Gratefully Review: Pricing, Fit and Limits

Gratefully is an AI layer that sits on top of a nonprofit’s existing donor database and answers questions about it. It does not replace your CRM. It reads it, along with your documents and email, and builds a searchable model of what your organization collectively knows about its donors.

That distinction matters more than anything else in this review, because the most common mistake is evaluating it against Bloomerang or Salesforce. It is not an alternative to either. It is something you run on top of one of them, and if you do not have one, there is nothing here for you yet.

What it costs

Confirmed against the vendor’s own pricing page on the review date below.

Every account starts with a 14 day free trial of Advanced, the top plan, with no card required. When it ends the account moves to the Free plan rather than locking, so the trial is a way of seeing the ceiling rather than a countdown. Extra seats on Professional and Advanced are $100 a month each, or $80 billed annually, and the vendor states that all integrations and real time syncing are included on every plan including Free. Annual billing saves 20% against monthly on each paid tier.

Publishing a price at all is worth noting in this category. Of the four dedicated AI fundraising products we looked at, two publish pricing and two do not.

What it actually does

Three things, and they are worth separating because the marketing runs them together.

It ingests. Live CRM connectors for Salesforce for Nonprofits, both Nonprofit Cloud and NPSP, plus Bloomerang and Little Green Light, each syncing records, gift history and interactions. Mailchimp, Constant Contact and HubSpot supply email engagement signals. Everything else arrives by CSV import or document upload, in PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX and plain text. There is no Raiser’s Edge NXT connector, which matters if you are a Blackbaud shop: your route in is the CSV import. The uploads matter more than they sound: the case notes, the board memos and the old strategy documents are usually where the context lives that the CRM never captured.

What it builds from that is a knowledge graph rather than a second database. It models relationships between records, so donors connect to other donors, to board members, and to the staff conversations that mention them. The vendor is explicit that nothing is migrated and that it reads your existing systems in place. That matters practically: the failure mode of most donor data projects is a migration nobody finishes.

It ranks. The assistant, named Grace, produces a prioritised portfolio each morning, with a stated reason attached to each name. The vendor describes seven signal categories behind the ranking: relationship risk, moves management progress, commitment health, giving trajectory, stewardship moments, hidden revenue and deadlines.

It answers and drafts. Natural language questions about donors, with citations back to the source record, plus drafted briefings, thank yous and handover documents in the organization’s voice.

The claim that matters, and how to test it

The vendor’s central technical claim is that numbers are calculated and auditable rather than generated, and that every answer cites the record it came from. If true, that addresses the single largest risk in applying language models to donor data, which is a confident and wholly invented figure presented to a board.

Do not take it on trust, and do not test it on questions you cannot check. Take three donors whose history you know in detail and ask about each. Verify the answer, then follow the citation to the record. Then take one reported total and reconcile it by hand against the CRM.

The trial is 14 days of the top plan without a card, and the account moves to the free single user plan afterwards rather than locking, so the verification can continue past the fortnight on one seat. An assistant that is accurate on the cases you can verify has earned provisional trust on the ones you cannot. One that is not, has not.

Two of those seven signals, moves management progress and stewardship moments, assume you are running a defined donor cycle in the first place. If that is not a phrase your organization uses, start with moves management, which is the practice this product is built to accelerate, and our free tracker template if you want to run it before buying anything.

Who it is for

The fit is narrower than the marketing implies, and being clear about it is more useful than a list of features.

Where it is wrong

It cannot fix your records. Everything here is built from what your CRM and documents already contain. Thin history produces thin answers delivered confidently, which is worse than an obvious blank. If your data has gaps, fix that first. It costs nothing.

It assumes a portfolio. The core output ranks who a gift officer should contact today. An organization with no defined portfolios has nothing for it to rank, and will be paying for a daily list nobody owns.

It is not for the smallest organizations. At $4,788 a year for five seats, an organization under about $1m is spending a programme line on the paid tier. Part time development help will do more at that size, and a spreadsheet plus a calendar covers a file of 200 donors. The free single user plan changes that arithmetic rather than the conclusion: it costs nothing to run one fundraiser on it, and the question becomes whether the records are good enough to be worth reading.

