A friend's father is in hospital. The family needs help with treatment costs the local healthcare system does not fully cover. You and seven other friends agree to chip in — small amounts, £20-£40 each, to cover an immediate £200 need. Someone sets up a GoFundMe. The eight of you contribute. The friend's family receives approximately £190 after platform fees and payment processing.
The £10 difference is small in absolute terms. It is also the cleanest possible illustration of how group-fundraising platforms work: a transparent percentage cut on every contribution, applied even when the entire group is people who already know each other and would have given the money directly if there had been a path.
For larger amounts the percentage compounds. For amounts that should be tiny — a £5 chip-in for a friend's birthday gift — the percentage hits especially hard, because card processing's flat fees are largest as a share of small amounts. The platforms are not running unfair businesses. They are running businesses that price their services at the rates the existing payment infrastructure forces them to.
The S-handle restructures the payment infrastructure underneath group fundraising — and most of the platform-fee logic disappears with it.
What group fundraising actually costs on the existing platforms
GoFundMe. No platform fee for personal fundraisers in most countries (GoFundMe earns from optional tips). Payment processing of approximately 2.9% + 30¢ per contribution still applies. A £200 fundraiser with eight contributions of £25 loses £4-£8 to processing alone, plus any optional tips contributors choose to add to GoFundMe itself.
JustGiving. Platform fee plus processing for charity fundraisers. Personal fundraisers on JustGiving Crowdfunding carry processing fees plus an optional service contribution. UK-centric.
Tilt (closed). Was a popular pool/group-gift platform; shut down in 2017. Left a gap in the market that has not really been filled.
PayPal Pools (US). Available in some markets; basic functionality; relies on PayPal's underlying processing fees. Limited in countries where PayPal availability itself is restricted.
Mass-bank-transfer ad-hoc. Friends collect to one person's bank account via individual transfers. Works domestically; falls apart cross-border because each contributor's bank charges a fee, the recipient may incur receiving-bank fees, and the FX margin on each individual transfer compounds.
Cryptocurrency-based fundraising. Works for crypto-native groups but the contributor base for most fundraisers is not crypto-native. Setting up wallets specifically for one fundraiser is high-friction.
The pattern: every existing option carries either a percentage cut, a country restriction, a setup-friction layer, or some combination. None of them treats group fundraising as the simple "everyone in the group sends to one place" operation it really is.
How an S-handle works for group fundraising
An Shandle is a single payment identifier — short, shareable, permanent, global. For group fundraising, the handle becomes the universal pool address: one identifier, shared in the group chat or email, that any contributor sends to from any country.
The use cases:
Friend's medical fund. The family member managing the fund publishes their Shandle. Contributors from anywhere send any amount, from any currency. The fund's recipient sees each contribution arrive in seconds, with the contributor's identifier visible in the transaction record. No platform sits between contributor and recipient.
Wedding-fund pool. The couple publishes their Shandle on the wedding site or in the invitation. Guests contribute from their wallets directly — no Honeyfund 3.5%, no Zola 2.5%+Stripe, no individual gift-card workarounds.
Group-gift collection. One person organising a group gift for a friend's birthday, leaving present, retirement, or anniversary publishes their handle. Each contributor sends their share. The organiser then either passes the collected amount to the gift recipient (also via handle) or uses it directly to purchase the gift.
Community fundraisers. Local school PTAs, neighbourhood associations, religious community funds, mutual-aid groups. The handle provides a transparent receiving address that any community member can contribute to without joining a separate platform.
Holiday-trip kitty. A group going on holiday together can use a single shared handle (set up specifically for the trip) that everyone contributes to in advance, with one trip-organiser managing the spending.
What it costs: nothing on same-currency contributions. A small transparent exchange spread on cross-currency contributions, shown before confirmation. There is no platform fee. There is no per-contribution processing charge. The 2.9% + 30¢ that compounds across multiple small contributions does not apply.
Group-fundraising platforms typically charge 2.9-5% per contribution plus processing fees, with country availability tied to underlying payment-processor support. For fundraisers that involve people who already know each other, most of the platform-fee logic exists to support payment infrastructure the group does not actually need.
— GoFundMe, JustGiving, PayPal Pools published fee schedules, 2025
What changes for community-level fundraising
The structural effect of removing the per-contribution fee is that small fundraisers become viable as a category. Currently, a £10 chip-in for a community gift is uneconomical to route through GoFundMe — the processing fee eats too much. Most groups bypass the platforms for small amounts and accept the IOU/Venmo-domestically/awkward-bank-transfer reality instead.
With a handle, the smallest contribution arrives intact. A £5 chip-in is £5. A £200 medical fund collected from forty contributors is £200, not £190 or £180. The economics that made platform fundraising viable only at certain scales become viable at every scale, including the smallest.
Cross-border fundraising specifically becomes practical. A community split across countries — a diaspora group raising funds for a hometown project, a friend group contributing to a wedding gift across continents, an online community pooling for a member's medical need — can use a single handle that works for every contributor without each contributor navigating a different platform's country availability.
Group fundraising at small scales is one of the oldest forms of community money. The platforms that emerged to facilitate it added value through hosting, discovery, and trust signals — but added cost through fees that scale with the group's generosity. The S-handle removes the cost layer for groups that already know each other, while keeping the simplicity that made group fundraising work in the first place.
Spondula is pre-launch. If you have ever organised a group gift, a friend's medical fund, a community pool, or any kind of "let's all chip in" — and accepted the platform fee as the cost of doing it — the waitlist is where that cost stops being unavoidable.
Frequently asked questions
How does using an S-handle for group fundraising compare to GoFundMe?
GoFundMe handles hosting, discovery, and trust signals — useful for fundraisers reaching a public audience beyond the organiser's existing network. For group fundraising among people who already know each other (friends, family, communities), most of GoFundMe's value-add is unnecessary; the cost layer is what remains. An Shandle works for the group-fundraising-among-known-contributors case at no platform-fee cost.
Can contributors send to a group-fundraising handle from any country?
Yes. Spondula is being built as a globally inclusive infrastructure. Contributors from any country the network reaches can send to the handle without geographic restrictions or country-specific platform-availability issues.
Is there transparency about who has contributed?
Yes. The handle's wallet shows each contribution as it arrives, with the sender's identifier visible. The fund organiser can see contributions in real time and acknowledge contributors as the fund grows.
What if I want to organise a public-facing fundraiser, not just a group of known contributors?
For public fundraisers — where discovery and trust signals matter — platforms like GoFundMe still add specific value. The Shandle works alongside the platform: the organiser can publish the handle in fundraiser communications as a low-friction direct-contribution channel for people who already know about the fundraiser, while the GoFundMe page handles broader discovery.
Can I receive recurring contributions for an ongoing community fund?
Yes. Contributors can set up recurring transfers to a handle on whatever schedule they choose. Ongoing community funds — neighbourhood associations, mutual-aid groups, recurring family contributions — work the same way as one-off fundraisers, with the same handle as the receiving address.
Spondula is a global payments network. It is not a bank, exchange, investment platform, or broker. Availability, pricing, and Operator coverage vary by country. Bitcoin rewards depend on real network activity and are not guaranteed. See our terms and conditions for full details.
