are the questions that come after reading it.
Four self-serve plans, and not one of them takes a share of your donations — no per-donation fee on all four, so a year where your giving doubles costs you nothing more. What Aurora is paid for is the writing: an update goes in, and a full set of posts for every channel you are on comes out. Free covers 2 updates a month and is funded by an optional contribution donors may add at checkout — your organization still receives the whole gift. Pay per update covers the same 2 a month, asks your donors for nothing, and charges you $0.99 for each update past them. Starter is $29/month for unlimited updates, which is the cheaper arrangement from about 32 updates a month. Growth is $99/month, also unlimited, and adds same-day support and the full assistant allowance. PayPal is on every plan including the free one, and Aurora takes no share of a PayPal donation either. The four things that genuinely differ between plans are set out on the pricing page.
On Pay per update, each update past the free 2 costs $0.99. They are added up and charged once, at the end of any month you actually go over — never a separate card payment per update, because a $0.99 transaction loses about a third of itself to the processor and there is no reason to invent that cost. Re-running an update, regenerating a piece and editing anything you have already made are free, always: the only thing that ever costs money is having something new to say. On Free nothing is charged at all — there is no overage, the free updates come back on the 1st, and everything already written stays yours to edit and post. On Starter and Growth there is nothing to go over.
Your payment processor charges its own fee on every transaction, on every plan. Stripe's standard US card rate is 2.9% + $0.30; PayPal's own rates apply and depend on whether they have granted your organization charity status. On a $100 card gift that leaves $96.80 reaching your organization — the same figure on all four plans, because Aurora takes nothing out of a donation on any of them. The only other charge we make is the $0.99 an update on Pay per update. There is no setup fee, no contract, no minimum term, and no charge for extra widgets, needs or donors.
Because Stripe bills that fee to Aurora rather than to you. Aurora is the platform on the charge, so Stripe debits its 2.9% + $0.30 from our balance, and we recover it inside the single application fee you do see against each donation. It is the same money leaving the same gift — deducted once, not twice. It is also all that deduction contains: none of it is Aurora's share, because Aurora has no share of a donation on any plan we offer.
No — not on any plan we offer today. On all of them a monthly renewal is treated exactly like a one-time gift: no per-donation fee, on either processor. (If you are on our older Pay as you go plan, 3% + $0.30 still comes off each renewal, exactly as it comes off a one-time gift.) Your payment processor's own fee applies to every renewal on every plan, because each renewal is a fresh transaction. This is the part of charging for updates that a finance committee tends to notice second: a sponsor who renews for three years costs you no more in year three than they did in year one.
No. PayPal is on every plan, including the free one. Connect PayPal, Stripe, or both, and you choose which one donors are offered first. Aurora takes no share of a PayPal donation on any tier — it settles straight into your own PayPal account. A monthly plan is worth holding for a different reason entirely: it stops the update counting, and is the cheaper arrangement from about 32 updates a month.
Aurora takes 0% of PayPal donations — PayPal's own rates apply. That holds on every plan and is structural rather than promotional — nothing in Aurora can attach a platform fee to a PayPal gift. What PayPal charges depends on whether they have granted your organization charity status, which you apply for with them directly.
Stripe pays out to the bank account you connected, on Stripe's normal payout schedule. PayPal credits your PayPal balance, which you withdraw yourself. Either way the money settles into your own account rather than into ours, so Aurora never holds your funds and cannot delay them.
Yes, on every plan. Connect Stripe and PayPal, and you choose which one donors are offered first; you can change your mind whenever. Donors only ever see a processor you have actually connected.
Your donations are untouched: Aurora takes no per-donation fee on every plan, so there is no percentage waiting to come back onto your gifts. What changes is the writing and your donation form. You land on Free, which means 2 updates a month rather than unlimited updates, posts that link to your Aurora donation page rather than anywhere you choose, and a widget that starts asking your donors for an optional contribution. Everything already written stays yours to edit and post, and monthly gifts your donors had already committed to keep renewing — we will not cancel a supporter's standing gift because of your billing. A payment of yours that simply fails does none of this; only actually cancelling does.
No. Pay as you go is closed to new organizations and no longer appears on the pricing page, but nothing about your terms moves because we retired a listing: still 3% + $0.30 of each gift, still no monthly fee, and the story allowance you already had. You can move to any of the current plans from your dashboard whenever you like. Moving is one-way, though — the plan is not offered any more, so we cannot put you back on it afterwards.
What your donors see
The widget is the only part of Aurora most of your supporters will ever meet.
No. They pay through Stripe Checkout or PayPal's own checkout and never create an account with Aurora. Nothing is stored on our side that they have to manage or delete.
Only if your organization has connected a PayPal account — it is available on every plan, but nothing appears until you connect one. Where both are connected, donors see both options in the widget and pick one.
Card gifts can always be monthly: any need can be offered as a one-time gift or an ongoing sponsorship, and the donor chooses. Monthly giving through PayPal depends on how your PayPal account is set up — where it isn't available the widget says so on the spot and offers the card option for that gift, rather than taking a commitment it cannot keep.
The widget switches to a donate-only mode with sensible preset amounts and a custom amount box, so supporters can still give. It never shows an empty shelf.
From your organization's own average gift, rounded up to amounts that read like real numbers rather than like arithmetic. You can also set the presets by hand, and a donor can always type their own figure.
Yes, automatically, naming the specific need they funded. Whether the gift is tax-deductible depends on your organization's status and your local rules — that relationship is between you and your donors, and Aurora does not assert it on your behalf.
In-kind, drives and requests
Not every gift is money, and not every need starts with you knowing about it.
Yes, on any need you've marked for it. They pick a drop-off time, you get an alert, and the pledge sits in your queue until it arrives.
Yes. A drive gets its own public page with a shareable link, and supporters reserve what they'll bring — so you don't end up with forty of the same thing and none of what you actually ran short of.
Yes. There's a public form with no login, on a link you can print as a QR poster and put on a wall. Requests land in a review queue where you approve them into a draft need, or decline with a note that gets sent to the requester.
If they gave an email address, it and their phone number are erased automatically 30 days after the request is closed. You don't have to remember to do it, and there's no setting to get wrong.
Data and security
Where the money and the records actually sit, and who can reach them.
Payments run on Stripe Checkout or PayPal's own checkout, on their infrastructure. Aurora never sees or stores a card number, which is also why we can say plainly that a breach of Aurora could not expose one.
No. Every record is scoped to the organization that owns it and the database enforces that on every read and write, not only on the screens that display them. Our security page has the detail.
Yes. Every gift is recorded with the donor's details and the need it fulfilled, and the full donor list exports to CSV whenever you want it — for your CRM, your acknowledgements, or your auditor.
Only the widgets and pages you publish, and the needs you put on them. Donation records, donor details, in-kind pledges, request submissions and the billing screen all sit behind your login. Nothing about your organization is listed in a public directory by us.
Leaving
Written down in advance, because the time to read it is before you sign up.
Yes. Your full donor and donation history exports to CSV from the dashboard at any time, without asking us and without a support ticket. There's no contract and no notice period: stop paying and take the snippet off your site.
Nothing changes. They were always settling into your own processor account rather than ours, so there is no balance of yours for us to hold or release. Recurring gifts are yours to cancel or leave running, and your donors' existing links keep working until you take the widget down.
Yes — write to us and say so. Export first: deletion is not reversible, and your donation history is the record you may need for a grant report or an audit years later.
Still have a question?
Build a widget before you connect a payment processor — nothing comes out of a donation on any plan, and your first 2 updates a month are free whether or not you ever pay us anything.