Integration coverage is narrower than the large platforms. Salesforce for Nonprofits, Bloomerang and Little Green Light are covered natively, with Mailchimp, Constant Contact and HubSpot for email engagement. Raiser’s Edge NXT is not on that list, so a Blackbaud shop is in CSV import and file uploads, which works but is not the same product. Confirm your specific system before trialling.

No third-party security certification is published. The technical description of how donor data is handled is unusually detailed and better than most of the category, but no SOC 2, ISO 27001 or equivalent independent audit is listed anywhere on the site. For a product asking to connect to a donor database, a board is entitled to ask, and the honest position is that the controls are described but not externally attested. Ask directly about audit status and timeline, alongside the rest of the questions worth putting to any AI vendor.

It is a young product. There is less independent track record here than for the established names, and less published evidence from long deployments. The trial exists precisely because of that, and the answer is to use it on real data rather than to rely on case studies.

If Salesforce is the system underneath, our review of Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud covers what that platform costs and where it goes wrong, which decides whether a layer on top is the right next spend.

Data handling, and what to establish in writing

Connecting any system to a donor database means handing over names, addresses, giving histories and, in the notes, a good deal that donors would consider private. This is the part of the evaluation most organizations skip, and it is the part a board will ask about afterwards.

Both plans list automated PII redaction as an included feature. Establish what that covers in practice before connecting anything, because the term is used loosely across the industry. Specifically: is personal data removed before anything leaves your instance, or is it redacted in outputs while the underlying processing still sees it. Those are materially different, and only the first is a real control.

Four things to get in writing, from this or any vendor in the category. Whether your data is used to train models, and whether you can opt out. Where the data is stored and processed. Who at the vendor can access your instance, and under what circumstances. And what the retention period is after cancellation.

Ask also whether your existing obligations reach this. Some state charitable registrations, some grant agreements and most donor privacy policies contain commitments about disclosure to third parties. A donor intelligence platform is a third party. If your published privacy policy promises donors that their information is not shared outside the organization, connecting any tool of this kind requires you to look at that promise first.

The strongest argument for it

Not the time saving, which every vendor in the category claims and which is hard to verify. The strongest argument is that the knowledge layer belongs to the organization and outlasts the people who built it.

Research from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, surveying 1,663 US fundraisers, found median tenure in the current job of 2 years, mean of 3.6, with 20 percent intending to leave their organization within the year. Major gift relationships routinely take longer than that to mature. The gap between how long relationships take and how long the people holding them stay is the actual problem, and it is structural.

Note that this is not exclusively a software problem. Written contact reports, a defined handover process and a rule that donor context goes in the record rather than in someone’s inbox address the same gap and cost nothing. Software helps because it lowers the effort of doing that, not because it substitutes for it.

The verdict

For an organization with a populated Bloomerang or Salesforce database, at least one person doing donor work, and knowledge concentrated in too few heads, this is the most reachable product in its category and the trial is genuinely low risk. The published price is a third of the nearest comparable floor, and the 14 day trial of the top plan is enough to verify the accuracy claim on your own data, and the free plan afterwards means the checking does not have to stop when it ends.

For organizations below that line, the honest answer is not yet. Get the CRM current, decide who owns donor relationships, use a free general purpose assistant for drafting, and revisit this when there is something for it to work on.

Questions people ask

How much does Gratefully cost?

There are four tiers. Free is $0 for one person with no time limit. Essential is $99 a month, or $79 billed yearly, for one person. Professional is $499 a month, or $399 billed yearly at $4,788, for five people. Advanced is $999 a month, or $799 billed yearly at $9,588, for ten. Extra seats are $100 a month each, or $80 billed annually.

Every account starts with a 14 day trial of Advanced, the top plan, with no card. When it ends the account moves to the Free plan rather than locking. Confirmed against the vendor's own pricing page on the review date shown on this page. Software pricing changes without announcement, so verify before budgeting.

