Americans spend $500 a year on tips they'd rather not give—$37.80 per month in guilt-induced gratuities. 72% say tipping is expected in more places than five years ago. 50% have felt manipulated by checkout tablet screens. And 30% now tip less out of spite when prompted.

That same guilt-based extraction is now spreading to nonprofit donation pages—and the data is brutal. The American Cornerstone Institute found that asking donors to "cover the fees" triggers a 38.5% drop in conversions and 20.5% less total revenue.

Do the math: on 1,000 donation attempts, you lose 385 donors and roughly $17,000 in revenue trying to capture a 3% fee. Meanwhile, platforms marketing themselves as "free to nonprofits" quietly extract 15%+ from your donors at checkout.

The only clear winners? Payment processors. Every guilt-induced tip increases the transaction size—and their cut.

Science is compression—distilling complexity into truth. When you compress all the research on guilt-based extraction, the data tells one clear story. And it's not the story being advertised.

We offer the "cover the fees" feature. We recommend against using it. Here's why.