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What $16.5 Per Charity Per Year Buys

Free For Charity’s core program keeps a nonprofit’s entire digital presence alive for about $16.5 per year — our actual hard cost, dominated by the .org domain registration. Everything else is engineered to be free.

The unit economics

  • Domain registration (~$16.5/yr): the one thing that always costs real money — so we pay it.
  • Hosting ($0): charity sites are fast, secure static sites on free static-hosting infrastructure — no servers to rent or patch.
  • Email ($0):Microsoft’s nonprofit grant (we help charities claim it).
  • DNS & security ($0): free-tier enterprise DNS with our volunteers holding the configuration.
  • Labor ($0 in dollars): volunteer webmasters, IT project managers, and designers — the real engine of the program.

The commercial comparison

A small nonprofit buying the same stack commercially typically pays $300–$1,500+ per year: $10–20 domain, $100–400 shared hosting or website builder, $70+/user email, plus setup and maintenance labor billed at market rates. The difference — a couple hundred to over a thousand dollars per charity per year — is money that stays in soup kitchens, animal shelters, and scholarship funds.

The multiplication story

With 200+ organizations supported, small gifts scale strangely well:

  • $16.5keeps one charity’s domain alive for a year.
  • $100 covers six charities for a year.
  • $1,000 covers sixty.

That’s the thinking behind our endowment: at scale, investment income alone can keep every supported charity’s digital presence funded permanently. See the endowment fund or give directly— the footer’s “Fund Free Domains” campaign routes 100% of your gift to exactly this cost (Zeffy charges us no fees).

Where the numbers come from

The cost figure is our registrar’s .org price; supported-organization counts are derived from dated records as described in how we count. We publish the same figures to our Candid profile.