Is Gratefully a CRM?

No, and this is the most common misunderstanding about it. It is a layer that sits on top of a CRM you already run.

It connects to Bloomerang, Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud and NPSP, and Mailchimp, reads what is there along with documents you upload, and answers questions about it. Your donor records continue to live in the CRM.

If you are shopping for a system to hold donor records, gift history and receipts, you are looking for a CRM and this is not one. Choose that first, use it consistently for a couple of years, then consider whether a layer like this adds anything.

What does Gratefully integrate with?

Live CRM connectors cover Salesforce for Nonprofits, both Nonprofit Cloud and NPSP, plus Bloomerang and Little Green Light, each syncing records, gift history and interactions. Mailchimp, Constant Contact and HubSpot supply email engagement signals. File ingestion covers CSV, PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX and plain text, and the vendor states more integrations are being added.

There is no Raiser's Edge NXT connector, so a Blackbaud shop is relying on CSV import and file uploads. That works, and the document ingestion is genuinely part of the product rather than a fallback, but it is not the same as a live connection that stays current.

The vendor states it reads these systems in place without migrating or duplicating data. Confirm your specific system is supported before starting a trial.

Who should not use Gratefully?

Four groups. Organizations without a CRM containing at least two years of consistently entered history, because there is nothing to build from. All volunteer organizations with no defined donor portfolios, because the main output is a ranked list nobody would own.

Organizations under roughly $1m in revenue, where the $4,788 five seat tier is a programme line and part time development help will do more with the same money, though the free single user plan costs nothing to try. And organizations with only a couple of hundred donors, where a spreadsheet and a calendar reminder genuinely cover the job.

Is Gratefully accurate, and can you trust the numbers?

The vendor states that figures are calculated and auditable rather than generated by a language model, and that every answer cites the record it came from. That is the correct design for this use, and it is the specific thing to verify rather than assume.

Test it during the trial on cases you can already check. Ask about three donors whose history you know in detail, confirm the answers, then follow each citation to the underlying record. Separately, take one reported total and reconcile it by hand against your CRM.

Accuracy on verifiable cases is the only reasonable basis for trusting the cases you cannot verify.

What is Grace in Gratefully?

Grace is the assistant within the product. It reviews the donor portfolio and produces a ranked list each morning of who needs attention, with the reason attached to each name.

The vendor describes seven signal categories behind the ranking: relationship risk, moves management progress, commitment health, giving trajectory, stewardship moments, hidden revenue and deadlines. It also answers natural language questions about donors with citations, and drafts briefings, thank you letters and handover documents.

The design point is that a person decides what to do with the list. It prioritises and prepares, it does not contact donors.

How does Gratefully compare to Dataro?

They do different jobs, despite both being described as AI fundraising tools.

Dataro is a prediction engine. It scores your database for likelihood to give, upgrade, lapse or leave a bequest, and pushes those scores into your CRM so you can segment appeals on them. It earns its cost on large files with an active mail or email programme, and its published pricing starts at $15,000 a year plus $0.10 per active donor.

Gratefully is prioritisation and recall. It ranks a gift officer's portfolio with reasoning attached and holds the organizational knowledge behind those relationships, free for one person and $4,788 a year for five seats.

Large file with volume appeals points to Dataro. Small development team where knowledge lives in too few heads points to Gratefully. We compare the two in detail in Gratefully vs Dataro.

What happens to our data if we cancel?

The vendor states that data can be exported at any time and that there is no lock in. A cancelled or expired paid plan drops to the Free tier rather than closing, so the donor file stays in place and keeps syncing on one seat.

Get the specifics in writing before you connect anything, because the general commitment is not the whole question. Ask what format the export takes, whether it includes the knowledge layer the product built or only the records you supplied, and how long anything is retained after cancellation.

Your CRM remains the system of record throughout, so cancelling should not put donor records at risk. The thing genuinely at stake is the derived layer, which is exactly the part worth asking about.